Is WordPress Good? 10 Reasons We Don't to Use It!

WordPress is a behemoth of web design and blogging. As of April 2021, WordPress ran over 45.8% of the web's top 10m sites.

There's a simple reason for this: it's the first thing you think of when you think of website development. Many individuals and businesses looking to design their online presence don't have extensive technical expertise when building websites.

The process seems intimidating, but anyone could design a site using WordPress, right? There are so many of them; it must be easy.

But with so many sites using this platform, there's one question few people consider:

Is WordPress good? It's not enough to have a website; you need one that is functional, appealing, and accessible.

Here's the catch: compared with other web development options, WordPress can be:

• Difficult to use effectively
• Slow and clunky
• Vulnerable to malfunctions and cyber-attacks

Here, we'll consider the question of "Is WordPress good against the criteria you'd want from a service supporting your online presence." With this information, you can determine whether it's the best option for you.

Do you know the problem with being a gigantic platform? You have too many customers.

This problem exists for WordPress because it tries to make itself accessible to its entire user base, and in doing so, creates a bloated offering with far too much choice and not enough tailoring.

Its fundamentals are clunky and mean that from the word go, you've got an item you don't want in your basket for every item that you do.

Its model runs on an open-source model. The hope here is that its plugins will mean that its users can help each other with more specialist areas.

For example, if someone sets up a crafting website, someone else will have created a crafting theme that is perfect for such an enterprise.

But that theme still isn't aimed at you.

It's aimed at every single crafting website using WordPress, which makes it generic. And it may have bits that you don't want.

Is WordPress good for a crash course in web design using generic components?

Maybe. But that's not what you want your website to be, is it?

If you want a custom website built just for you - no copied themes or templates it's time to hire a web design company.

The difference between a blog and a website is often sketchy. You can have:

1. A website that is exclusively a blog used to share posts containing the owner's thoughts
2. A blog that is part of a website that also contains other sections, such as products and services
3. Whatever the heck Tumblr seems to think that blogging is

The developers initially designed WordPress for the first definition. If you'd asked us back in 2003, ‘is WordPress good?', we might've given it a rave review. And with good reason.

Back then, the idea of starting a blog with some pretty design theme where you could share your thoughts with the wilderness of the internet was… pretty wild. Over time, WordPress started to add more functions that allowed a blog to behave more like an independent website. This expansion was a good thing, again: people wanted more options and flexibility.

However, the fundamental framework of WordPress never transitioned away from its origins as a blog template. For many individuals and businesses looking to design a website today, the blog is an important but secondary part of the design. Using WordPress to design a high-quality website is a bit like building a house from the attic downwards.

WordPress's colossal user base also means that it simply has too many hungry mouths to feed. In-person technical support is a critical component of designing and operating a website successfully. However, WordPress has so many customers with such a diverse range of problems that it can't possibly provide in-person support to them all.

Furthermore, WordPress doesn't have a designated development team. Due to its open-source nature, if you encounter a problem, you are on your own.

You have to find a developer familiar with WordPress to diagnose and fix the problem.

It's a drawback of getting a service for free that it's not obliged to help you out when things go wrong.

One reason that many people ask, ‘is WordPress good?’ is because it's free. We love free things...

However, if they come at the cost of having to hire an independent developer every time you need a problem fixed, we'd query whether you can call it ‘free.’

This brings us to our next point.

WordPress plugins are the inventions of third-party developers, often seeking to address an issue on their WordPress site. Other times, enthusiasts create plugins for community use. These plugins are generally freely available for use but not closely maintained by their developers.

The open-source structure means that you may not get a hold of the plugin's developer if it doesn't work. You may find that some plugins work fine by themselves but disagree with other plugins on your website. This problem is one of the many issues with open-source coding that doesn't involve direct collaboration: there's no cross-checking for consistency.

The free-for-all model essentially creates a kind of ‘goblin market’ where you can pick up anything that looks pretty and put it on your website… but if it bursts into flames, you have no explanation or ability to fix it.

You have to pay an independent developer to fix the problem for you.

A site built up from scratch has all its components tested for internal consistency and compatibility. Is WordPress good for offering so much for free? Yes! We love the concept.

But it's hazardous to have so many random plugins floating around, and WordPress users often learn this to their cost.

What Kitching Ltd is getting at here is that when you choose a web designer that uses WordPress, they're picking random plugins to add the functionality that you request.

How often are they checking that this plugin is up to date and not causing unseen site issues?

Another drawback of using open-source plugins is that they:

• Often have exploitable features in their code, and
• Are popular targets for hackers

Say a plugin runs on 0.001% of websites that use WordPress. If we estimate that around 455m sites are using WordPress, 4,550 websites are using that plugin.

It's not exactly the heist of the century. However, if even 1% of those sites are businesses, that means that hackers can exploit the web presence of 45 different businesses.

Would you agree that there's potentially money there? This vulnerability makes websites using WordPress a handsome prospect for hackers. After all, there's no coordinated WordPress customer support to address problems in the source code or protect users from this kind of exploitation.

Once again, if the question of ‘is WordPress good?' hinges on the assumption that WordPress is free, it's crucial to count the potential costs of not using bespoke website development. If your website uses code written uniquely for that purpose, it's far less likely to draw unfriendly eyes.

