WordPress is the ideal choice for enjoying a hassle-free content management system (CMS) solution to getting started on your blogging journey. If you want to blog motivational content, pen down your thoughts for readers, or share daily life experiences, WordPress.com offers you a free, easy-to-use, and secure platform to get started right away.
However, WordPress isn’t always the best choice for blogging needs particularly if you plan on building an online community and a business out of it. As such, choosing the best CMS for your business involves researching systems, comparing CMS components, and understanding pricing models so that you pick the best options for your content needs and business goals.
Despite WordPress being one of the most popular platforms in the world, it has quite a few inherent limitations such as requiring multiple plugins for additional features including anti-spam security plugins, having a poor SEO Ranking that means your fresh content might get lesser activity than you may expect sometimes, slow page speed, and the website going down sometimes even without a notice.
This article will help you better understand the drawbacks of WordPress, so your decision to choose this platform or not is a well-informed one.
What are Disadvantages of WordPress?
While WordPress has become an advanced content management system, it is better suited for users looking for a blog publishing platform. However, for users wanting to transform their blog into a platform offering digital downloads, online courses, etc., WordPress.com is not the best choice as it will not offer all the main advantages of a full CMS platform.
Here is detail regarding the limitations and disadvantages of this platform:
Incomplete Documentation and Tutorials
WordPress still lacks in providing complete and consistent documentation leading to a waste of time and potential business for new WordPress users.
Time-Consuming Website Design and Backups
While WordPress is deemed user-friendly, designing an interactive and user-friendly website that radiates professionalism and urges users to engage is quite complex.
Once users try to customize WordPress templates, mostly they realize the limitations in terms of flexibility. Moreover, customizing WordPress templates is not only time-consuming but also costly. Therefore, if your website's uptime is crucial for your online business, then you may want to consider other options.
Limited Earnings
WordPress's terms of service do not allow bloggers to write paid posts or review products, etc. For blogging as a paying career, you need to apply for its advertising program called WordAds, which is available to WordPress blogs that meet certain traffic and quality requirements.
Once approved, you can start earning through your blog, however, you will be sharing your earnings with WordPress.
Issues with Uploading Plugins
Although a lot of users migrate to self-hosted WordPress so they can benefit from certain attractive features that come with using advanced plugins, they often face certain issues with uploading those plugins. For instance, plugins are susceptible to various security threats such as viruses, bugs, hacking, etc.
Lack of SEO Optimization
WordPress SEO Plugins are available for optimizing your website for search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo. However, these plugins cannot fully optimize your website for SEO. For instance, SEO plugins cannot optimize website speed, nor can they eliminate bloated code and security threats.
Unnotified Suspension of Blogs
WordPress.com has a strict policy regarding terms of use and it suspends blogs suspected of being involved in prohibited activities. WordPress may not even warn bloggers to remove or save their blog content, before suspending it.
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What is WordPress and its Advantages?
A growing interest in blogging and the need for website development have also increased the competition between blogging platforms to offer more flexibility and versatility.
WordPress is a popular name among the blogging community, boasting an ever-growing market share, it is known for providing bloggers what they expect from a good blogging platform. CMS is growing in popularity as well, particularly for companies looking to use CMS for content organization, sharing, and marketing.
Read further to learn about the advantages that make WordPress a worthy choice:
User-Friendly Website Management
WordPress uses a database to collect and follow website knowledge, making it easier for users to search and manage different sorts of content on the website. The admin interface is simple to use and the site settings are easy-to-grasp, therefore you can manage your App business without needing to hire extra help. As WordPress is user-friendly, you need little to no coding expertise to benefit from several features offered on the site, such as:
- Updating blog content.
- Adding themes and plugins.
- Easy adjustments to web design concepts.
Open-Source Platform
WordPress CMS is an open-source website development platform which is one of its advantageous features. The source code is completely open and available for sharing and modification.
This makes the WordPress community sufficient for working on the coding resolution. The platform is the most elaborate self-hosted blogging and website development program that provides you with plenty of open-source content to practice while working on your web design.
Utilization of Plugins
A great way of designing a unique website offering modern features to cater to the growing needs of users is to incorporate plugins. Plugins offer additional features for your website, truly setting it apart from the competition. You can enhance your website speed and security and include social media provisions to further enhance your amazing and user-friendly website. Plugins range vastly in terms of their functionalities, such as one can accelerate your page speed while another, for instance, Google Analytics, can track and tell when and how users hit your web design. Other functionalities of plugins include:
- Facilitating order tracking.
- Providing purchase notifications.
- Supplementing inventory management.
- Building a hassle-free online storefront.
SEO Plugins
Crazy, infinitesimal amounts of available data have highlighted the importance of relevancy and combining Search Engine Optimization into web content. When used correctly, it works to boost views through increased viewer traffic, leading to enhanced sales and business. for your website.
WordPress CMS is a good platform for SEO, making use of semiotic coding applications enabling users to manage SEO features with ease. WordPress users can also choose from a wide assemblage of SEO plugins to boost their website rankings. These popular plugins can provide significant advantageous effects.
Pre-Built WordPress Themes
WordPress offers a range of pre-built themes to give your website an attractive look. These include beautiful themes for all core applications with examples of different categories of websites in the archives of themes, ranging from medical field-oriented templates to those better suited to restaurants, real estate, etc.
Why I Should Not Use WordPress?
Here we will discuss two main reasons why you shouldn’t use WordPress. For starters, WordPress is a considerably slow platform. Secondly, despite contradicting claims, it is not an SEO-friendly website. If a good speed and SEO-optimized tool are what you need, then WordPress may not be the right choice for you.
WordPress is certainly slow! It could be because of all the additional plugins, repetitive codebases and databases, and its server requiring considerably more resources than traditional webpages. Good website speed is essential for efficient working, but on WordPress enlarged images, extra page content, and unpredictable hosting can cause it to crash too.
Website speed is important in keeping your viewers engaged, and not exasperated by the time it takes to get things done there. A slow page can cause you to lose real business because your potential viewers won’t stick around long enough to see what you have to offer.
Moreover, contrary to popular belief WordPress isn’t SEO optimized. Merely having the installation of an SEO tool on your site isn’t enough to optimize it. The tool needs to be properly paired with the relevant knowledge and expert knowledge as SEO strategy implementation is comprehensive and requires years of knowledge and research. Therefore, for users considering WordPress.com as a magical solution to their SEO troubles, that is an unfortunate no.
WordPress undoubtedly has a huge and influential audience from all around the globe, which can serve your blog well. However, you must first decide what you plan to do with your platform. If expressing yourself through blogging is your aim, then WordPress.com is a wonderful choice for you, but if you want to turn your website into a business then you may consider trying out other platforms.