WordPress is Not Made for Businesses

Published in

Select Interactive

5 min readJun 26, 2017

The first thing you need to know about WordPress is that it was built to be a blog platform. An easy way for an individual to have their own personal blog on the internet. It does that relatively well, but it leaves a lot to be desired when you use it differently than intended. When you try to use it for anything more than a few blog posts or pages and begin to add layers of complexity and data, you’ll run into some serious issues.

Security

The biggest issue with WordPress sites is likely security. WordPress has become a popular target for hackers of late. Earlier this year over 1.5 million WordPress sites were hacked due to platform security vulnerabilities. This may be somewhat alleviated by WordPress’ security updates, but as you’ll soon find out, the updates can be far more trouble than they’re worth.

Content Management

While the big sell for WordPress is easy content management it really isn’t as easy as it sounds. Yes it does allow people to manage their content, but it also gives people access to edit everything in the project. This includes code for the website layout, settings, and everything else. While this might seem like a good idea, the truth is I don’t really want clients being able to poke around and edit the design or configurations of a site because it’s very likely they have no clue what they’re doing. That’s what they hire us for.

Additionally, with access to edit everything in the website, the administrative dashboard can become quite congested. There are links for all kinds of admin tools, and many of them have generic names such as “Visual Composer”, “Mega Main Menu”, “Salient”, etc… Once you start adding plugins you could end up with links for a “Home Slider” and a “Nectar Slider”. What’s what? What is the difference between a Post and Page? Why are “custom pages” like a portfolio listed separately from Pages?

Nothing about these dashboards are really streamlined to make the process of editing content quickly and efficiently. Too many options with no clear direction of what is what.

Performance Issues

WordPress is configured about as bad as it can get for load times. In a world of increasingly immediate gratification, users don’t want to wait for a website to load for longer than a second or two.

The way WordPress sites are built requires unnecessary amounts of uncompressed data to be downloaded before anything on the page will start to display. This leads to slow load times even on the highest-end machines with fast, wired internet connections — and that’s without taking images into consideration.

WordPress, out of the box, does nothing to optimize your images for the web, which can cause even more performance issues if your website is image-heavy.

Hosting Concerns

All websites have to be hosted somewhere, and once yours is up and running, you might completely forget about the issue of hosting altogether. But occasionally a website has to be moved from one host to another. Sometimes the hosting service shuts down, sometimes increased traffic requires you to upgrade. The complexity of WordPress sites can turn this into quite an ordeal.

Additionally, one of WordPress’ “claims to fame” is their inexpensive hosting plans. It seems great to be able to host your website for cheap, but what really happens is your website is put on a server with hundreds of other websites all competing for that server’s resources. If you don’t pay the price for good hosting, your website’s performance will surely pay the price in the end.

Plugins

On first glance at WordPress’ plugin library you’ll probably see an amazing resource of limitless (and more appealing — free) possibilities. The reality of the situation, though, is that while you can find a plugin to suit most needs, these plugins are often built by unknown developers, are out of date or unsupported, or are simply awful for your site’s performance. And if your website relies heavily on multiple plugins, it’s highly likely that you’ll end up with compatibility issues, with one plugin breaking another, leading to hours of headache-ridden debugging.

Updates

This brings us to the next point — WordPress is being updated constantly. At face value, this is probably a good thing. More features, better security, and up-to-date technology are all great, but for someone who wants a no-hassle website, these updates can be very troublesome.

You have to spend time every update — sometimes more than once a month — to keep your website up-to-date. And when each update could potentially break every single one of the plugins you rely on, this is much more headache than it’s worth.

Of course, you could always choose to ignore updates and leave your site in an outdated version, but this brings us back to the biggest issue of poor security and high-risk hack vulnerability.

Search Engine Optimization

A common reason that WordPress is recommended is its plugins for Search Engine Optimization. It sounds really great — that a plugin could do search engine optimization for you! But as we continue to see with WordPress, the reality isn’t quite so grand as the theory.

What these plugins actually do is allow you to edit meta data such as page titles and descriptions on your website — something that is possible on literally any website. What it doesn’t do is tell you what information should actually go in these fields for the best results, and it certainly doesn’t review your analytics after a given time period to tell you what’s working and what’s not.

Compatibility

People browse websites in many different ways. From different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer to different devices like phones, tablets, or computers. Because of this, it’s important to make a website that functions properly and looks good no matter the browser or screen size. WordPress makes it very difficult, if not impossible to provide this compatibility for all but the simplest websites — and inconsistencies can make your website look unprofessional and poorly made.

Final Thoughts

The last thing to consider is that WordPress is basically a template, and when you use a template you end up with a website that looks exactly like every other WordPress website out there. In addition to everything above, you are really sacrificing uniqueness and creativity — the chance to make a positive impression on your users — for a “cheap and easy” solution. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.

If a developer or agency is recommending WordPress for your company website, it’s time to ask if they have actual knowledge of web development, or if they simply rely on a template platform such as WordPress to claim they offer “web development” as a service.

For a better understanding of the thought and effort that goes into optimizing a custom website, check out this post on how we at Select Interactive build a website.

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This isn’t just our opinion either— here are others voicing similar concerns: