The benefits of using WordPress are tremendous. WordPress is an awesome platform for building websites. Currently, more than 35% of websites on the internet are built using WordPress itself.
Having used WordPress for quite some time now I will show you both sides of the coin.
First, let’s look at the advantages:
- Easier and faster to create websites: It is quite user friendly to use. A non-technical user can easily build complex websites using wordpress which would take much longer if the same person was to build it from scratch. You don’t need to be familiar with basic languages like HTML, CSS for building websites with WordPress (although it will definitely help if you do).
- Easy to maintain: The maintenance part is also simple and a layperson can maintain it with some reading.
- Free plugins and themes: Today wordpress repository has a huge collection of free plugins and themes. These plugins and themes are sufficient to create a medium to complex website. So we don’t need to write custom code for the majority of the websites.
- Woo-commerce: The most popular e-commerce plugin on wordpress plugin repository. This plugin can do it all in terms of most needed e-commerce functionalities for a basic to medium level business. There are paid plugins too for this, if you want some custom extra features. You can set up shop easily and add products and get to selling.
- Thriving online community: WordPress is so popular today that you can find anything regarding it on google. If you face any problem while setting it up or later you can simply google the error and chances are that someone somewhere already faced that problem and has a solution for it.
- Saving money: The wordpress is free and open source. So it saves you the initial cost of setting up of a website. You only have to shell out money for paid plugins or themes if you want to purchase them.
- Regular Updates: WordPress is regularly updated to secure it against malware or security threats on the internet.
So these were the majority of the reasons why you should opt for WordPress for creating your website.
But let’s look at the other side as well, the disadvantages:
- Continuous hacking attacks: Being the most popular comes with its own set of problems. Due to its popularity wordpress websites are under constant hacking attacks all over the world. So if you don’t implement security measures your sites are at a constant risk of being hacked. And yes i have faced this problem quite a number of times in my career. So please do pay attention to this, and install security plugins on your websites and back it up regularly.
- Continuous Updates: Regular updates signify that the company cares for its product but it also means that now and then your site would break, due to theme-plugin-wordpress conflict and compatibility issues. If you update core wordpress files it might break your theme as it might not be updated to work with the new wordpress environment. Similar is the case with old plugins. So you need to regularly update both the theme, wordpress core files and the plugins in order to ensure that your website doesn’t break.
- Too many plugins: While plugins are great for building your wordpress website but using too many of them will definitely affect the performance of your site and reduce its loading speed or increase the loading time. Try to use only minimal set of plugins and update them regularly as mentioned in the above point.
- Website loading speed: As wordpress comes built in with lots of functionality it also means that it contains lot of code bloat. On top of it the themes that we download also contain unnecessary code which results in slow loading of wordpress websites if they are not optimised fully.
- Most websites look the same: If you are not careful about the design of your website then the chances will be high that it will look similar to most other websites on the internet. Because wordpress is used in most cases to build a website using themes. Those themes will give your website a default look which if not changed will lead to your website looking same as others. So always customise the design of a theme of your website.
Conclusion
So now as you have seen both the advantages and disadvantages you would be better able to make a decision.
I think the pros outweigh the cons here. You must go for WordPress as it’s the most user-friendly platform available right now and with so many available themes, plugins, both free and paid this makes a great candidate to be used for building your website.
Hope you build something awesome using WordPress!!