If you’ve ever thought about creating a website, you might have noticed that there are dozens or even hundreds of ways to do it.
Page builders, visual editors, design platforms, CMSs, frameworks, themes, HTML templates, custom code – the choice is endless. Creating a website may not be a problem, but choosing the right way to do it can be a huge headache.
I also faced this choice many years ago, and today I want to tell you why and how I chose WordPress. Today we will talk about the real pros and cons of this great content management system.
A bit of background
I love WordPress, and it shouldn’t be a secret to anyone, because otherwise I wouldn’t have created this website and wouldn’t have wasted my time writing this article.
But this sympathy didn’t come overnight, it was a long way.
When I created my first blog, I initially wrote HTML code from scratch and quickly realized that it was very naive and useless. Then I started googling and learned about CMS and ready-made platforms. Like any creator, I wanted to make something special and tried everything I could: Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Blogger, Wix, Tumblr, etc.
I didn’t like some platforms because they were not flexible enough, others had poor design, and when I compared the prices of additional modules, it was easy to make a decision. So I installed WordPress and started.
Since then, I changed many jobs and professions and went through many life events, but WordPress has always been a part of my life. I became an official translator for the polyglots community, started doing design, did a lot of projects, founded an agency, made a lot of mistakes, and tried hundreds of themes, plugins, and solutions. So I have some real-world experience, and today I’m going to talk about what I’ve noticed while working with WordPress.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is not just a content management system – it’s an amazing community of people from all different backgrounds. It’s an open-source project released under a general public license, which means that everyone has access to the source code and everyone can contribute to its development.
There are many talented developers and designers here, but also translators, managers, marketers, creators, entire teams, eco-systems, and even multi-billion dollar companies. WordPress is very different and very rich, sometimes even too much. WordPress is accessible and open for any use. There is a lot of commerce, and even more freedom and enthusiastic involvement. This is a separate philosophy.
WordPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg, who made it as the fork because the developer of his blog’s code base hadn’t shown up for a long period of time. You can still read this historic post called “Blogging Software Dilemma” on his blog. Then people started to unite and develop the project together. It went through many stages but retained its core – diversity, accessibility, flexibility, freedom, and beauty. When you realize the scale, you really start to think: “Code is poetry – isn’t it?”
Almost 20 years have passed since its foundation, and now it is 43% of the entire Internet, with about 455 million sites. This is impressive. And there are reasons for that.
The real Pros of WordPress
There are many characteristics that can be viewed as pros and cons, and I’m sure it depends very much on the worldview.
I’ve met many different opinions, from those who recognize nothing but custom code to those who work only with cloud-based website builders. I’ll just share my observations as a person who has tried everything but has settled on WordPress.
So let’s start with the reasons why you should choose WordPress.
Eternal freeedom
Total and complete freedom.
You choose the path, you choose the way, the look, the design, the functionality – in fact, you can do almost anything and everything. WordPress allows you to do whatever you want and forbids nothing. Your site is completely yours, all the content, files, data, decisions, and rights are yours.
There are a lot of options for realizing the same idea – you can create it yourself, visually, or you can make it fully custom coded. Moreover, you can choose which of the visual methods you prefer, and even this method can be additionally improved. You can use plugins, you can create your own, you can add it to a community directory for others to use, and it can be ten people or a hundred thousand.
You can choose your own hosting provider, capacity, and location. If you don’t like the current provider, you can easily change it, and there are many ways to change it. If you want, you can connect your own server and not depend on anyone. This is complete freedom, and it’s something that fascinates a person like me.
In general, I believe you get the idea.
Here you can do whatever you want, and you are 200% owner of your site – no one will block it, no one will delete it, and you can fully control every single aspect.
WordPress is a tool for pleasant communication with the database, which has been tested by time and the work of hundreds of millions of sites. It is very deep and already has a lot of features. You have the opportunity to create fully dynamic websites with a clear system of data management and a concise structure based on popular open-source technologies with little or no effort. Literally, you have a great foundation – what you do with it is your responsibility.
