WordPress Pros and Cons: Everything You Need to Know

If you’re looking to build your website with WordPress, it’s essential to determine whether it’s the best platform for you, which depends on the type of website you want to create.

Though WordPress has secured a place in every developer’s lips as a go-to CMS, it has both benefits and drawbacks that you need to factor in.
So before calling the final shot, this article will help you discover the pros and cons of WordPress. Let’s dive right in.

Types of websites you can build with WordPress

When WordPress first came onto the scene, it was just a simple blogging platform. But over the years, it has evolved into a full-fledged content management system powering over 43% of websites across the internet.

Now, WordPress is capable of handling all sorts of websites – from personal blogs to massive corporate sites and everything in between. Let’s take a look at some of the main types of websites you can create with WordPress.

1. Ecommerce Store

E-commerce is where WordPress really flexes its muscles these days. Just install the wildly popular WooCommerce plugin and bam – your basic WordPress site just transformed into a full-fledged online store.

With WooCommerce, you can sell any type of physical or digital product, manage inventory, calculate shipping rates, and accept payments via all the top gateways like Stripe, PayPal, and more. From a simple one-person store to a huge multi-vendor marketplace, WooCommerce supports any e-commerce use case.

Site built on WordPress: Poshmark

2. Business Websites

WordPress is a powerful platform for businesses of any size to establish a professional web presence.

Thanks to the massive ecosystem of business-focused WordPress themes and plugins, you can craft informative pages about your company’s backstory, services offered, employee bios, and much more – all without writing a single line of code yourself.

Want to integrate email marketing? No problem. Need a contact form? Easy peasy. Location maps, and SEO optimization, are possible with WordPress for businesses.

3. Membership Sites

Plenty of businesses and creators monetize by providing premium gated content to paid members/subscribers. WordPress makes launching a membership site like this a breeze with plugins designed specifically for it.

You can restrict access to certain content, create user profiles, set up subscriptions, build discussion forums for your community, and deliver your premium materials. It’s an increasingly popular revenue model that WordPress accommodates nicely.

Site built on Website: Health My Lifestyle

4. Online Course Platforms

For experts looking to share their knowledge through multimedia online courses, WordPress is a fantastic course platform. Just install an LMS (Learning Management System) plugin like LearnDash or LifterLMS.

Site built on WordPress: Success Valley

These integrate seamlessly, letting you create full online courses complete with video lessons, PDF materials, quizzes, assignments, and the ability to sell access or grant certificates upon completion. An online school powered by WordPress is super doable. Success Valley has built its online course platform on WordPress.

5. Multi-Vendor Marketplaces

Speaking of selling access, WordPress can even be used to create full-blown multi-vendor marketplaces similar to Etsy, Amazon, or Udemy’s instructor marketplace.

With the right combination of plugins, you can allow independent vendors to open their own “stores” on your WordPress site.

They can upload their product listings, handle sales/payouts, and you take a cut as the platform owner. Build a whole buying/selling community all through WordPress.

The core WordPress software is 100% free and open-source. But premium themes and plugins really unlock their full potential to create virtually any type of website you can imagine – from basic brochure sites to complex enterprise solutions.
With an intuitive user experience and a massive global community behind it, WordPress makes launching an online presence accessible to businesses and individuals alike.

Let’s find out the Pros and Cons of using WordPress

WordPress has taken the web development world by storm, empowering everyone from individual bloggers to massive corporations to build powerful websites. But like any technology, it comes with its own set of strengths and limitations.

Let’s take an honest look at the pros and cons of relying on WordPress for your online presence.

What makes WordPress so popular:

1. Free, open-source content management system

WordPress is completely open-source, which means developers can dig into the code, remix it, and share their magic with the world.

This democratized approach fuels constant innovation from the massive WP community, birthing awesome new themes and plugins constantly.

One of WordPress’s biggest draws is just how user-friendly it is, even for total tech novices. The clean dashboard makes it a breeze to draft posts, update pages, upload media, and keep your whole site humming along smoothly. It’s a natural fit for anyone coming from a blogging background.

2. Highly flexible and customizable

When it comes to website builders, WordPress stands out as an incredibly versatile option.
Since it’s an open-source platform, users have the freedom to write custom code tailored specifically for their site.
One of the biggest draws of WordPress is the level of control and customization it grants website owners.

