For a long time, it was pretty much taken for granted that WordPress should be the “default” back-end option for any new website. In fact, for many online business owners it still is.
And for good reason.
WordPress is an incredibly useful tool, one that allows people with minimal technical experience to build, maintain, and edit basic websites.
In addition, WordPress carries some serious cachet as the driving force behind several big-name brands like TechCrunch, The New York Times, BBC America … and even Beyoncé!
It’s no wonder then that so many online business owners and designers default to WordPress as the go-to solution for all of their new site builds.
However, it might not always be the best option.
The internet has changed dramatically since WordPress was first released back in 2003. And in that time, a slew of new alternatives has entered the market in order to capitalize on those changes.
As a result, WordPress — while still a dominant force in the content management market — no longer enjoys the near-total monopoly it once held.
In this post, and the one that follows, I’ll be highlighting some of the reasons why WordPress might not be the best choice for your next website after all. I’ll also be talking about some of the new alternatives to WordPress and discussing their pros and cons.
Note that this shouldn’t be taken as a total knock on WordPress. Far from it. As I already stated, I think it’s a fantastic option for allowing non-tech-savvy users to create their own websites.
However, far too many people see it as the only such option available to them, when in all likelihood they might be better served by a different solution.
In any case, understanding the full range of options available will not only help you choose the technology that’s best suited to your individual needs. It will also make sure that you’re able to run your own website without any serious difficulties — or as few difficulties as possible.
There really is something for everyone!
What Is WordPress, Anyway?
Alright, let’s not get to far ahead of ourselves here.
Before we get too deep into the nitty-gritty of content management, let’s start off with the basics: What is WordPress, and why should you care?
WordPress is a fee and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has traditionally been associated with blogging. However, it can also be used to support additional types of web content like forums, galleries, and online stores (among others).
In the 15 years since its initial release, WordPress has grown into the most popular CMS on the market by far. It is currently used by more than 26 million active websites, including about 31% of the top 10 million sites on the web. This amounts to a total market share of nearly 60%.
Needless to say, its closest competitors fall far behind.
Joomla!, the second-most-popular CMS, powers roughly 2 million websites, while Drupal (the oldest of the bunch) runs on less than 1 million sites. Combined, both CMS command about 12% market share.
Due to its ease of installation (many hosting providers like Bluehost and HostGator now offer one-click WordPress installs), as well as its instant brand recognition, WordPress has become the dominant player in the CMS market.
This does not, however, mean that it is necessarily the best solution for your business.
The Drawbacks of WordPress
Popular though it may be, WordPress also suffers from a series of well-known shortcomings — several of which might actually harm your online business endeavors.
To begin with: WordPress was designed as, and created to be, primarily a blogging platform. It was never really intended to become a tool for creating full-fledged websites.
(As a case in point, most of the top brands that make use of WordPress — such as The New Yorker and Bloomberg — do so primarily for blogging and/or news publishing.)
In order to get WordPress to power non-blogging sites, a number of third-party themes and plug-ins are required.
These provide for additional options in terms of site layout and functionality, e.g. search-engine optimization (SEO), security, contact forms, and modal pop-ups.
As of the time of writing, more than 11 thousand themes are currently available for sale on the online marketplace ThemeForest, and more than 50 thousand plug-ins are listed in the official WordPress directory.
These are extremely useful for customizing a basic WordPress site. But because the developers behind the vast majority of WordPress themes and plug-ins are not associated with WordPress, they are often prone to malfunction if poorly coded. They can also at times conflict with one another or render certain aspects of your site unusable.
With regard to themes, in particular, users also need to become aware of the so-called “lock-in problem.”
This refers to the fact that certain popular themes — such as Divi by Elegant Themes — build out significant portions of their web pages in “shortcodes,” or snippets of proprietary code that allow users to embed content or create components that would have otherwise required several lines of HTML, CSS, and/or JavaScript.
While this is certainly helpful to some users who might appreciate the ease with which they are able to style their websites, these proprietary shortcodes can make it extremely difficult (if not outright impossible) to ever switch themes or migrate CMS should the need arise.
As a result, users can become “locked in” to either their theme or to WordPress (or both!). And should they ever want to switch from one CMS to the other as business needs demand, users might find themselves needing to reconstruct their entire websites from scratch.
Another common frustration with WordPress sites is that they are often slow to load.
This has to do with the several years’ worth of legacy code bundled up within the software, as well as the fact that WordPress sites are (by nature) server-side rendered, rather than client-side rendered.
Here’s what that means in plain English, courtesy of WP Beginner:
“WordPress pages are ‘dynamic.’ This means they’re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to your user.”
This process involves several steps. And the complexities involved can seriously harm your SEO rankings, bounce rate, and loading speed.
While much of this slowdown can be mitigated with the help of a good caching plug-in like WP Super Cache, no plug-in can totally transform the rendering processes inherent to WordPress sites or the heavy, resource-intensive PHP involved.
One final shortcoming related to WordPress sites is perhaps the most serious: security.
All PHP- and MySQL-based CMS (including both Joomla! and Drupal) are vulnerable to security attacks, and WordPress is a particularly common target among these because it is the most widely used.
The basic structure of these CMS leaves them open to SQL injections — in which new data is inserted into your database — as well as cross-site scripting (XSS), by far the most common vulnerability found among WordPress plug-ins.
It should be noted that these concerns persist even if the offending plug-ins are unused or have been deactivated. For that reason, it is recommended that unused plug-ins be properly uninstalled.
Well, this certainly sounds like a lot of doom and gloom, doesn’t it?
It should be mentioned that several of the concerns listed above are shared with Joomla!, Drupal, and other CMS with similar PHP- and MySQL-based code structures.
In addition, the vast majority of basic WordPress sites with light traffic should have little to worry about in terms of security attacks, loading speed, and SEO rankings. They aren’t yet in a position to be concerned about these issues.
This post isn’t directed at them. WordPress will continue to serve them just fine.
This post is directed at those business owners who are intentionally scaling up their current online presence.
These are the individuals who should take the factors listed above seriously and proactively work to ensure that their sites function as effectively as possible — whether that be through intentional monitoring of their WordPress sites or through seeking out an alternative solution, like those I’ll be discussing in my next post.
So, what do you think? Do you have any experience with these (or other) WordPress issues? Was there anything that I missed, or something that I should not have mentioned as a concern?
I look forward to hearing from you in the comments section below.
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