Diversity and flexibility
The free WordPress library includes 60,000+ plugins and 10,000+ themes. In short, plugins are modules that you can safely connect to your site to extend its functionality. And themes are a framework – a template on which your design will be built. Often, their functionality overlaps, and a theme can be very minimalistic, or it can be a full-featured application. The line between a plugin and a theme is quite fluid, and with the introduction of block-based themes, it becomes even more blurry.
All themes and plugins are created by people to solve different needs. Paid libraries contain hundreds of thousands of solutions, which is a very, very big volume. It’s such a big variety that less than 0.0001% of them will be enough for an ordinary user to satisfy all their needs.
WordPress itself has dozens of separate website builders. Each of the popular builders has additional extensions. You can always choose your favorite way to create anything and you can always customize it for yourself. It’s not just an ecosystem – it’s a whole world with huge separate internal ecosystem communities.
Only with the help of WordPress plugins you can create a landing page, portfolio, blog, corporate website, media platform, store, marketplace, bulletin board, real estate catalog, learning management system, crowdfunding platform, forum, social network, event aggregator, auction system, CMS, and even an application. Your website can be multilingual, lightning-fast, with sliders, carousels, galleries, advanced animations, filters, dynamic data, custom post types, page builders and calculations, multi-step contact forms with a customer base, automatic spam protection, and email newsletters. And the best part is that if you start with a regular blog, you can always expand to a store and vice versa. You can start small and add the necessary functionality over time to create exactly what you want.
Most likely, if you have an idea, there is already a ready-made solution for it, and not just one. But if you know a better way, you can always make your own product, and if it turns out to be needed by a large number of people, it can even become a profitable business.
Isn’t it impressive?
Ease of maintenance
Managing WordPress is easy, and that’s one of its best features. Really.
Many years ago, when I started my first blog and tried everything, I immediately got the idea and it attracted me. WordPress is very, very thoughtful because it is created by a lot of people who are passionate about the vision.
WordPress consistently releases updates, the community cares about security, design, modernity, backward compatibility, accessibility, and thanks to this, you don’t have to think about who will maintain the core code of your site now and in the future.
Just imagine: thousands of developers, designers, marketers, translators, and managers work on WordPress all year long so that you can update your site for free and make it more relevant and better with a few clicks. At the same time, your site still belongs to you. It’s a titanic work.
The same goes for plugins and themes. If you choose functionality from a reliable team, you can be sure that it will get better over the years, and that everything will keep working steadily.
This is much, much (!) easier than creating a solution from scratch and maintaining the entire system yourself.
Value & price
When I started my journey, of course, I noticed that WordPress was not the only CMS on the market. And of course, others also had their advantages. But when I imagined the specific results I wanted to achieve and compared it to the price I would have to pay for the extensions, WordPress was and still is unbeatable.
If you need a quick, simple one-page business website. All you need is a domain and inexpensive hosting. Why? Because the free out-of-the-box WordPress version already has a beautiful design, the most important tools, and sufficient SEO support.
But of course, you want to be better, and you want to create something more unique. You’ll be surprised, but if you know where to look and what to choose from, more than 75%< of your needs can also be met for free. And these will be high-quality solutions.
WordPress is a very competitive environment, the most popular problems have solutions from dozens of very talented teams. I would really like other areas of human life to have a similar environment.
In 99% of cases, the basic functionality will be free, and only to get something outstanding you will sometimes have to pay a premium subscription. And I strongly advise you to buy a premium!
The price of premium solutions is usually low, precisely because many people use the solutions and we essentially share this cost among ourselves. The value we receive is not proportionate to the work done.
Imagine that for a conventional 79 euros, you get the result of the work of dozens of people over several years, as well as attentive support and updates for another year. That’s a pretty good deal, isn’t it? If you are still in doubt, try to hire a team of ten developers for one year for 79 euros.
