Pros and Cons of WordPress Plus an In-Depth Review

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s largest open-source content management system (CMS). It helps people with little to no technical knowledge in creating, managing, and modifying website content. While it’s possible to create a website using WordPress without knowing how to code, the best WordPress website designs are ones handled by the pros.

The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

One of the pros of WordPress is that you get three options from which to choose when it comes to creating a website. WordPress.com gives you the ability to create and manage a fully hosted website. You may opt for an upgraded plan on WordPress.com to get access to features typically associated with self-hosted websites. The third alternative is to use WordPress.org for your self-hosted website.

If your requirement for a new website limits to personal blogging and you are not interested in monetizing your blog, WordPress.com might work well for you. However, if you’re a blogger or a business owner who wishes to generate revenue through your website, turning to the self-hosted highly flexible and scalable WordPress.org might be in your best interest.

While you may choose to pay for advanced features through an upgraded plan on WordPress.com, you stand to get better value for money through WordPress.org.

WordPress.com

• Free to use
• Maintenance free
• com network helps generate traffic
• Limited theme support
• Cannot use plugins
• Not good for monetization

WordPress.org

• Good for monetization
• Easy-to-use plugins
• Complete support for themes
• Requires ongoing maintenance
• Need to generate traffic on your own
• Hosting-related expenses

This post discusses only WordPress.org from this point.

Pros and Cons of WordPress

It’s common for business managers and owners to ask “What are the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress?” before deciding if this is the right CMS for them. The fact remains that while this platform comes with multiple benefits, there are some potential downsides of WordPress as well. For instance, while using this CMS does not include any fee, you need to spend money on web design, web development, and hosting your website.

Pros of WordPress

There are several advantages of WordPress and not all find a mention on this page. Here are the most important ones.

• Free. The WordPress software is free to download as long as you meet its system requirements. However, you need to pay for using premium templates and hosting.
• Flexibility and scalability. Flexibility sets WordPress apart from typical website builders because it lets you change just about any element through coding. Depending on your needs in the future, you may scale up your website or trim it down at any time.
• Choice of host. Moving your WordPress website between hosting providers is fairly straightforward, and you get to choose from several WordPress website hosting
• Plugins. Irrespective of the type of plugin you need, you may expect to find it on WordPress. These include plugins for eCommerce, website security, translations, member enrollment, data backup, contact forms, payments, and more.
• The WordPress community. The global WordPress community is strong and continues to grow. While WordPress does not provide the type of tech support you may receive from a website builder, WordPress web developers commonly reach out to other community members for solutions to their problems.

What Are the Limitations of WordPress?

If you look at the potential disadvantages of WordPress, you will notice that they tend to revolve around requiring adequate technical knowledge.

• Installing. Installing a WordPress website on your own can be challenging unless you work with a hosting provider that lets you go through a one-click installation process. If this is not the case, you’ll need basic technical know-how.
• Security and maintenance. One of the possible WordPress cons is that it requires regular software updates, failing which your website might become vulnerable to online attacks. While updating WordPress is fairly straightforward, there might be problems when it comes to individual plugins. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to a temporarily non-functional website. Fortunately, this is not much of a concern if your web design agency takes care of its maintenance too.
• Absence of direct support. While web developers have an extensive WordPress community to turn to when they face any type of problem, there is no support on offer directly from WordPress.
• No WYSIWYG. Website builders tend to give you a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) experience. However, you get to use an abstract interface when entering content through WordPress, so you don’t get to see the end result while you’re working on any webpage.

Managing Content on WordPress

When it comes to WordPress pros, a great aspect is that it lets you segregate features related to design, functionality, and content. This gives you or the web design company you partner with access to higher levels of data portability. Simply put, you may add content to your website irrespective of the design you use or tweak the design without impacting the content.

Businesses that wish to share large volumes of data with their target audience may benefit in particular because this platform excels when it comes to data management. It is fairly easy to manage multiple product pages or posts by turning to the data entry style of content management system that WordPress offers than relying on a drag-and-drop styled website builder.

Ways in which the WordPress content management system can help simplify how you manage your website include:

• Automatic consistency in content. Once your customized WordPress theme is in place, all the new pages and posts you publish will display in the same manner automatically. This gives you or your web design agency the ability to publish new posts with consistency in layout design. Compare this with a drag-and-drop website builder that typically requires you to add every element each time you wish to create a new page, and you’ll realize how much time you stand to save.
• Quick site-wide changes. A centralized customized theme design controls the content layout of your entire WordPress website. As a result, WordPress website developers can make site-wide changes by adding new code or tweaking existing code much faster than they could if they were to make modifications to multiple pages one at a time. For instance, if you wish to change the way your website’s featured image appears, making a layout change will ensure that the update applies across all the pages of your website.
• Easy to manage individual content pieces. While WordPress simplifies how you make site-wide changes, this also holds true if you wish to manage individual pieces of content. What helps is that finding any page is relatively easy by seeing all your content based on parameters such as tags, categories, authors, date modified, and so on. The search option gives you the ability to find pages based on textual content. After you get to the page you’re looking for, making the required changes follows.