WordPress makes efforts to keep its users secure by issuing patches that counter some widespread problems.

However, user reports suggest that these security updates can impact plugins, preventing them from working or making entire websites crash.

While the patches are essential (imagine how much worse it'd be if they didn't release them!), this is an annoyance that means you frequently need the services of a WordPress developer.

Equally, if you fail to update your WordPress regularly, you may find your site running into operational problems.

The takeaway from this is that WordPress doesn't have great functionality. Constantly fine-tuning your site to accommodate patches costs a lot of time and money.

It may lead you to wonder why you didn't just opt for a website with bespoke support and maintenance in the first place.

One of the most touted features of WordPress is that it's great for SEO. It's as common and understandable for starter businesses to not fully understand SEO as it is for them not fully to understand web design.

A 2019 U.S. study found that 36% of small businesses had an SEO strategy, and of these, 80% believed they had a good understanding of SEO. That suggests that fewer than 30% of small businesses even pretend to understand SEO. But it sure sounds good, right?

This ‘feature’ is another major reason WordPress continues to attract so many users who don't want to sweat the small stuff.

However, the truth about SEO is that it's only as strong as the person who builds it into a site.

Sure — WordPress may have some features that make it easy to incorporate basic SEO into your website. But you'd have a far more effective web presence by working with developers and content creators who understand the tailoring your site needs to flourish in the search rankings.

Just because WordPress is the first result you see when you search for blogging sites doesn't mean that WordPress blogs receive some automatic promotion!

As ever, paying a little now to work with experts can boost your presence and avoid expensive fixes further down the line.

Let's return to the early 00s. Those heady days when your innocent eyes could look at a proposed web background of deep blue fading to sea green, corner to corner, and see only beauty. With a few gold buttons and a heading/subheading in a font that you would never dream of using in any serious document, you had your precious website.

Okay, this is an extreme example: many WordPress themes are quite lovely. However, these plugin themes are all generic, and your website needs to look anything but generic. With 99% of WordPress themes, your readers and clients will be able to tell that you've used a stock background. It's not a professional look.

If you were a film director, your web presence would be The Big One that you're counting on to get you noticed. Are you going to search for royalty-free background music to avoid costs, or are you going to hire a composer to make sure the soundscape perfectly matches your vision?

Is WordPress good for themes? Well, it sure has a lot of them.

Quite aside from their limited aesthetic appeal, WordPress themes are still plugins that can disagree with other content on your site and cause it to crash.

Building your website from the ground up is better for your business's functionality and its appeal. At Kitching Ltd we build your custom website from scratch with our built in web builder for small businesses.

Whether it's differences in the display between browsers (e.g., Firefox or Chrome) or issues with displaying on mobile, we'd query is WordPress good in terms of compatibility.

There are fixes and workarounds for most issues, but this still translates to an investment of time and — if you need to hire a developer to do it for you — money.

Mobile compatibility is incredibly important for building and maintaining an online presence today. If your website prominently features a blog, someone could be scrolling through that on their mobile as they take public transport to work. But only if it's readable.

It's about more than just making sure your site doesn't ‘bug out’ when someone views it on mobile. Working with a development team that can optimise your online presence for mobile according to its likely content is just flat-out a better option.

Do you know that phrase ‘can’t see the wood for the trees'? We might use this to describe the approach of some WordPress developers.

WordPress is open-source, which means it often attracts incredibly technical minds fascinated with the ‘potential’ of coding without sparing a thought for what code should do for a webpage. Is WordPress good for these developers? Yes, but as a kind of playground.

Most software developers agree that code is the enemy, something to use only when necessary and even then needs under surveillance before it turns into digital whack-a-mole.

Compared with the cost of hiring a software development team to build your webpage for your business, you're at risk of ending up spending a lot of money ‘sponsoring’ someone to, er, fool around and find out.

Save yourself time, money, and bafflement by working with product-oriented developers who have a vested interest in your webpage's success.

So is WordPress good? We'd summarise our attitude to WordPress as such: just because you can, it doesn't mean that you should.

WordPress's single most appealing feature is the fact that it's free. We understand that to some people, this will always drown out everything else.

However, you have to consider that by using WordPress:

• You can lose valuable time.
• Payments to fix a ‘free’ service do count towards its overall cost.
• You make yourself vulnerable to hackers.
• You can slowly lose your mind as plugins won't stop fighting.

WordPress has its uses and has been a revolutionary force in online content management. The fact that so many businesses still use its services is a testament to its cultural impact. However, we don't think that WordPress is a great solution for building an effective online presence in the 2020s - for most small businesses anyway.

So is WordPress good for your business? Not so much when considering its myriad functionality problems, security issues, and lack of consistent customer support.

Compared to working with a bespoke web design company that can build a bespoke website, manage SEO, install security, and boost your analytics, we might even say WordPress is bad.

When considering website hosting, instead of just asking ‘what’s the best hosting platform', you should ask ‘what does my website need to operate at its best?’ Don't buy the farm before knowing which animals you want to raise.

Put yourself first, and work with a web design agency who will do the same.