What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Wordpress in 2019?

The core advantages of Wordpress are:

• With over 26% of all websites now built on it you will find a developer very quickly, and if your developer is no longer available you will be able to find support in the thousands of developers out there.
• As a recognised brand you can have confidence that the underlying support for wordpress will continue.
• With thousands of themes and templates to choose from you can have a slick website up and running very quickly.
• With an easy to use interface in the backend it is easy to update content on a regular basis.

The core disadvantages of Wordpress are:

• With such a large amount of websites built on Wordpress if makes it a very attractive target for hackers
• With so many developers to choose from it is very easy to find a rogue developer that has not been to college and learnt how to code properly. It’s important to do your homework and find a developer that has a good background and portfolio of work. And by this I don’t mean just judging a book by it’s cover. Look at every website that the agency has built and run a site speed test on it using https://tools.pingdom.com/ if their websites are taking longer than 3 seconds to load and have a rating of less than 75. Walk away until you find a proper developer that can build a fast website.
• Themes, templates and plugins all sound exciting and enable you to get your site up and running fast, however if a plugin has been used on 20k websites and a hacker finds a way to use it to get into the back end of your website and access your database, it will mean you are a soft target.
• If you are trying to differentiate online then you need a website that makes you look different and helps you define your unique selling point. If your website designer uses the same theme time and time again you may end up having a website that looks the same as your competitor.- How are your customers going to remember you if youi look like all the other websites?

In summary

Wordpress get’s a bad reputation for very public hacking. We hear of business websites getting hacked every month. But it is not the fault of Wordpress, it’s the fault of the web developer that was employed to build the website. Inexperience is often to blame, using short cuts with themes and plugins that are built by third parties leave you at risk of being hacked, losing data and worse still the brand damage that comes with it.

Research your web designer carefully, are they just a designer or do they have solid coding experience or are members of their team understand how to do patches to make sure your Wordpress instance is running on the latest version with all the latest security updates.

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