Pros and Cons of WordPress: 10 Things I Love & Hate About WordPress!
Here at Sanders Design, the core of many of our projects involves WordPress. If you are looking for someone to guide you through the pros and cons of WordPress you have landed on the right page.
Whether you need a professional bespoke website or help to maintain your current WordPress installation. It is safe to say that Sanders Design understands WordPress ‘inside out’, which is no surprise since we have been using WordPress for almost 2-decades.
While I certainly favour WordPress for web design projects and Sanders Design genuinely believes that it is the best software around. There are both pros and cons of WordPress. After all, no piece of software can be perfect, right?
In this post, I will go through the things that I love about WordPress and the things I hate about the software, although hate is very much going to be a “clickbait” word here. More ‘mildly dislike’.
Remember, if you want to find out more about WordPress or commission one of our services, Sanders Design is never more than a phone call or email away.
10 Things to love about WordPress
1. WordPress sites are mobile friendly
Let’s start with the ‘big one’ regarding the pros and cons of WordPress. The one which could make or break your online business.
Nowadays, more people than ever are accessing websites via their mobile devices. In fact, most internet browsing is done ‘on the go’, which means that you need your website to look decent on a mobile device. If it doesn’t, then you are going to be throwing away a lot of business.
WordPress has responsive themes and plugins. So WordPress will adapt to the screen’s size; this also means that you only need one website for all devices.
Having a responsive WordPress site assures that you will be doing more business than if you had a simple site designed purely for desktop computers.
2. Search engine optimisation ready
While there are plenty of ways to market yourself online, the one strategy that you should always be putting a lot of your focus on will be search engine optimisation or SEO for short.
This is the process of getting your website ranked highly in the search engines. Once you are at the top of the searches for your keywords, you can do untold amounts of business; it is an affordable way of marketing yourself.
Now, proper SEO is going to be challenging at the best of times. It is a long-winded process that will take months, if not years, to perfect.
This is why you need every bit of help you can get. WordPress is SEO-ready out of the box. Google, and other search engines, have an easier time indexing WordPress sites.
WordPress also has a plethora of tools that you can install to make things even easier. If you want to be found quicker online, then you need WordPress.
3. Perfect for ecommerce sites
You probably don’t need us to tell you the number of people that are buying products online nowadays.
Fact, it is likely that the bulk of purchases will be made online in a few years. This means that if your company sells a product or service, you need to provide a method for your customers to purchase from you.
There are plenty of different pieces of software out there that you can use. You have probably heard of something of them, such as Shopify or Magneto.
However, I firmly believe that WordPress is better than either of those.
Not only because it is cheaper, but it is easier to use and a whole lot more customisable. WooCommerce is the main eCommerce plugin that we use for our WordPress projects, and we find that it works well for eCommerce stores of all shapes and sizes.
I’m confident that you will love it too. It is pretty easy to get to grips with, even if you don’t have the foggiest idea of how eCommerce works.
4. Excellent social media integration
Next up on my list of pros and cons of WordPress is something that you really need to be paying attention to you when you are building up an online business; social media.
Social media, along with SEO, is going to be the primary way your site gets discovered. Social media is a great way to share content with your established customers.
I’m sure that you are already using social media to promote your business. However, I know just how cumbersome it can be to make it work. You have to be forever logging into your social media accounts, and that is only if you remember.
WordPress, with a combination of plugins, makes this process simple. You can share content directly from your WordPress installation with just a couple of clicks, making it easy to get your message out there in next-to-no time at all.
5. Increased security
Nobody wants their website to be hacked. If you are operating in the UK it is a legal requirement for businesses to ensure that website data is adequately protected.
Even if it isn’t a legal obligation for your business, exposing customer data would pretty much kill your brand overnight.
WordPress, when used correctly, is, without a doubt, one of the most secure pieces of software that you can have running on your website.
It gets constant updates too, so if there are any ‘security holes’ they are patched out pretty sharpish.
Sanders Design will always help to ensure that your site is as secure as it possibly can be.
6. Easy to use
Nobody wants to spend hours and hours adding a simple product or post to their website, do they?
Well, with WordPress, you don’t have to.
I have seen people with absolutely no technical know-how using WordPress easily. Adding or editing pages is no more complicated than using Microsoft Word.
While there are a few more technical aspects to WordPress (I will talk more about them shortly), even those are going to be simpler to wrap your head around than other pieces of software.
7. Customisable and adaptable
Some people see WordPress as just a blogging platform. While it may have been like this in the past, it has gone far, far beyond that now.
It is now one of the most customisable pieces of web software you can get. With tens of thousands of plugins and themes to choose from, you can make your WordPress site function however you want.
Got a hotel? Add a booking system. Run a takeaway? Allow people to order online. Want to run a social media site? You can do that too!
If you can imagine a type of site that you want to build, you can probably do it in WordPress with the correct use of plugins and the right team.