Now, I want to emphasize, and this is very important. If you have the opportunity, always buy a premium solution and pay for a subscription – because it’s in our best interest!
If the developers of your solution have a stable income, they will be able to continue to improve your product, which means that you can sleep well and not worry about the support and future of this part of your website.
Independence
This follows from the previous advantages.
When you create a website using a website builder, you are playing on someone else’s field and by someone else’s rules. You don’t own your content, you don’t own your capacity, you don’t control the limits, and if you need to expand to a level that is not provided by the builder, you’re screwed. You have to pay all the time, and if the provider changes the price, the terms, or the functionality, all you can do is agree or lose your project.
When you create your website with custom code, especially if you hired an agency for this, you become completely dependent on their support. All the changes, all the compatibility – all this will always cost you money, and you will hardly be able to take care of the future of your project on your own.
If your project has been around for a long time and is run by one particular team, and then some unforeseen circumstances arise – they go bankrupt, or get into trouble, or you have a quarrel, or you just have different views and realize that you don’t like working together anymore. You can’t just change the team like that.
If your project is created on WordPress, using popular and modern tools, there are 100% hundreds of teams on the market that can take over your site on the fly and continue working on it. In extreme cases, you can do it yourself.
Some people may start saying that WordPress is not user-friendly, slow, or outdated, or that it is not secure and bloated. But I would say that it is what you make it. Just calculate how much WordPress or any other solution will cost you (not only money, but also time, risks, and opportunities), even if you hire an agency, and then make a decision.
Integration, expansion, and adaptation
Again, WordPress is 455 million websites, more than 43% of the world wide web. And this number is only growing over time.
This is great news for everyone who chooses it – because it means that WordPress sets trends.
The core of WordPress has been translated into about 200 languages, and you can always contribute to the translation of all popular solutions into your favorite language. I have been translating the most popular solutions for many years and continue to do so from time to time.
A clean installation of WordPress out of the box follows the most important web development practices and helps you not to violate them: accessibility, adaptability, speed, semantics, SEO data structure, and image lazy loading. In addition, WordPress allows you to visually add integrated content embeds from other popular sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, Twitter, Soundcloud, TikTok – almost any possible embed) in a couple of clicks. It’s a powerful system, and it’s hard for me to imagine myself re-creating and maintaining each of these elements that have been developed over 19+ years from scratch.
If we consider WordPress with plugins, it includes all possible and impossible integrations, cache, security, advanced SEO, media optimization, automation, SMTP email validation, dynamic data, maps, chatbots, flexible admin panel – everything that can be helpful.
The largest and most important services always have WordPress integration. And to be honest, even if this integration is not available, I will rather think about the quality of the service itself, because why hasn’t this company developed its own integration for the most popular system on the Internet?
Search engines already know how to index your site, and your site already has a structure prepared for search engines. WordPress has evolved along with the Internet and it has greatly influenced its evolution. Google and Microsoft have their own separate plugins for integration into your website. Every major hosting service allows you to install WordPress in a few clicks, because it is an industry standard. Many large companies allocate employee time to collectively support and improve the development of the core.
All the most popular payment systems can be integrated with a few clicks in many variations. The same is with delivery services, CRM systems, email newsletter providers, CDN, advanced analytics, and even cookie compliance.
Moreover, in 2023, you can create any kind of automation through webhooks, API, and even visually through a plugin or Zapier connection. If there’s a popular service in the world, there’s a 99% chance that it has integration with WordPress. But if this service does not have integration, you can make it and it has the potential to become a popular product.
It makes the work much easier. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and everyone always cares about compatibility with you. Because companies don’t want to lose such a large market.
Ease of use and quick learning curve
Going back in time, ease of use was also a big reason why I chose WordPress. I remember the first time I opened the admin panel and realized – this is it.
Catalog themes in one click, installation of advanced functionality in two clicks. Choose anything you want, and if you don’t like it, delete it just like you added it. And this is more than five years ago.
