Pros and Cons about using Wordpress
I think all developers have used Wordpress at least one time. THis amazing CMS is good but far away to be perfect. Here I am trying to gather all pros and cons about using this blogging platform. Maybe this on is still the most used platform around the surface web.
Pros
- Many plugins ready to use for all your needs: galleries, portfolio, social, cookie alert, etc.
- Perfect for blogging and creating contents without having technical skills.
- Ready to use for all kind of users.
- Photo galleries and portfolio plugins available are almost all amazing.
- Open source structure: any developer can write code and share it online. This can code can be reused.
- SEO friendly and SEO integration: you can add keywords and choose your URL structure
- Themes and layouts available are many and almost all are responsive. You can add your theme or search a new theme in the wordpress network. Responsive themes can let your website suitable for multiple devices like mobile phones, tablets or iPads
- Installation need only some minutes and your website can be ready very fast
- Hosting services can give you wordpress and other CMS to install in your web space and you don't need to do anything
- Sharing posts on the social networks can be very easy with some plugins.. Just choose your content strategy and happy blogging!
- You can turn it into an e-commerce with the WooCommerce plugin
- Even big companies use it
- You can change the /wp-admin URL page with your login form
Cons
- Like all others CMS, you have not the control of the code if you are not a wordpress expert
- Too many queries for each page
- Caching and other perfomance operations are necessary
- Bugs are very bad. Do you feel secure? If there will be a malware or some code injection, your system can be in danger and it's hard to sanitize it
- It's hard to have a validated HTML code
- No OOP on the souce code: wordpress gives static functions and hooks to interact with the core system
- Customizing a plugin can be very painful
- A good SEO activity is still necessary.
- Updates: you have to update your system constantly due to bugs, security problems, plugin updates and new releases...
- Your website will not be different from other websites with the same theme. You have to build your own theme if you want to be unique
- The user passwords are still encrypted with MD5 that it's considered insecure. Now it seems very difficult to convert existing passwords to something better like password_hash.
Conclusions
I consider Wordpress a good CMS for blogging and small websites but it can cause you a lot of trouble and frustration if you are using it for your company or a big project.