WordPress is an extremely popular publishing platform. It’s commonly used by bloggers, businesses, sports teams, online shops, and anyone else who wants to create an attractive website for a good price. Just like any other product it has its own sets of pros and cons.
The Pros of Using WordPress
Creating a WordPress site to suit your needs is easy. That’s because there are thousands of different themes on the market. Some are expensive, some are cheap and others are free. Some themes are designed specifically with businesses in mind while others are made for photographers. Thanks to a huge development community, the possibilities are endless.
After you’ve made your website, writing posts and creating new pages on WordPress is very intuitive and simple. On your first day you’ll be able to perform all sorts of basic functions with only a minimal amount of experience. Creating and editing posts and pages is a very streamlined process.
Another pro of using WordPress is that you’ll be able to carry out all these functions from any computer in the world. WordPress is browser based, which means that it doesn’t matter which computer you use to access your site.
On top of that, once you begin to put content on your site you’ll be in a good place to get SEO (Search Engine Optimized) traffic. That’s because WordPress is search engine optimized to some degree. It’s also compatible with dozens of different social media plugins. These are incredibly important, and it’s a topic I discuss in my article: What are the Most Important Parts of a Website.
The Cons of Using WordPress
Since WordPress is the largest publishing platform on the market it’s always a big target for hackers. A person interested in making a virus or finding a glitch in the system may spend a considerable amount of time doing so, since they know that their are nearly 100 million websites running on WordPress. That’s why you need to always be on top of security, which is talked about further in this article: 3 Hidden Security Risks for WordPress Users.
Another con of using WordPress is that some of the settings are just not that intuitive. Doing simple tasks is easy, but once you dig deeper into the platform you’ll start to uncover some idiosyncrasies. WordPress is such a large platform that learning how to use it to its full potential can take a while
Finally, most of the free themes available for WordPress just aren’t that good. They perform especially poorly on mobile platforms. Not only that, but they are more vulnerable to security exploits than premium themes. This is partly because of their poor design and partly because they are rarely updated.
Conclusions
There are few other programs on the market that will allow you to make an attractive, highly functional website in under twenty-four hours. That’s the power of WordPress. It’s easy to set up and with all the different themes available you have thousands of different options to choose from.
Of course, no program is perfect. Once you start diving into a deeper level of customization things can start to get tricky. WordPress has some confusing features and menus that can make it difficult to figure out. Also, it would be nice if there were stronger standards for themes that would ensure that they always work correctly on mobile platforms. All things being equal though, WordPress is a very useful web platform that millions of people depend on every day.
Sources
- http://www.onextrapixel.com/2014/10/01/wordpress-fans-beware-main-disadvantages-of-using-wordpress/
- http://aspireid.com/web-design/10-benefits-of-using-wordpress-to-power-your-business-website/
- http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224613
- http://www.wordher.com/6-reasons-why-free-wordpress-themes-are-bad/