Kendall Hogenmiller • May 10th, 2018
There are many reasons why people and businesses look to WordPress when building or updating their website. Taking all of those reasons into account, we wanted to explain why, as CMS developers, we choose not to use WordPress.
1. It’s harder to be unique.
I know many people and businesses aren’t super concerned with accidently choosing a website theme that is similar (or identical) to a competitors’. However, as someone who recently found 5 companies, who are all competitors, and who are within 5 miles of each other all with the exact same website template. I’d say that this is a major negative to using WordPress. It can also be difficult to figure out within each theme what you can and cannot edit/alter until you’re already in that process and have potentially already shelled out the cash for the theme.
In today’s market, consumers want to see originality and creativity from a company, no matter what the product or service is that they’re buying.
2. You’re restricted to the plug-ins that WordPress provides you with.
Ultimately, WordPress was created to create blogs and not full-scale websites. With that in mind, you won’t be able to build a completely customized website that will streamline your companies’ day-to-day operations. You’re restricted to the plugins available on the market, unless you spend money creating your own. You’re also opening yourself up to new conflicts, security risks and site-speed issues as you continue to add more and more plugins. On their own, plugins usually work well. Often, poorly written plugins don’t play well with others and can start throwing errors if combined in the wrong way. Most of the time, these only cause small issues, such as a single broken plug-in or missing functionality, but the more complicated ones have the ability to crash your entire website.
In addition, one of the biggest effects of plugins is their ability to increase site load time. Each plugin you add to the mix increases the amount of code running on your site and the database requests being initiated every time a page is loaded. This all of this adds up and can really slow a website down. (Besides being annoying, site-speed is an SEO parameter as well)
3. WordPress has a history of major security issues.
With the millions of people and businesses relying on WordPress for their websites, it has become quite a hacker magnet. Hundreds of thousands of WordPress sites are hacked every year, with no real end in sight. And while perhaps the core software might be protected, the themes and plug-ins you integrate might be exposing holes in the security.
Ultimately, we feel you’re better off safe than sorry in. With so many options these days for building and managing your website, we find its better not to risk yours and your customers data over ease of use.
4. You’re not necessarily hindering your SEO efforts, but you’re definitely not helping them by building your site on WordPress.
There are some plugins within WordPress that do a pretty alright job with SEO, especially if you’re someone who really doesn’t understand what you’re doing. However true SEO strategy exists outside a WordPress plug-in. In the end, this point isn’t necessarily a reason to not get WordPress, but it is a big reason why you would still need an experienced SEO specialist to go in and work on your site for you.
5. There’s no support team waiting to help you as soon as an issue arises.
WordPress was built as a community. This is what allows the site to remain free, since anyone out there can design a new layout or plug-in and upload it for public use. The downside to free though is that there isn’t a direct number you can dial or chat bot for you to message in the event that something goes wrong with your website. The typical route for WordPress users is to Google their issue and hope to find some reddit type thread of users who had a similar issue and hope that someone has answers.
This can make things incredibly difficult, considering most people choose to use WordPress for ease of use and therefore aren’t able to diagnose site issues and solve them in a timely manner.
In the end, for those who may have a super tight budget for their website, require a simple multi-page site, and not a whole lot of time to spend learning basic CMS, WordPress is still a great option. However, if you’re a larger company that has the budget to create a custom design, on a safer self-reliant server, we would highly recommend making the investment.
