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You’ve heard of WordPress and you probably knew it was popular, and it is. According to data from IT research firm W3Techs, 43.2% of websites are running on WordPress in 2022, a slight increase from 39.5% in 2021. Is WordPress always the right choice though? Despite what some tech gurus thought in the recent past, this most popular site creator and content management system isn’t going away. Why/ In short, it offers significant advantages, such as low cost and high flexibility. WordPress does have some limitations in security, support, and design flexibility.

WordPress Basics

WordPress makes it super easy to create a blog or website without much technical knowledge. The huge user base has created thousands of plugins and hundreds of site templates (themes). Many of those plugins and themes are free, making it relatively easy for a user to create a cool blog or site with advanced features like contact forms, search, and more. Whether you want to host a blog, sell art, or get a newly created education nonprofit online, WordPress makes it easy to create a site that looks professional and delivers adequate performance.

A WordPress user gets an easy-to-use tool for creating and managing content like blog posts, pages for downloadable documents, and even a searchable database. Those things can be done through custom coding with languages like PHP and MySQL but a good CMS eliminates most of the coding in much the same way a website template makes it easy to put up text and images on a site without understanding the technical complexities of how that works.

Advantages

If you have a blog and direct people to Amazon to buy your book, a WordPress theme and a couple of plug-ins should do the trick. The further you move from that simple business model, the more complicated a WordPress implementation is.

Ease of use might be the single best reason to adopt WordPress and keep using it. Free themes make it easy to create blogs and sites for businesses, nonprofits, and individual entrepreneurs. Third parties sell hundreds of different premium themes, usually for under $80. For smaller organizations and entrepreneurs, this makes WordPress hard to beat. Customers can host their sites on WordPress servers and reserve a custom domain at a modest cost as well.

Users can extend their site’s functionality with a vast selection of free and premium plugins. The exact number is impossible to report because it changes almost daily, but Niche Pursuits estimates the number to be over 70,000. These modules provide things like contact forms, security, e-commerce, event management, migrating a blog from another platform, and more. Users may also host their site or move the code to another hosting company. WordPress also supports mobile app development through plugins and APIs. This combination of user-friendliness, flexibility, and user support is balanced by some limitations in the software

Limitations

If your site requires lots of custom functionality, a WordPress site may not be the best option. Developers are somewhat limited by the basic WordPress functionality plus the added features that plug-ins require. It may prove to be impossible to implement some features exactly as you would like. Otherwise, you or your developer may be able to find plug-ins that deliver the needed functionality.  Now you have the modest added cost of those plugins and more things to patch. This is another disadvantage of WordPress implementations – lots of updates and security patches. You have to manage this yourself, or use a development and hosting company that can do the maintenance for you.

Site loading speed is crucial to usability, which is important to keeping people on a site shopping, viewing ads, and so on. A WordPress site might be a bit slow relative to a site custom-built for speed and stability but odds are this is going to be a minor problem.

For almost all entrepreneurs and start-ups, WordPress remains a good option. Here is what Danielle Lemons, our Project Management Operations Director said about this popular CMS and site builder:

“Previously the thought wave of the tech world was that we were migrating away from WP as platform and moving onto bigger, “better” platforms like Drupal or Laravel. However, we haven’t seen the expected decline and have seen a lot of entrepreneurs still looking to WP for a quick, secure, inexpensive option for kicking off their website needs. WP right out of the gate is free, easy to use, secure and inexpensive to customize. In my opinion, WP’s open-source solution isn’t going anywhere in 2022.”

 If you need a relatively easy way to get an e-commerce site or a blog up and running, WordPress is going to be a viable option for years to come. Don’t ignore sophisticated bespoke development approaches either, as they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

Development with WordPress and Beyond

Many organizations and entrepreneurs will get all they need from a WordPress site, thanks to the low cost and the vast number of free or inexpensive plug-ins available. If you need a fast, stable, and good-looking site, you might need a professional web development firm to take care of the design, coding, testing, and maintenance. DevDigital has completed over 2,500 projects over the past 14 years. Contact us to schedule a conversation about your Web development needs.