This topic is widely debated throughout the internet space when it comes to what's the absolute best technologies to create a website. I shall first says this... there will never be the "best" when it comes to creating a website. So let's just get this over with.
Now, WordPress has been around for a very long time. Beside their commerical arm that they are operating under WordPress.com. Their free opens source version is under WordPress.org. As the web development world matures, these days there are more hate than love for the 3000 pound gorilla in the web development space. If one scour through the reddit site, I am sure you will come across developers that like to give WordPress a negative rant for various "valid" reasons. However in this post, I like to talk some sense from the angle of low code and easy access to the technology.
Not too long ago I heard a friend telling me of this wonderful tech that allows him to easily creates websites and he was thinking of going all out into it to see if he could make a living creating website for SME. At that time, I wasn't technically trained to fully understand what he was saying but I somewhat knew that website is an important marketing platform for most businesses. However knowing that my friend wasn't technically trained, I wondered how he is able to pick up this skillset and make a living out of it. Well I wish him luck and he moves on.
A year later, I chanced upon the requirement to create a website for one of my companies and decided to go with WordPress. The initial stages were not smooth sailing but I did managed to get the basic website setup. Well so much on how I got into WordPress... So my intial interaction with WordPress was when I was not technologically sound but I still managed to get it working.
I scour through the internet and found a few commonly mentioned cons of using WordPress to build a website. Here I will list out a few and go through them one by one on my thoughts why WordPress still probably on the gorilla in the room (maybe a little skinny these days)
This is the most debated part of WordPress in the internet. Yes I completely agrees that website built by WordPress are probably more exposed to website built with traditional tech. One of the biggest flaw in WordPress is the millions of plugins that gave WordPress the limitless functionalties. These plugins are often built by 3rd parties developers that might have abandoned after a few years of launching the plugins hence not updating the plugins to work with the latest versions of WordPress. To make things more complex, plugins have to work to other plugins and themes. Many times security loopholes are with outdated plugins. My suggestions: The golden rules when it comes to WordPress plugins are 1, use as little plugins as possbile. 2, only deployed plugins that are created by reputable developers and 3, always update your plugins.
Yes technically if you need a static information website, you do not need to install WordPress as it was always meant to be a content (blog) management system that requires a database and a backend stack to serve the content to the frontend. However over time, WordPress has such good ecosystem of plugins that increases it's functionalities, it has since turn into an entire web development platform. Furthermore website owners will like to refresh content of their website constantly and WordPress can gives this ability to website owners. Taking out the need to hire a "webmaster" (for those that are old enough to know this term) to make updates to their website. My suggestions: These days, static websites are not benefical to any businesses. Everyone should considers deploy a content management system website for the ability of pushing out new content constantly. WordPress then becomes a obvious choice as it is technically "free" and there are an abundant of helps and information if you needed them operate a WordPress site.
There are website developers that see WordPress as a competing solution to their skillset. As with all low code platforms, these developers that see the rise of low code technologies, threatening their livelyhood. WordPress is probably the worst hit as it has such wide adoption in it's space and by far the pioneer in low code space. However I found that many highly skilled developers started off with WordPress. This is especially so for self taught developers. No other platforms offers easier ways getting into web development. Many self taught developers started from WordPress and moved on to other technologies or further enhanced the functionalities of their WordPress sites by changing CSS or PHP that powers the WordPress platform. My suggestions: Embrace low code platforms and not rejects it. There are definitely projects that are suitable to deploy WordPress.
WordPress by itself is free however there are other cost associated in deploying a WordPress site. They are hosting, SSL and security plugin. The latter is subjective but i have not found a really good lifetime license security plugin though with good enough knowledge you can secure your WordPress site enough to prevent most hacks. Despite the debate online talking about how much actual WordPress site cost, I find the same for most websites create by another other technologies or visual website builders. My suggestions: Go with WordPress if you are consider with cost because there are plenty of information online to help setup a WordPress site at any budget. As compared to others available, there are definitely long term cost like subscription or hidden maintenance costs.
In short, with the above most commonly found negatives comments about WordPress, it has survived the bigger part of the decade and still dominate the website creation space. In my opinion, the biggest advantage of WordPress is its maturity reasoning in a lot of information online that helps site owners or its non tech employees solve most basic or intermediate problems. Furthermore, there are plenty of well established plugins that greatly enhanced a basic WordPress site. With a bit of research, you can develop a complex website with a fraction of the cost of a website developed in traditional stacks. The developers of WordPress is constantly improving and upgrading the technology hence I believe that WordPress will continue to improves.
These days I hardly develop new websites hence my opportunity to explore WordPress is limited. However throughout the years, I have been purchasing lifetime agency license of some of the best plugins for WordPress. Some of these license are no longer available in lifetime license making them highly sought after and also allows me to deploy on my own sites. Recently I revisted some of these plugins and decided to deploy a WordPress instance on a docker container as a dev WordPress environment to play around and found WordPress has since further improves. I am particularly interested in the stock page builder Gutenburg. Together with a few good plugins, you can build almost any websites.
