WordPress is a platform widely adopted by many and by many, I mean approximately 74,652,825 sites worldwide. Around 50% of this figure is hosted on free WordPress.com according to ManageWP Blog. WordPress also accounts for 18.9% of all self-hosted websites.
Advantages of WordPress
1. Easy to operate
You can easily make changes to your website without knowing HTML coding. It is easy to add pages, blog posts, media, products and change current content on WordPress. WordPress has helpful guides and support for each area of their platform if you do happen to find yourself stuck.
2. Affordable
WordPress has a variety of themes to choose from and using a ready-made template can cut costs and time taken to manually build a website for your small business.
3. Increasing number of templates and plugins
WordPress offers more paid and unpaid themes and plugins than most other content management systems. This means that if you want to add more features to your website, there’s a good chance that there’s a plugin available to do this for you.
4. Popular platform for business of all sizes and industries
In the past, it has been known that other website platforms have left clients with a website that offers limited ability to make changes and a system that isn’t able to adapt to changes in the business. WordPress is so widely used that it inherently moves with changes and trends in the web design industry.
Regardless of who you use to manage your website, the chance are, they’re familiar with WordPress.
5. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is easy to incorporate
WordPress has many reliable plugins available to download for help with website optimisation. SEO can be a main driver in traffic for many websites but can be difficult for small businesses will little time or to understand or implement the principles.
WordPress makes it easy for all users to optimise their website for search. Yoast is by far the most popular tool for SEO but there are alternatives including All In One SEO.
Disadvantages of WordPress
1. Frequent software updates
In order to keep your website up to date for current browsers and virus attacks, WordPress requires you to update the software frequently. The frequent updates make it difficult for some plugins to adapt to the changes made to the WordPress software and they don’t tend to operate the way they should after updates.
It is advisable to take a backup copy of your website before updating your WordPress version in the event of any problems with the update that could affect your website.
2. Content doesn’t always appear the way you wanted it to
When making changes in the backend of WordPress, it doesn’t always appear the way you expected it to when looking in the actual browser. This can be frustrating for those that aren’t overly familiar with HTML or php when trying to get text and images to appear the way they want it to.
3. Costly and time consuming
If your website was built upon a theme and you decide you want to make major changes to it, it could be time consuming and costly to get a developer to makes changes to the layout for you. Every theme is programmed differently so it would take time for a developer to understand how the individual theme was made.
If you know that major changes will be made to the theme in the future, it may be best to consider building from scratch to meet your specific requirements.
Businesses using WordPress
Techfivestars has effectively used WordPress to build a website that is clear, easy to use and is aesthetically pleasing. The website is easily navigable and the overlapping pages as you scroll are an impressive addition to the website.
