It is no surprise that WordPress is continuing to dominate the marketplace with its intuitive Content Management System (CMS), and its thriving community of users, content creators, & developers.
The internet can expect to see WordPress’s continued growth and expansion throughout the years and beyond. If you’re planning to get started with a brand new website for your business, but lack the skills for coding and web development, WordPress might just be the perfect CMS platform for you.
WordPress comes with a super simplistic visual layout that helps users easily create what they desire, but if anyone runs into issues with WordPress, have no fear, WordPress’s thriving community of users, developers, and content creators will come to your aid.
But Should You Be Building Your Website With WordPress? What Are the Pros and Cons of Using WordPress?
To help new users or anyone who is considering WordPress as his/her new CMS platform make an informed decision, we’ve compiled a detailed Pros and Cons structure that will surely inform users on this open-source CMS platform and help them make an accurate decision.
So let us get started with the WordPress Pros and Cons…
The Pros of Using WordPress as a CMS
Like every technological improvement and progression ever, WordPress too has its fair share of pros and cons. It’s only elementary that nothing is truly perfect! But the good thing is that WordPress is mostly used by pros when talking about this awesome open-source platform.
Relatively Inexpensive
WordPress itself is a free platform, from creating accounts to setting it up to, customizing a website with themes and plugins, everything is free on WordPress. Even if you have minimum technical know-how, you don’t even need to hire someone to develop your website for you.
The only key cost of WordPress is its hosting plan/subscriptions. Depending on which hosting platform you choose for your WordPress website, your cost may vary.
Nowadays, thanks to open-source platforms like WordPress, operating and maintaining websites has needed a massive reduction in costs with increased affordability.
User-Friendliness
This is a major plus point for WordPress, since it was developed from the ground up to be one of the most user-friendly CMS platforms ever.
Everything in WordPress, from setting up an account to adding content to blogs, is hassle-free and code-free, so that everyone from every professional niche can enjoy and reap the benefits of WordPress as a CMS platform.
Indeed, the user-friendly nature of WordPress makes it a perfect platform for beginners and professionals alike. That being said, creating a website is more than just choosing a CMS platform. It involves understanding design principles, SEO, content creation, and a lot more.
For those who are new to this, it can be a daunting task. That’s why resources that teach how to create a website from scratch can be incredibly helpful. These guides often provide step-by-step instructions that cover everything from domain registration and hosting selection to choosing the right theme and customizing your site to suit your needs.
Community Made Themes
Although WordPress has its own set of themes to build and design websites from. But WordPress truly shines because of its community-made themes, which are more attractive with more unique and modern design elements and more productive functionalities.
You can choose your desired theme from an extensive collection of premium themes on the platform. WordPress community-made themes are available for every price tier depending on their maiden category and use-case.
Community Made Plugins
Same as themes, WordPress’s thriving community has made thousands upon thousands of awesome plugins for every use case. From weather reporting to data safety to website customization, you name it and there is a functional plugin present for WordPress.
Mobile-Friendly Functionality
These days, mobile devices are winning the preferred web-surfing devices race. So, it is a key factor of success for any website to build and maintain a mobile-friendly website that performs well on any mobile platform.
WordPress themes and designs are typically responsive. Through the use of this market-leading Content Management System (CMS), you will be able to automatically take advantage of emerging responsive web technology for mobile platforms, without having to create new sites for every unique mobile device.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
WordPress is a great platform, that is very capable and built with SEO in mind. WordPress sites are built with all the SEO features a site should have.
WordPress sites are competitive in search engine ranking thanks to constant code for favorable Google indexing, customizable SEO components, and plugins dedicated to SEO content/context improvement.
You can double your SEO effectiveness by combining a good SEO strategy with SEO content, a high-performing theme, SEO-focused plugins, and the WordPress CMS.
Responsiveness
Most current WordPress themes are designed and built with responsiveness in mind for all modern devices.
WordPress’s large community of developers has built thousands of awesome themes from the ground up for the open-source platform.
These themes generally perform very well when it comes to responsiveness.
The growing number of people surfing the internet on mobile devices makes it so that having a mobile-friendly website that comes with a consistent UI/UX across all devices is a very important matter in this day and age, and WordPress surely excels at this.
