WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). At the time of writing, it’s estimated that about 810 million websites are built on WordPress; that’s around 43% of all websites worldwide.
WordPress must be the most popular CMS for a reason, right? But does this make WordPress the “best” CMS? As with everything, the “best” is relative. WordPress is very good for a lot of use cases, but defaulting to “let’s just use WordPress” may not be the best decision for your business’ website. Yes, if you need a quick website for your startup, WordPress may be a good choice to get rolling quickly, but it’s something you may want to change in the future.
Why WordPress Is So Popular
While WordPress has a lot of advantages, there is also a bit of tautology in its popularity: it’s popular because it’s popular. Being so widely used means it’s well supported both formally and informally. Novice WordPress users can find troves of information online to help them with problems. It also means that there are a lot of easy to use and set up plugins to solve almost any problem posed. The popularity begets more popularity.
While this is a bit of conjecture, WordPress also does a good job of balancing complexity/customisation with being user friendly (especially for beginners). Installing WordPress on a server takes only a few clicks. From there it’s easy to get a basic website up and running with WordPress and then build your knowledge from there.
WordPress is also very versatile. WordPress powers anything from a basic personal blog up to large e-commerce websites and professional business websites.
Disadvantages of WordPress
WordPress’ popularity is also one of its main disadvantages: all in all, hackers will want to try and exploit the biggest number of websites, so going after the biggest player is a logical way to go. Security on WordPress can be pretty good, but everything is going to have some sort of vulnerability, and WordPress tends to be targeted more than other content management systems.
Also, since it’s is so popular, WordPress has a myriad of third-party plugins that can be used to enhance it. Since there are so many plugins available, there’s no guarantee that these plugins will work together. What may originally look like an easy solution can end up breaking a site.
Finally, since WordPress tries to balance ease of use with complexity, there can be limits on true customisation unless you’re an expert. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a basic blog or personal website, but if it’s a business website with very specific needs, this could create more problems.
Projects Where WordPress Isn’t Appropriate
While WordPress is certainly a great choice for many projects, the larger a project gets, the less appropriate WordPress is for it. Basically speaking it’s not as scalable as something like a Wagtail based website.
Going further on this, while WordPress is fairly customisable, its PHP base isn’t as efficient for building custom integrations and new features when compared to a Python based framework like Django.
Here at Red Crow Digital, we’re also always concerned about site security, and WordPress’ general security issues cannot be ignored. Websites that require a high amount of security, whether for the site itself or for the third-party systems the site integrates with, are probably not a good candidate for WordPress.
Basically speaking, the bigger and more complex a website grows, the less suitable it is for WordPress. WordPress doesn’t handle resource intensive websites very well, nor is it easy to integrate it with third-party applications. Because of this, WordPress may be a good choice when a business is starting out, but it’s also very likely that that business will grow out of their website quite quickly.
Is WordPress Right For Your Next Project?
That very much depends on the scope of your project. If you need something quick set up to showcase your business, we can help with that. But if you are looking for something more complex or something that needs to scale, we’d likely suggest an alternative CMS (and help you with that too!). Either way, we’re happy to give you the advice you need to make the right decisions, so get in touch with us today.