WordPress for SEO

Just using a WordPress website does not imply it will rank highly in online searches, and your SEO strategies need to be solid even if you’re using this CMS. This is because you still need to provide great content and ensure optimizing it for search engines. What WordPress does, though, is that it helps you address several basic factors that can help your website rank well.

For example, WordPress lets you add SEO plugins to fine-tune your efforts. While a plugin does not optimize a website, it makes the process easier and more efficient for website managers. Some of the best SEO plugins for WordPress include Yoast SEO, SEO Writing Assistant by Semrush, SEOPress, WP Rocket, ShortPixel, and Rank Math.

WordPress for Mobile Friendliness

Having a completely responsive mobile-friendly website has a positive effect on SEO. Google and Bing use this as a ranking signal in their algorithms upon detecting that users are carrying out searches on mobile devices. Generally, mobile-friendly websites outrank their non-mobile-friendly counterparts in searches conducted on mobile devices. As a result, if you’re hoping for mobile users to visit your website, optimizing it accordingly is crucial.

Fortunately, creating mobile-friendly responsive websites is fairly straightforward when you use WordPress. Besides, WordPress provides apps for iOS and Android, giving creators the ability to write, edit, and publish posts using their mobile devices.

The Effect on Page Loading Speed

WordPress in itself does not come with a predetermined page loading speed. The speed at which any page loads depends on multiple factors, one of which is server response time. To make it to the first page of Google’s search results, your website needs to compete with the time that the top 10 organic page results take to load.

WordPress lets you work on improving your page loading time in different ways such as:

• Using optimized images
• Updating plugins
• Caching
• Enabling GZIP compression
• Minifying CSS, HTML, and JS files
• Cleaning up your database

The Security Factor

The WordPress security team comprises around 50 experts, including security researchers and lead developers, and it regularly consults with leading hosting companies and other security researchers. However, just like websites created using other platforms, WordPress websites are vulnerable to malware infections and hijacking attempts. The good thing is several security plugins help make WordPress sites more secure. Some of the top ones include:

• Sucuri
• iThemes Security
• Wordfence
• Jetpack Security
• WP Cerber Security

Is WordPress Good for Professional Websites?

What differentiates WordPress from hosted content management systems such as Weebly and Wix is the level of complexity it allows you to bring to the table. Expandability is another important factor that works in the favor of WordPress because once you build a website using this CMS, there is virtually no limit to how much you may scale up. Here are a few scenarios in which turning to WordPress might work well for your business:

• You need state-of-the-art web design that supports the latest technicalities and offers flexibility in coding.
• You wish to incorporate online payment features.
• You exist in a highly competitive niche and require advanced search engine optimization (SEO)
• You wish to give possible clients access to a searchable database.

If you’re wondering “What are the benefits of WordPress?” know that one of the key ones is that it lets you create different types of websites, examples of which include:

• Business websites
• eCommerce websites
• Landing pages
• Blogs
• Social networking sites
• Online forums
• Online tutorials
• Online portfolios
• Online directories

The Best WordPress Websites

WordPress gives web developers access to a variety of sophisticated tools as well as the ability to get deep access to HTML and CSS files. This gives them the means to come up with some exceptional designs and highly functional websites. Some of the best WordPress websites you may come across belong to businesses and organizations such as:

• NASA
• Rolling Stone
• Rafael Nadal
• Usain Bolt
• The White House
• Harvard University
• TED Blog
• Capgemini
• Daybreaker
• The City University of New York (CUNY)

Is WordPress Good for Everyone?

While WordPress is good for making just about any type of website, some people might benefit by looking at other simpler platforms. You might not need WordPress if:

• You want a simple blog with no plans to make money through your efforts.
• You want a basic website and don’t plan to grow your business online.
• You don’t want to worry about updates and backups.

Conclusion

You may use the WordPress.org CMS to create practically any type of website, be it a blog, an online shop, or a portfolio. Besides, it’s a great solution for small projects as well as for large enterprises. Just like any other WordPress review will tell you, WordPress is the market leader for a reason. It gives you complete freedom of what you may do with your website and lets you customize it any way you deem fit.

Now that you know what the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress are, determine if you should use it to power your new website. If you’re unsure about whether or not this CMS might work well for you, consider discussing it further with a web design agency that specializes in this realm.