Originally a blogging platform, WordPress has transformed itself into a full-fledged Content Management System (CMS) and is arguably the most popular one on the planet. As you can well imagine its rise to that status is due to its undeniable strengths, and there are certainly many advantages to developing on WordPress.
Advantages of WordPress
Of all the advantages that WordPress brings to the table, the one that is probably the most notable is how user-friendly it is. Every aspect of WordPress from its installation to publishing a website and populating it with content is designed to be accessible to users – even those with little or no experience.
On top of that WordPress benefits from being open source and having such a large community of users and developers. The latter ensure that there are extensions, plugins, and themes enough to customize your WordPress experience according to your needs – and even make up for some of its inherent disadvantages.
Simply put it is an easy-to-use, cheap, and flexible platform that allows for the creation of a wide range of websites.
Disadvantages of WordPress
It should be noted that one of the main disadvantages of WordPress is the fact that it is open source – which works as a double-edged sword. Because its source code is public, exploits can be found and distributed easily, and while they tend to be plugged quickly in subsequent updates there is still a period when your website may be vulnerable.
Additionally as much as WordPress does have weaknesses in terms of security, SEO, scalability and several other areas. With third-party extensions it is possible to cope with these and even end up the better for it, but they are not present in a ‘vanilla’ installation of WordPress. At scale WordPress can get slow however, due to the amount of unutilized code that comes with it by default.
From a design and development standpoint however the biggest disadvantage of WordPress is that it is difficult to customize. While that isn’t a problem for an experienced developer, a newcomer will find it far more complicated to customize a design on WordPress than with a standard WYSIWYG editor.
Suffice to say the question you should ask yourself is: What are you looking for? If you’re looking for a simple platform that you (or another webmaster) can quickly learn to use and publish content then it is definitely a good choice. With the right methods to increase WordPress site engagement you could even grow it into a sizable website.
That being said it is important that you keep in mind the weaknesses of WordPress – and address them if necessary. Through the extensions that are available you should be able to customize your WordPress installation to suit the needs of your website – subject to certain limitations. For a truly custom WordPress website however you may need to call on WordPress development services and have a professional handle the alterations that you want made to it.
