Pros and cons of WordPress

WordPress is a CMS or Content Management System that has been in operation since 2003. WordPress appeared on the market as an option for creating blogs similar to Blogger or Tumblr. However, WordPress overtook these competitors with its option to download and install on your own web server, while the other competitors remained purely online options.

This download option allowed WordPress to become a proper CMS that allowed a technician, without the need for much programming knowledge, to set up their own blog and, later on, a website. Its use has become so popular that today there is a whole community of followers and contributors to the platform that allows it to stand as the CMS par excellence with millions of websites developed with this system. Today, however, we will analyse its pros and cons, to decide in which cases it is the best option.

The most popular CMS

WordPress is undoubtedly the most popular content management system. According to W3techs, in March 2024, 43.2% of websites are made with WordPress -4.5 points more than in 2020-. If we analyse its importance within the CMS universe, the monopoly is overwhelming as it has a 62.8% share of all CMS websites in March 2024.

Flexible but not simple management

The use of a CMS such as WordPress allows the website administrator to edit pages and create entries through the backoffice, as well as to upload content without excessive technical knowledge. Once someone gets used to it, despite the initial learning curve, it is difficult for them to move on to other CMSs.

It is important to note that many administrators think that with WordPress they have control of the entire website and can easily modify everything, but this is never the case. In fact it is common for the administrator to dismantle the entire WordPress, which is why we recommend limiting the administrator's access to functionalities.

Open source PHP platform

One of the main benefits is that WordPress is undoubtedly an open source platform, which means that you don't have to pay any licensing fees to have a WordPress. Being open source software, WordPress programmers can also share the code with other programmers, saving a lot of time and resources, which is a great advantage.

The use of plugins

WordPress works with plugins, both free and paid. The use of plugins will allow us to simply install multiple options on our website. Currently there are 57869 available for download from the WordPress website. For example, using a plugin such as Yoast we can facilitate the SEO tasks to be performed on a website. The use of plugins, however, can also be labelled as a disadvantage, since the plugin philosophy saves us hours of programming and costs but forces us to adapt to "what the plugin does" and we do not control the code 100%.

E-commerce ready

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress plugin and is used by 18.1% of WordPress websites. WooCommerce allows us to turn our website into a catalogue, online shop or e-commerce. However, we must keep in mind that we are always talking about a simple online shop with few products, not comparable to a Prestashop or Magento (now Adobe Commerce).

The blog at its heart

If you have to create a blog, WordPress is the tool par excellence, not in vain the structure of WordPress continues to be the blog, with pages and posts.

Affordable price

Since it is open source software, we do not pay licenses for its use, which results in lower costs. Moreover, if the use of plugins saves us many hours of programming, the use of templates does too. There are free or paid templates that allow us to have a prefabricated design for our WordPress. This makes WordPress a very economical option but without getting a unique website. That is why the use of templates is both an advantage and a disadvantage compared to more customised programming options that we solve with the creation of a custom design without the use of templates.

Tailor-made design

It is possible to have a professional, bespoke WordPress web design. However, custom designs are difficult to program and should always be done by a WordPress web design agency with proven solvency.

Performance and speed

Although we have several caching options, WordPress does not stand out for its speed due to its philosophy of using plugins. There is no doubt that this CMS generates a lot of redundant code that affects the speed and SEO of the website.

Security and updates

This is one of the weakest points of WordPress. The fact that it is such a popular platform means that everyone knows the core code of our website and, in addition, we depend on CMS updates and plugins that, very often, generate multiple problems of incompatibilities and misconfigurations. We may have to revert WordPress to a previous state if we encounter problems and carefully analyse the solution, which can mean many hours of dedication. This is the problem of not controlling the code used 100%.

So... yes or no?

Many agencies impose its use in order to be able to offer cheaper budgets and not be tied to the hiring of programmers or designers, however, and once analyzed the main advantages and disadvantages of WordPress, from SEMSEO Agency we are very clear that WordPress is a very powerful product that should always be valued, but it is not the panacea nor will it take you to the stars.

We recommend the use of WordPress for simple projects that do not require excessive customisation at the programming level, nor do we expect the appearance of future ad hoc functionalities and that the client should always bear in mind that he or she is the one who must adapt to the functionalities of WordPress and plugins in question. We also believe that WordPress should always be used using a bespoke and differentiating design and be installed and developed by an experienced web design agency.