Because you have full access to modify the platform itself, you can tweak every aspect of your site to align perfectly with your business’s unique needs and objectives.

Whether you prefer to tackle those customizations yourself or by hiring a expert WordPress developer is up to you. The choice is yours to make at any point along the way. That flexibility is incredibly powerful for businesses looking to craft a truly tailored online presence without being confined by the limits of other website builders.

3. Active community

Since WordPress powers the majority of websites around the world, it has a huge community of users. Members of the WordPress community actively discuss and develop ways to use this content management system more effectively.

If you have any questions or issues regarding WordPress, you can ask them on one of the forums. This makes it easier for beginners to find the necessary information to build websites using WordPress.

WordPress subreddit, an active forum for WordPress.

The WordPress.com forum is one example of an active forum you might want to check out. It covers various discussion topics, including news, how-tos, etc.

4. Integration/Add nearly any feature with third-party plugins

WordPress boasts an extensive plugin library, allowing users to customize and extend their websites effortlessly. They don’t call WordPress the “WordPress ecosystem” for nothing.

With a galaxy of over 59,608 free plugins to choose from, you can extend your site’s capabilities in virtually any direction. Need an SEO assistant? Done.

Want to add a slick contact form? Easy peasy. Trying to build the next Amazon? There are plugins for that too! Free and premium options fit any budget.

Leveraging plugins enables you to expand and enhance your website’s capabilities without extensive coding or development work.

Simply search for the desired functionality, install the plugin, and activate it to add or improve new features. You can find plugins that allow you to add features like contact forms, social media integration, e-commerce capabilities, and more. They’ll enable you to tailor your website to meet your requirements and goals.

Some of our favorite plugins include:

What makes WordPress not a good fit for you

1. Limited Customization for Non-Techies:

Undoubtedly WordPress offers a wide range of customization options, achieving a unique and highly customized design often requires advanced technical skills.

The platform’s user-friendly interface can be misleading in this regard. Non-techie web development users might find it challenging to achieve the desired level of customization without hiring a professional WordPress developer, which oftent turns out to be quite expensive.

2. Frequent updates and performance issues:

Keeping your WordPress installation, themes, and plugins up-to-date is essential for security and stability.

However, updates can also break existing functionality until you get everything in sync again. Annoying? Yes. Is it necessary? Also yes.
Not all WordPress themes and plugins are created equal when it comes to lean code and blazing speeds.

Installing too many bloated, poorly coded components can make your once-stellar WordPress site feel sluggish over time.

2. Plugin Dependency:

WordPress’s flexibility is often attributed to its vast library of plugins that allow users to extend functionality. However, excessive reliance on plugins can become a double-edged sword.

Overloading your website with plugins can slow down its performance, lead to conflicts, and increase security risks.

It’s crucial to strike a healthy balance between using plugins and optimizing your website’s performance.

3. Adding up custom costs:

WordPress itself is completely free. However, if you factor in the cost of premium themes, plugins, hosting, domains, and developer assistance (if you need it), the total cost quickly add up as your site ambitions grow.

For major customization beyond pre-built components, you’ll likely need to enlist paid professionals with robust PHP, CSS, and HTML skills to sculpt the WordPress codebase to your exact specifications.

This can be a significant investment if you’re aiming for a highly tailored and complex website.

4. Getting stuck in maintenance mode:

A common issue most WordPress users run into is their site getting stuck in maintenance mode. As part of its automatic update system, WordPress has a built-in maintenance mode that activates whenever you update your software, themes, or plugins from the WordPress dashboard.

This can be pretty frightening as it can also affect the administrator and backend. All of a sudden, you can’t log in to your WordPress site, and your website is essentially down, except for a brief message that visitors see.

At the end of the day, WordPress offers immense potential anchored by a thriving open-source community.

However, like any powerful tool, it requires care, knowledge, and intentionality to truly master – as well as a willingness to invest financially when needs expand. By honestly weighing the pros and cons, you can decide if the WordPress journey is right for you.

Closing Thought:

WordPress isn’t superior in 100% situations. It has both advantages and disadvantages that you need to consider. However, WordPress is probably better for the vast majority of websites and should be your default choice for most situations because:

It’s the most user-friendly content management system, especially for non-developers
You can quickly get up and running with an attractive website without lots of development hours/costs
It’s easy to find professional help if you run into any issues