High-Level of Customization
WordPress comes with a robust, feature-set that allows for a good deal of website customization options.
And not only that, the WordPress community has designed and built awesome plugins such as Elementor page builder and Droit Addons for Elementor, which allow users to fully customize the look and feel of their websites without writing a single line of code.
Effortless Backlinking & Syndication
WordPress allows for an easy backlink building and syndication process that helps websites build trust among users and gain more authority.
The Open Source Program
The source code of WordPress can be used, studied, modified, and redistributed by anyone. Because WordPress is open-source software, many of its themes and plugins, including those from some of the best GPL sites, are available for free under the GPLv2 license.
Utilizing an existing code/process can reduce the development time and cost of a product significantly.
And since WordPress is an open-source platform, most of its major work processes are faster than other such CMSs due to its being an open-source platform and its community can identify issues faster.
Best for Setting up E-commerce Platforms
With the help of powerful plugins such as WooCommerce, WordPress has been turned into a hub for e-commerce businesses and platforms.
Users can now single-handedly build and customize the e-commerce front without any hassle with WordPress and start selling products online.
Social Media Integration
WordPress features hassle-free social media platform integration. This is a great feature for business owners and content creators alike to instantly share their content and information on every major social media platform without any issues whatsoever.
Disadvantages of Using WordPress
Like all the mentioned pros, WordPress also has its fair share of issues and downsides roaming around. Before making the decision to adopt WordPress as your preferred CMS platform, we believe you, the user, should be aware of all the downsides.
Using WordPress has its drawbacks. These include:
Website Vulnerability
In this day and age when cyber security is a big threat for all web users, security turned into a big challenge for many users.
WordPress’ popularity alone makes it a prime target for cybercriminals. The high reliance on plugins created by various developers increases the risk of malicious code leaking into your site.
And WordPress is an open-source platform, malicious actors are well aware of how the ins and outs of WordPress work to the bond, and this makes WordPress CMS particularly vulnerable.
Frequent Updates
Although keeping programs up to date and running smoothly is always a plus point, this allows sure to get the latest security updates and features. But this doesn’t always play out well for the user side of things.
Problematic updates and fixes have caused major headaches and even total loss of data for WordPress users in the past. Especially because of premium themes and plugins, from which WordPress users demand the latest and greatest updates on a regular basis.
Poor SEO Management For Beginners
People who don’t have SEO experience may struggle with WordPress’ SEO friendliness.
In WordPress, if a post is over-categorized or over-tagged, it is flagged as duplicate content by Google/other popular search engines. It can have a significant impact on your site’s SEO rankings.
Prior Knowledge
Although WordPress doesn’t require a complete understanding of how it works before using it.
It is, however, beneficial to have some knowledge of it beforehand. It makes operating the software easier.
It will be advantageous for you if you have previous software or web development experience. It will be a bit challenging for you if you have no prior experience with WordPress.
It does not mean that you need to know WordPress to work on it, but you should have some background knowledge.
Performance
Although this is strictly not on the WordPress CMS, But as WordPress gains popularity, themes and plugin development teams are putting more and more uncalled-for updates behind their programs, weighing them down along with users’ WordPress-built websites.
In comparison to other blogging platforms and CMSs, WordPress is a competitive blogging platform and CMS. It is free and extremely simple to use, making it the perfect choice for most new bloggers and website owners.
Is WordPress the Right Choice for You?
If you think you are willing to put the time and effort into learning the ins and outs of this CMS platform or you are willing to set up your website through WordPress CMS, or you’re just looking for an inexpensive CMS option.
If you’re among these lines, then we can confidently say WordPress CMS is the perfect option for you.
WordPress is a great option for anyone who is looking to create:
- A blogging website
- Educational Portal
- E-Commerce Platform
- Business website
- Project presentation website
- Digital marketing platform
- Etc
To Sum up,
We hope this WordPress Pros and Cons listing with a detailed description will help you make the right decision to whether to adopt WordPress as a CMS platform for building your website or should you consider some other platform.
In the end, it truly does matter how good or bad WordPress is, what matters is – can WordPress be the right choice for you.
Recommend users do their own research and make a uniform decision before coming to a verdict