WordPress is very convenient. Of course, you need to spend some time understanding it, just like with any new program. But most of the functionality is intuitive, usually, everything is where you expect it to be.
In 2023, you can start creating a new page or post in one click, you will open a block editor where you edit everything visually and see the result instantly. Over time, when you get the hang of it, you can edit every single part of your site, the display of every element, all fonts, all colors, all spacing, etc. If you’re missing something, just add an extra set of blocks and your options will skyrocket. Building a website has never been easier.
Of course, if you resist, argue, and don’t take the time and attention to learn, it will be difficult. But if you figure it out, you’ll feel like a real boundless creator.
WordPress is very well documented and has a separate section with learning materials. And each individual plugin usually has its own documentation as well. But even if this is not enough, you can always find separate courses and many tutorials on all possible aspects of creating a WordPress website.
Comparing the ratio of time to study and available opportunities, this is the best ratio available. And again, you can always install a separate page builder and your experience will be exactly what you want.
Design and beauty
There are many talented designers involved in the development of WordPress. They do their best to make the core attractive, clear and modern.
Open the home page of WordPress, open the pages of other CMSs and you will understand what I mean. WordPress is attractive, it is in step with the time. Look at the standard themes it releases every year, they reflect trends, don’t they?
It’s been many years since WordPress implemented Gutenberg, a visual block editor. This is a new paradigm in design and content management. Gutenberg supports most of the modern design and CSS standards out of the box, and I’m slowly watching it get better and better with each new update.
The number of themes, blocks, patterns, templates, builders, extensions, kits, methods is absolutely amazing. Sometimes, when I observe the endless variety of designs created on WordPress, I begin to think that it is perhaps the most extensive source of experiments in the field of web design.
Recently, WordPress introduced a separate library of free patterns created by users from all over the world. This is a fast-growing source of inspiration for your website that is growing at lightning speed.
Moreover, Openverse, the world’s largest consolidated library of open-licensed media files, is also being integrated at a steady pace. It looks like it will soon be integrated directly into the editor.
But when it comes to designing the Front-end pages of your website, your posts or dynamic data, it’s all up to you, because with this flexibility and extensibility, you have no limits and can create anything you can think of.
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the design of the admin panel, but in the end, I have to admit that it is very convenient in the form it currently exists, and I can hardly imagine how to make the layout of the elements better. But what’s more important is that the design of WordPress is constantly improving and evolving, and with each new update I see better progress.
Stability and security
Sometimes I hear people complain that WordPress is not secure and that websites on WordPress are hacked more often than any other website. But wait a minute. WordPress is the majority of all existing sites, and it is not surprising that for this reason it also takes a share of hacks.
WordPress consistently releases security updates and is constantly being closely analyzed by a dedicated team of security experts. It adheres to the most advanced standards in the industry and is so stable that it has been around for almost 20 years. If there’s one thing that’s stable in this world, it’s WordPress!
Over the years, I’ve had a few cases where viruses have infected my site. But that was a long time ago, when I used free hosting with free domains and installed everything on those sites. Those were faraway youthful experiments.
Since I started creating websites for clients, I have never experienced a single case of hacking. The most I’ve seen is spam in the contact form and comments. But no one is 100% safe from this.
Needless to say, even products like WhatsApp, Netflix, and Amazon have been hacked. So security is a very fragile concept.
WordPress is open source, which potentially allows hackers to find security gaps. On the other hand, the entire community of thousands is working to prevent this from happening. 43% of the Internet is interested in keeping WordPress secure. WordPress has been around for so long and has gone through so many stages that all the most important gaps have been identified and resolved long ago.
If I have to say more, I am sure that WordPress has made one of the biggest contributions to the security of PHP and the Internet in general.
