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The Pros and Cons of Using Wordpress for a Website

Wordpress is the most popular CMS platform out there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best. Obviously, the platform has tapped into something that speaks to webmasters at large. However, its practicality for each individual will depend on their own specific use-case. If you’re wondering if Wordpress is right for you, look no further.

This Wordpress crash course will run you through the pros and cons of using Wordpress to build your site.

Pros

1. User-Friendly

Wordpress is extremely easy to use. Even if you have no programming or technical training whatsoever, you can easily use Wordpress to build yourself a beautiful site. The biggest reason that Wordpress continues to remain so popular is how easy it is to learn its functions, use its features, and manage its sites. Even if you do have a question, you can simply take to the internet, where there are literally thousands of pages from other users on how to solve your problem. The benefit of using a CMS that’s so popular is that there’s a lot of support and knowledge out there to help you out and give you advice.

2. Plug-Ins

Plug-ins are small programs that you can install into your Wordpress site to expand or improve its functionality. Plug-ins work kind of like the apps on your phone. They perform certain functions that enable your site to do more than just the basics. There are quite literally hundreds of thousands of Wordpress plug-ins out there, and many of them are free to download and use. No matter what you’re thinking of adding to your site, there’s probably a plug-in out there that can make it happen.

3. SEO

Wordpress, by itself, builds SEO friendly coding into its program. So if you’re using a Wordpress site, you already have a slight advantage over sites on other platforms. Better still, you don’t have to worry about setting up those codes yourself. Wordpress automatically does it for you. There are also tons of SEO plug-ins you can download that will add all kinds of optimization features to your site, which saves you the time and effort of doing those optimizations yourself.

4. Mobile Friendly

Most Wordpress themes are responsive, which means that they are friendly for mobile devices. This saves you the time and effort of having to design a responsive site yourself, and it can score you huge points in terms of SEO and user traffic. This is an especially good feature for eCommerce sites, as an increasing number of consumers prefer to shop over mobile devices rather than on their computers.

Cons

1. Updates

Wordpress updates are critical to the smooth functioning of your site, but they can be a real nuisance to keep up with. Worse, individual features of your Wordpress operate on different updating schedules. So your themes and plug-ins also have to be regularly updated in order for them to function properly and remain secure. However, because of this, sometimes Wordpress updates can cause glitches in individual themes or plug-ins, which can negatively impact the functionality of your site. In extreme cases, you might even have to revert to a back-up version of your site while Wordpress is solving the problem.

2. Vulnerability

Wordpress is also open source, which means that anyone and everyone has access to its programs. This is what gives us such a rich variety of themes and plug-ins to work with, but it also makes it extremely easy for determined hackers to find security holes they can exploit. It’s always important to make sure that your website is secure, but with a Wordpress site, it’s doubly important to make sure you’re updating, password protecting, and getting good security protection from your web host.

3. Speed

Wordpress sites can get bogged down very quickly in their own code, which means that they can slow down very quickly. This unfortunate feature means that it can be difficult to build and maintain Wordpress sites of a certain complexity, as you’ll have to be constantly streamlining to make sure that your loading speed stays at an acceptable rate. This can also make Wordpress a difficult platform for people who want to build content-rich or media-heavy sites and can make it a nightmare for really big sites like databases.

4. Customization

Wordpress is very easy to use, but that ease comes with certain limitations. If you are looking to build a basic, smooth-functioning website, then Wordpress has all the tools that you need and more. But if you’re looking to build a website that’s more complex or sophisticated, you’re eventually going to run into trouble.

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