According to research done by W3Techs on the latest usage of content management systems data, WordPress has almost 41% of the overall share of all websites. That means out of every 100 websites, 41 of them are powered by WordPress, entirely or partially.
The figure is indeed huge, but does that mean WordPress is the best option to build your website? Well, the short answer is, No! Let us take a closer look and discuss the main reasons why WordPress sucks and why you have to forget about WordPress if you want to have a high performing business website.
Reason 1: WordPress was built to be a Blogging Platform, not a CMS Platform
WordPress was created to be a supercharged blogging platform and not a content management platform. It was only ever designed as a blog platform, and then, over the years, more and more plugins got built for it. All of a sudden, now, it has turned into a big CMS platform that everybody talks about. Ultimately, it is not an enterprise-level CMS platform. WordPress has its place in terms of solving some time and cost issues, which small businesses might have. But if you are serious about your business and you think it is going to scale, then I would suggest choosing an enterprise-level CMS platform and not WordPress. WordPress does work to a certain point, but it lacks a lot of inherent functionality, which I feel a CMS platform should have. It is inadequate in terms of the front-end quality and the user experience that your customers get when they look at a website. In my opinion, a CMS platform should be inherently secure, yet in WordPress, you have to install at least two plugins in order to make sure that it is secure. That clearly says WordPress is not a serious CMS platform, especially if you are serious about your business.
Reason 2: WordPress has Security Issues
Why do many WordPress users say that WordPress security is terrible? Well, this is because they use an older version of PHP, which is pretty dated. There are security vulnerabilities in those versions of PHP, and the fact that WordPress supports those older PHP versions makes WordPress more vulnerable to the security issues that were present in those old PHP versions. Many plugins and themes are usually the culprits of having security flaws in WordPress. And that is what happens when you have a large and open community like WordPress is, where anybody can make a plugin. There is no real, verified publisher process or anything like that. You will have plugins and themes that have security issues with them, and it is completely up to the developer to maintain those. Therefore, WordPress has a terrible security flag. Finally, WordPress is just a major target for hackers simply because it also occupies over 40% of the Internet. It is pretty easy to find WordPress sites regularly and then just make it your target because you can find lists of security vulnerabilities of WordPress plugins out there, and you know hackers will find those to exploit the websites that are using those vulnerable plugins.
Reason 3: WordPress is Slow
WordPress sites are indeed slow. The WordPress codebase can be considered bloated and dated, so when people find that out, they say WordPress is slow. It has many bloated themes and plugins that are widely used. WordPress is not slow out of the box, there is nothing about the 2021 themes that I would consider that makes it a slow website. You can load up those themes on any decent host and you will have a pretty fast site. But where I think the real problem is that many WordPress sites are slow because many bloated plugins and themes make it slow. Themes that you buy from ThemeForest, usually you have to do a lot with that theme to cover a broad user base. WordPress has to do all the calculations to figure out how the site should be rendered, so WordPress deserves the stamp of being slow at its core, but it is slower because of what people typically do on top of WordPress themes and plugins.
Reason 4: Bad WordPress Plugins
There are thousands of plugins out there for WordPress. Many of them are built by very good programmers. Those plugins do not have a problem, but thousands of plugins are developed by programmers who have very bad programming habits. Now, do you want a website built on WordPress with a plugin installed by somebody with lousy programming habits? Because the likelihood is that if you install those plugins, they will break the rest of your website. And if you are not a developer, you will not be able to fix it. What this tends to mean is that those plugins probably contain lots of errors, poor site functionalities, they don’t meet standard’s compliance. All of these things have importance when it comes to search engine optimization. Ultimately, what does Google think of your website, and what do your customers think of your website? If it is not standard compliant, if it is not accessible, if it is not responsive, Google is going to mark your website down. Do you really want that with your website? I have seen so many, I would say 99% of the websites out there, WordPress websites specifically, have all of these issues with them: standards compliance, accessibility, responsiveness because of the plugins they use.
Reason 5: Frequent WordPress Upgrades
Another reason why building a website on WordPress is a bad idea because you may know upgrades are not always about improvements, sometimes they cause errors and website crashes. So, you have to test all the new features before installing the updates not the best way to spend your time. And sometimes, there are multiple major WordPress releases in a month, but obviously, upgrading the website numerous times in a month would be very risky.
Reason 6: Poor in SEO
Another downside of WordPress is related to search engine optimization. WordPress positions itself as this SEO friendly platform, but it gives you only the basic optimization. If you want to have more than that, you have to download special SEO plugins that may slow down your site’s loading speed. Sitemaps are an important part of SEO, and WordPress is known for messing up with sitemaps and tagging. You will anyways have to hire an SEO specialist if you are working on a WordPress website. You cannot be dependent only on the SEO plugins, they are not enough to make you rank on top in Google.
Reason 7: Lot of Alternatives Available
A lot of people do not realize when they are asking for WordPress that there are better alternatives out there. If you want to build a relationship with your web designer, perhaps let them suggest a platform, especially if you are very specific about what outcomes you want out of this. If you want your website to be highly optimised for Google, to be quick loading, load on mobile devices without any problems, then maybe you want to consider some of the alternatives to WordPress, or even having a custom CMS platform built for your website.
Final Thoughts
To summarize the reasons, I mentioned in this article on Why WordPress Sucks, it started out as just a blogging platform and not a CMS platform. There are lots of WordPress plugins, but a lot of them might be built by very unreliable programmers. There are far better and faster alternatives out there to WordPress with better SEO capabilities. And finally, if you want your website to be enterprise-level, which will eventually scale, WordPress must not be your choice!