The security of your website is a great topic for discussion and learning, regardless of the solution you use. If you have chosen WordPress and are just starting out, try to be careful enough, don’t install suspicious plugins, don’t set easy-to-guess passwords, use time-tested solutions, and in most cases, this will be enough.
Values, community and future
How did WordPress become the largest CMS in history?
This became possible thanks to its large community of contributors, freedom, accessibility, ease of use, and openness. And these have been the unchanging values of WordPress since its inception.
For me, as a person who cares about meaning, this has also had a great impact.
No other website creation product in the world has such a large loyal user community as WordPress. Every year, thousands of people take part in its creation, and there are many events, workshops, meetings, and lessons. It’s not just a program, it’s a whole movement and philosophy for freedom.
As Matt said at the previous WordCamp in 2021, WordPress is a real web3 that has been around for many years. When there is such a large number of sites in the world that communicate with each other, isn’t this a real decentralization and democratization of the Internet? WordPress plays a big role in freedom of speech and the internet, and it’s inspiring.
I am very impressed by the way WordPress is growing and changing over time. Imagine 200 languages available for translation. A community of people spread across all continents and hundreds of countries has a plan, and it’s being implemented according to a holistic vision. It is the largest living decentralized experiment in the history of the World Wide Web.
We have a beautiful future ahead of us with even more flexibility, even more features, even more beautiful and accessible design, with multilingualism built into the core, with the ability to work together online on one page of the site at the same time – just like Figma. And this is just the core.
I’m watching the community grow and it inspires and amazes me. Each plugin, each team, each theme and service closely follows the development of the core and grows with it. I am grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of this breathing techno-social progress. I really want the future of humanity to be like this – open, progressive, peaceful, beautiful, accessible, and collaborative.
Cons, such as they are
Not everything is perfect in WordPress. It has many drawbacks, which, depending on your purpose, can even be critical. These disadvantages are closely matched by advantages. And now I’ll try to describe the things that are not so bright and pleasant about WordPress in the same detail.
Variety
Yes, the diversity of WordPress is its most controversial aspect. This is the best and worst thing about it. Among the 60,000 plugins and 10,000 themes, there are many great, unique products, but there are also mediocre, not very good, outdated, and primitive ones.
If you know specific solutions, like me, then WordPress is light, bright, and pleasant for you. But when you don’t know anything, this huge choice can be really overwhelming.
I needed to test hundreds of themes and hundreds of plugins to understand what was really worthwhile and what was just a waste of time. I’ve read hundreds of articles and spent thousands of hours testing, learning, and working hard.
You can use Google, YouTube, or buy an inexpensive course to figure it out, but there are so many courses and videos and the topic of website development is so broad that it can be difficult to find a video that teaches you exactly what you want. You can read on the developers’ websites, but to be completely honest, almost every developer writes that their product is the best and will fulfill all your dreams and even more. There is a risk of spending a lot of time looking through huge amounts of information, spending money on solutions that are not fully understandable, and being disappointed.
The diversity and freedom of WordPress might be tiring because it’s hundreds of different products from different teams with different visions, different interfaces, functionality, and approaches to solving problems. Sometimes it’s high-quality code, and sometimes not so much, and the worst part is when the code of different plugins starts to conflict with each other. Or when the developer of a plugin you’ve been using for years suddenly stops supporting it.
The reason for the problem is that WordPress is like a universal sandbox constructor in which you can play around and create whatever you want. But most businesses need specific, stable solutions to achieve results – to fulfill the goals they want to achieve with their website. There are such solutions, but you need to know them and be able to combine them successfully. It’s important to test how the solutions work with each other, what results it gives, and most importantly, you need to understand whether all of the selected solutions will be supported by the team in the future. This is also the main reason why most developers and agencies have their own stack and pay for premium solutions – it gives a certain stability.
People are constantly writing to me asking for advice, we have a clearly defined stack for clients, and I constantly try to be aware of what’s going on, communicate, submit suggestions, note the shortcomings and help as much as I can, since I am a writer and an entrepreneur, and I went through all this myself.