8. Open source
While this may not benefit you all that much if you can’t code, it certainly helps us.
WordPress is open source. This means that we, and other developers, will have access to the code. Making it far, far easier for us to give you the site that you want.
If you do end up learning how to code, then the open-source function of WordPress will work in your favour too. This is because there are plenty of sites online dedicated to helping people with WordPress.
9. Fantastic content management system
At its heart, WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). It is a way to organise the content on your website.
It is one of the simplest to use, even if you have no technical knowledge. Just add your content, categorise it properly, and WordPress will do the hard work.
10. Performance
WordPress is blazingly fast. This means that the site experience for your visitors will be a whole lot better. It really helps when it comes to SEO too.
11. Flexible ecommerce options (BONUS)
If you have been keeping tabs, then you will know that this is the 11th bonus point! I really want to let you know just how brilliant WordPress is for creating an eCommerce website for your business.
You can allow WordPress to handle payment processing (with your selected merchant account) and even assist with the shipping.
10 Things to hate about WordPress
1. Lots of updates
WordPress is software that is going through pretty much constant development. Of course, this is something that helps to keep it feature-packed and secure. However, it also means a ton of updates.
For this reason, it could be seen as both one of the pros and cons of WordPress, although I am going to see it purely as a con here.
Multiple times per week, you will have to keep your WordPress ‘up to date’. More often than not, it involves clicking a button and nothing more.
However, you can run into issues. This is why we often recommend that you retain our services. Let Sanders Design handle all the WordPress updates for you.
That way, you can focus on running your business.
2. Learning Curve
While WordPress is still far more straightforward to use than other CMS solutions, it still has a bit of a learning curve, particularly if you want to access some of the more complicated features.
Again, the team here at Sanders can do the more complicated things for you. However, it is still always nice to have a solid understanding of your website’s basics, right?
3. Planning is needed
I reckon that this is not just one of the pros and cons of WordPress, but one of the cons of website development overall.
If you want to make the website work for you, you need to plan how you will be using it. I don’t just mean now, but as your business evolves.
A better ‘plan of attack’ means that you have to make fewer changes as your site expands. Sanders Design can help you to plan for the future.
4. Site hacks
WordPress is one of the more secure platforms. However, it is also the most popular. This means that unsecured WordPress sites are very prone to hacking.
Thankfully, it is easy to deal with this problem, but it is one thing I hate the most about WordPress as it means that you have to stay on top of things.
5. Coding knowledge is required
For the most part, WordPress is dead simple to use. However, every now and then you may come across issues that you need to troubleshoot.
This is open-source software, so you won’t be able to talk to customer support either. You have to deal with the problem yourself.
Luckily, there are countless forums and developers (like ourselves) that can help you. You are never going to be completely stuck, but it can be irritating at times.
6. You need technical knowledge
There is a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ set-up that you need to do with WordPress. Since this isn’t a hosted solution; if you are going to create your own website, it’s essential to know that you will need to maintain it’s hosting.
This is simple after a while, but it is still a different thing that you need to wrap your head around. You also need to ensure that everything remains secure.
Sanders Design can help you with all of this, so it isn’t a significant issue. However, if you are out there on your own, things are trickier.
7. You need web development and marketing experience
I believe this isn’t really a downside to running a WordPress but web development as a whole. However, I am going to include it as a con here.
Many people believe that WordPress is very much ‘built, and they will come’ when it is far from it. However, you still need to know how to draw people to your site and keep them there.
8. SEO friendliness
Yes. I also included this as a pro.
The SEO friendliness can be a downside to WordPress if you do not know what you are doing.
This is because people get a little bit crazy with the categorisation and tagging of their content. While this is a great way to get ranked in the search engines when done correctly, many people do not do it properly.
If you use lots of tags and categorise, your website will run the risk of being flagged as having “duplicate content”; an SEO issue which can harm your site.
9. Slow page load speeds
Yes. I included page load speeds as a pro. However, it can also be seen as a con if you do not do it properly.
WordPress has a lot of plugins available. People look at them and tend to overindulge in features. This can slow a website down drastically. If you use poor hosting, things can get even slower.
One of my jobs here at Sanders Design is to get the right balance between features and page load speeds.
10. Quality of plugins
There are a ton of awesome plugins for WordPress, but also some awful ones.
When it comes to managing your WordPress installation, we ensure that your site uses the right plugins. If you don’t have the right plugins, then your site could end up with errors, and it may even end up being less secure.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun article looking at WordPress, although the negatives listed above may offer challenges from time to time, WordPress is a great tool which explains why so many websites use it.
WordPress is great! In fact, WordPress is so great that it powers some 39% of all websites online. This includes some major ones that you use on a day-to-day basis.
Here at Sanders Design, I want to ensure that you have the smoothest possible experience with WordPress.
At Sanders Design I help clients navigate the pros and cons of WordPress. Contact me today and see how Sanders Design can help your business take WordPress to the next level.
