As you’ll already know if you’re a regular visitor to this website, we’re big fans of WordPress. The creation of WordPress has allowed more people to get involved in the art (and it is an art!) of creating websites, and in the process, they’ve been able to establish an online presence for their business or interest group.
Before WordPress came along, they would have probably had to pay someone else to do that for them, and wouldn’t necessarily have got the finished product they were hoping for. We don’t think we’re exaggerating when we say that WordPress has made the internet a better place.
Even with all that said, though, WordPress isn’t a ‘magic bullet’ when it comes to web design. WordPress has flaws and limitations, and there are some things that the platform either doesn’t do very well or can’t do at all. There are dozens of pages all over the internet that explain the benefits of using WordPress at length, so for the sake of balance, we thought we’d put together this guide to its limitations. After all, if you’re considering creating a website, it’s important to know what you can and cannot do with the WordPress building material before you start building.
For the majority of people, WordPress will do just fine. It’s entirely possible to run a business efficiently through a WordPress site. Just look at the number of online slots websites that depend on WordPress for their functionality. Because of the payment protection and complex maths formulas that they host, online slots websites aren’t simple affairs to program or maintain, and yet WordPress does the job admirably. If a ‘humble’ WordPress site is good enough for the multitude of Paypal slots and online slots operators that depend on it, it’s probably good enough for you. That statement won’t apply to everybody, though, so let’s take a closer look at some of the limitations that come with the software.
It’s Vulnerable To Hacks
There’s no getting around this one. The open-source nature of WordPress means that it’s vulnerable to attacks by hackers, and some high-profile hacks have taken place in the past. It’s not so much WordPress itself that’s vulnerable – it’s the templates and plugins that are used on the platform.
Anyone is free to make a plugin or a template, and WordPress doesn’t have an official body to monitor the quality or intention of those plugins and templates. If a hacker is clever enough to pre-load a plugin with malicious code, and you unknowingly use that plugin, you could be opening up access to the back end of your site without knowing about it. The best way around this is only to use peer-reviewed plugins, and be wary of anything that’s brand new and untested.
WordPress Is Slow
Ignore that headline. We don’t think that WordPress is ‘slow’ per se, but it’s not as fast as it could be, and it’s certainly slower than a well-built bespoke website. A ‘clean’ WordPress page should be just as fast as anything built anywhere else, but the more plugins you add to it, the slower it will become. A malfunctioning plugin can slow down your entire site, and potentially even stop it from loading completely until a fix is found. That fix might never come. Within reason, keep your plugin use restricted only to those plugins that you one hundred percent need and can’t function without.
WordPress Sites Look Too Similar
Standing out from the crowd is vital to the success of any commercial website – especially within a field of industry that’s highly competitive. You might not be able to make that ‘stand out’ website with WordPress. Most templates look very similar, and a seasoned internet user will be able to identify a WordPress website the moment they land on it. Customization helps with this, but no matter how much you customize, you’re still working within the same basic framework. You could try one of the more ‘experimental’ templates, but in doing so, you’re opening yourself up to some of the problems we’ve outlined above.
WordPress Pages Don’t Rank Well In Google
This issue might go hand in hand with the speed issue we outlined above. Google has been factoring page loading time into search result rankings – especially on mobile – since 2018. The company has recently indicated it’s going to make load times more of a factor in the near future, and that might be bad news for anyone who has a WordPress site and relies on a strong search result ranking for capturing trade and customer attention. Even without the speed issue, all WordPress templates contain a lot of proprietary code – code that Google’s crawlers and algorithms are trained to see as a barrier to web browsing. You’ll never get to the top of the search listings if there are non-WordPress sites in your way because Google is biased in their favor. Nothing can be done about this at the time of writing.
WordPress Sites Can Break Down
Yes, this is also true. If your page doesn’t have any plugins at all, you’re probably safe from this, but even having one plugin can result in your page breaking down and becoming unavailable, and it might never get fixed. Plugins need to be maintained, and if the creator of the plugin doesn’t feel like fixing it when things go wrong, your only option is to remove that plugin. If that plugin is integral to the functionality of your whole site, you might find yourself having to tear your whole site down and start again. As you can imagine, this is a massively frustrating problem to experience – and it’s a problem you wouldn’t necessarily have if you weren’t using WordPress.
We appreciate that we’ve painted WordPress in a negative light in this article, so let’s add some balance. Any website can break down. Any website can develop coding issues, or become unavailable when a server lets you down. A good search ranking is never guaranteed even if you have bespoke code, and you’re fantastic at SEO.
There are a whole host of problems that can affect any website, and WordPress is just as vulnerable to them as any other platform. You should still view WordPress as a highly competent and viable tool for creating websites – just don’t assume that it’s the safest and easiest way to go. And, just get a WordPress programmer!