Getting to the point and making WordPress easier and more clear is one of the main reasons why I created this website.
Safety
This disadvantage is largely a result of the previous one.
You can’t always be sure of the quality of someone’s code until you check it by testing it or by directly analyzing the files. Every developer can make mistakes, not only in WordPress, but in any existing program.
But when you install 30-40 plugins, choosing them only by name and description, with overlapping functionality and old update date, all this can lead to code conflicts and even critical errors on your website. In fact, it takes only one line of code to connect a third-party script to your site. And you are unlikely to review the code of the entire WordPress and all the plugins installed on it. So it really makes sense for all of us to be a little more careful. The Internet, like everything else in the world, is largely built on mutual trust.
Like many other popular tech solutions, WordPress is open-source code. Every plugin and theme can be downloaded and tested as well. This allows hackers to analyze security gaps. And it allows the community to quickly find and close these gaps. Even Windows is constantly releasing security updates. So be careful what you choose, trust but verify. And always update your core, theme, and plugins to the latest available version. By following best practices and proven solutions, your site will always be safe.
Complexity
After all, you will need to buy a domain, hosting, and install WordPress. This is more complicated than registering with a website builder. In the modern world, the majority of hosting providers have made this path visual, intuitive, and detailed. But it is still a bit more difficult than visual website builders.
If we compare WordPress with other CMSs, in my experience it is one of the easiest, most user-friendly and most attractive solutions. Every step is well documented, there are dozens of videos for every problem, you can always ask the community for help or find a developer. But it’s not as easy as proprietary website builders.
In addition to this, as you expand the functionality of your site, you will need to learn how to use other plugins, themes, applications that have their own settings and interface. WordPress is very competitive and everyone is trying to make it very convenient and easy to use, but there are still a lot of different ways and interfaces. If you look at it from the outside, you have a unique opportunity to create a fully visualized customized dynamic solution with automatic integrations and data processing. You will not get this from pagebuilders.
Don’t expect that you won’t need any effort. But if you relax and try to figure it out, you will definitely succeed and it may even be pleasant.
Freedom with responsibility
In WordPress, you have complete freedom, and that’s why most of the responsibility falls on you.
Yes, it looks good out of the box, and yes, most of the smallest things have already been thought out for you – but the rest falls on your shoulders.
You have to choose the hosting and take care of its capacity according to your needs. You have to choose and pay for the providers of the functionality yourself, update your site yourself (although auto-updates have been around for a long time) and make sure that nothing breaks.
In fact, this is the case with all your own projects, on the Internet or in life. But specialized products solve this problem for you, and we have to admit it.
Purpose
WordPress is a very flexible content management system, it has a defined structure and a clear, beautiful code base. And this can be a problem for your project.
Sometimes you really need a custom solution, or just one specific well-designed feature. If you don’t mind paying a monthly fee, and it doesn’t matter to you who owns your data, feel free to choose a proprietary solution.
You can implement 95% of your ideas with WordPress, but there are those that are better done on a specialized platform or created from scratch. For example, you can create your own social network, but not TikTok or Instagram.
WordPress is great for fast creation of a fully functional website, store, or portfolio. But if you’re building a mobile app or a cloud service, it won’t help you that much.
So sometimes, WordPress is just not your destination.
Conclusion
Overall, WordPress is a great solution to build your website. I definitely recommend it to my clients in 99% of cases. It is very beautiful, flexible, extensible, integrated into all possible services and you don’t have to worry about its support. It has its downsides, just like all other projects and products. But its pros greatly outweigh its cons.
WordPress has a rich history, a strong community, and a promising future. It’s endless possibilities with an always open ending. WordPress connects the lives of millions of people around the world and has been helping to develop free speech on the World Wide Web for almost 20 years.
But sometimes there are cases when it’s just not your stop, and then you should feel free to choose something that suits your specific needs better, or whose philosophy you are more comfortable with.
