Why we don’t Prefer building WordPress websites

First, before we start, I’d like to say, this post is not to be offensive to WordPress but rather to talk about some features that are missing, or needs extra work just like hand-coded websites because after all if it wasn’t awesome it’s wouldn’t have grown to this space of the market till now, WordPress alone has about one-third of all websites online, and that’s really really huge

It has a lot of features one can benefit from but it’s not the best option, before talking about the cons let’s talk about the pros:

1. It’s easy to build a website
   it’s all about dragging and dropping from the editor actually a lot of WordPress websites can be fully built-in one day, you just need to purchase a theme, apply it, and add your data to the website. And this reminds me about another thing I hate when there are companies building their whole business model on building these websites (while not adding any development work in PHP) and they call themselves web development companies. How come?! Almost anyone that’s not so techy can build a website like this. they just watch a couple of Indian videos on YouTube and there you go. A web developer.
2. A lot of plugins
   making it easy and so smooth to implement a lot of features like SEO to your sites with just a couple of clicks but on the other side, these plugins are one of the major cons points of using WordPress but we will get to this point later
3. Low cost as wanted
   I believe that the only reason or to be more accurate, the most affecting reason to choose WordPress is the low cost, along with the speed of building the website, although that this reason vanishes in the long run because one will get to pay much more on the long run, we will get back to this also in the next section

All these points and there’s more of course that is good for building the website using WordPress at the start of your business or if you have a new idea that you want to validate, but the truth is once you have established your business and online presence, then it might not be the best option for the business and here are the reasons (Cons of using WordPress):

1. Websites are slow
   you know using a theme, dragging and dropping blocks may not result in creating the best clean code, this can be fixed if you are a developer or you know some HTML so you can optimize the code, but since most users are not, the code will not be optimized, you may not be able to add an image in the best optimum size so the browser takes more time loading images and loading unnecessary code resulting in making your website slow, so that’s the first reason why you need a developer in your team to help hardcode or optimize code and image sizes
2. Many plugins have security flaws
   security is not something you can mess with, it’s true that one of WordPress Pros is having zillions of plugins, but if you’re not 100% sure of the plugin you are going to understand, you might be f***ed up, and this is one thing that has been proven over time
3. Plugins must be updated constantly
   there’s almost no WordPress site built with no plugins, all of them do have at least one, these plugins used are actually instances of the original code, they call the original code to work, but if this original one is updated, the instance will not find something to call and this will definitely lead to misfunction of your website, it depends on which plugin you didn’t update
4. Proactive Security
   you remember in the intro when we said that about one-third of world websites are built on WordPress, as huge and good this is, as exciting and attractive it is to the hackers, for the hacker to hack a website, they need to know their programming language first, and we all know that WordPress is built with PHP, and they need to know the structure of the website. These two are common along with all the WordPress Websites. So, for the hackers why don’t they put in their hard work once and get a lot of results from a lot of websites using this only hard work they used before. This makes it hard for them to hack hardcoded websites as they don’t know the language nor the structure. We know that they are investing a lot in the security section but it’s not perfect yet nor will it ever be
5. Hardcoded websites give you full control over the security
   it’s said in one sentence but is not easy at all and it’s very important, keeping your website files, database, and connection safe is not something you can mess with, you need to take backups of your website files and databases so you don’t wake up someday and found yourself naked with no business out there. Actually, this may not happen to you it may happen to the host providing hosting service to your website, it happened once to me, the hosting provider got hacked, and words can’t describe enough how miserable was I, so just make sure once your business gets big enough to have a technical guy on your team or in your agency taking care of the security issue.
6. 
   
   Higher cost over time
   if you are building an e-commerce website using Shopify, WooCommerce, or any other e-commerce provider service, your cost might sum up to over $50 per month, on the long run this cost is very high, because you can have a website built for you starting from $1000-$2000 (and we do that in PrimeCode) and have all functions that you will need, and it will be more stable because anyway when you decide to upgrade or redesign your website, you can’t afford any mistakes made so you will need to have a technical guy on your team or a freelancer to take care of your website

And that’s why I don’t prefer WordPress after all, one more thing before closing is that after all of this being said and we still didn’t dive into the technical issues and yet we are just starting, having all this pressure will make you overwhelmed while you still have a lot to take care of in your business.

I’ll be delighted if you tell me what you think about this post, whether you like or don’t like WordPress? And if you have any previous experience that you can share with us building your website.

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Ramy Samaan

PrimeCode founder, FastDeliver founder, addicted to learning, building and developing apps, chess, soccer, and family time.