In recent years, many companies have had a website (or even a webshop) developed in Wordpress. This often on the advice of a "marketer" or a "web designer". Over the last six months, more and more companies are contacting Sofco because they are experiencing problems with their website and want to make the move to a different, safer system and want their website to be precisely tailored to their house style, image and target group. As advice I give you 8 reasons why you as a company should not use Wordpress.
For clarity, I am not against Wordpress. I only believe that Wordpress has been promoted too much by many marketers and web designers who do not know better or have no know-how about developing a website. This is because the question must be asked in advance, what is the purpose of the website and what is the function of the website. That immediately brings us to the first reason.
Reason 1: Wordpress is not developed for companies
It is not developed for a shopping basket, not intended as a sales tool, not intended for a website with a lot of content. What is it meant for? It is perfect for bloggers, perhaps the best solution for bloggers that exists. But not for a company website and certainly not for a webshop. That is the first reason, is Wordpress suitable for what you want to achieve?
Reason 2: Wordpress is not search engine friendly
At least not with a standard installation. To make Wordpress search engine or SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly, various plugins must first be installed, modifications must be made to the configuration settings, etc. However, this is rarely done or only 5% of the possibilities within the plugins are utilized . In addition, the structure of the Wordpress website must be adjusted in order to optimally benefit from these SEO plugins. Something that is rarely done because the "builders" only know how to work in a template. The structure requires extensive knowledge of programming. Now there will probably be Wordpress fanatics who say that Wordpress can be made very user-friendly with various plugins, and that is true to a certain extent because Wordpress has considerable potential, but 99% to 95% of the websites do not achieve this potential. There are other systems that are much more SEO-friendly and much more user-friendly than Wordpress.
Reason 3: Wordpress is not user-friendly
Most companies have little time to delve into the operation of a system unless it is user-friendly. Wordpress was developed by programmers who work on the open source system worldwide. I have no doubt about the quality of these programmers, but they do lose sight of user-friendliness. Programmers simply have the ability to add as many buttons and options as possible, making Wordpress unclear to most people.
Reason 4: Wordpress themes are complex
Adjusting themes. For those who know how it works, it won't be such a problem. But for the most common users who want to make their website unique or different from others or want to make it in line with their existing house style or who do not want to use a theme, it can be a very complex and annoying process. Even for me, with 20 years of experience, it takes a huge amount of time to adjust a theme so that it is somewhat close to the desired effect. Even though I understand Wordpress themes, the template structure and I am a designer, it takes a lot of time to make changes within Wordpress. Especially someone who wants to build a website for the first time and starts with Wordpress will discover that it is much more complicated than they had previously predicted.
Reason 5: Wordpress is too large
Wordpress is an inflated piece of script that uses way too much capacity on your server. The installation of Wordpress (without plugins) is around 20MB while most websites that I develop are around 2MB. If a number of plugins are added, a Wordpress website can even amount to 180 MB or sometimes even more. This may not sound important when you consider that there is often advertised by hosting companies with unlimited data usage, unlimited space on servers. However, there is nothing like unlimited, that is purely commercial marketing language and to be honest, completely lied, because if you try to install multiple sites then your website will eventually be blocked or complaints will come from the data center. Unlimited means unlimited as far as is available. Now Wordpress is not directly a problem in terms of space but in terms of memory that a server has available. To make this understandable, you can compare a server with the (storage) capacity and memory of your computer. As you may know your computer crashes slowly or even if you use too many or too heavy programs at the same time. The same applies to your server. Wordpress uses a lot of memory. Every plugin that you add to your Wordpress website is in fact a program that requires extra capacity from your server. This means that the memory of a server suffers. In addition, most Wordpress websites are hosted on servers that are shared with other Wordpress websites. This way the speed of your website is influenced by the use of other websites. Since many people use Wordpress, the capacity of the server will decrease more and more.
Reason 6: Wordpress is open source, so hack sensitive
Open source may sound like a good thing, but it also causes many problems. Because it is a popular program, this also makes it interesting for hackers. And because it is open source, it also makes it very easy for hackers to come to the source of the software and to understand how one can easily hack Wordpress websites and find holes in the software. In recent years it has frequently happened that websites are being hacked en masse in this way. It sometimes happens that minor adjustments are needed to remedy this, but often it takes days and even weeks to remove a virus from a Wordpress website. As I already mentioned, a Wordpress website is 20MB in size, which makes it a monk's job to remove a virus. So it may just be that your website is out of the air for a few days or even weeks. It is therefore a major problem if your business depends on your website. If you have had a webshop developed in Wordpress, it may well be that you have no turnover for a few weeks.
Reason 7: Wordpress updates
This brings us to the following reason, which corresponds to reason 5. Because you are at risk of being hacked, it is therefore very important that you upgrade the platform to the latest version at all times. Which means that you must constantly monitor this. Most companies are not concerned with this or, excuse me, too lazy to keep up with this regularly, which puts the website at risk at those moments. This automatically brings us to reason number 7.
Reason 8: Wordpress plugins
Every time you update the platform it is possible that certain functions or plugins no longer work properly because the independent makers of the plugins have not yet updated their plugin. Until that time, the plugin in question no longer works, giving your visitors the impression that your website is no longer functioning and will therefore drop out.
Conclusion
As you can see, Wordpress has extensive functions and plugins, but this can cause many problems and is therefore not the best choice for companies. This is the reason that many companies eventually switch to a different system. Sofco offers its own maintenance system that has been used by many companies in the Netherlands. A system that is very user-friendly, where you never have to take updates into account and has never been hacked because it is not an open source.
We pay a lot of attention to research, so that we achieve an effective end result. We are constantly up-to-date with the latest developments in internet and we remain up-to-date in the field of design, trends, software and SEO. We regularly brainstorm with our customers to create new ideas and to go beyond the usual frameworks.
For more information, see: Sofco CMS