WordPress is the most popular Content Management System(CMS) used on the web today for creating powerful blogs and websites. It has lots of advantages and also have some disadvantages. The disadvantages often scare some persons who do not know how to cope with them and the run away from using WordPress to create blogs and for website development
Every content management system undergo some updates and upgrades released over time. The updates are usually designed to fix identified bugs and patch security issues. Some other bugs may take a long time to fix.
There are several WordPress bugs and which count as disadvantages which you will need to put into consideration when using WordPress for website development. You will need to understand how to address these bugs as you decide on the use of WordPress for your website development. Some of these issues include: translation, security, bad programming, support, bad default configuration, source code, customization, updates and resources.
Translation
One major problem with WordPress is the problem of translation. Most of the volunteers who are involved in WordPress do not have proper skills and expertise knowledge in the areas of translation. The volunteers involved in WordPress Anyone can be a volunteer, you only need a WordPress account and you can start translating from English into different languages without any restrictions.
Translators can do a very poor quality job and end up with very bad translations from English to foreign languages, turning the easy to use dashboard into non-sense admin area.
In some of the WordPress versions, especially the newest one, translations are incomplete. By updating the system, you might end up having your website in both English and the other languages you used before.
So if you need to build a website for a client who does not understand English, you rather do the translation and help the community out with your work, or you choose another method to build your website.
Security Problems
Security is a major concern in WordPress. One major concern is the brute force attack;. Btute Force Attacks occurs when someone tries to access the dashboard of your WordPress site or your FTP account by trying out different user names with different password combinations. If you choose a strong password and changed the default admin user name, you can reduce the chance of getting hacked, but there is no guarantee that you will always win.
Another big security hole is the quality and source of third-party themes and plugins which are made by both professional development companies and also by the hackers themselves. This underscores the need to carefully review the plugins before use and be sure that you confirm the credibility of the developer before implementing a plugin on your WordPress website.
These files are verified, but sometimes the developers can hide fishy code that will not catch the attention of the verifier. This has become a major security concern for WordPress.
These security problems cannot be resolved just with updates. They need to pay more attention on the themes and plugins that are being updated and verify the users who are doing it. Employing highly skilled programmers and WordPress expert to review the code could be a solution.
Bad Programming
The Core WordPress is developed by Automatic Inc, a professional web development company, who pay really close attention to details, most third-party plugins and themes are created by many other individuals and organizations who are, in some cases, really unskilled.
Not optimized code can not only slow down your site or cause errors, but can also be the back-door for a hacker to break into your site.
Lack of Support
Although there is an active and very large WordPress community providing support to users and developers and answering most of user questions, there are cases when you have to figure out things by yourself. The official WordPress support is represented by volunteer, plugin and theme developers, WP assistants or people from all around the world.
When buying a commercial theme or plugin, you will get a level of support from the company who sold it to you, but you might still have unanswered questions at the end of the day. You can also purchase WordPress support from different companies or buy guides to learn this system.
Default Configuration
To really be safe with WordPress, you need to tweak some default settings and secure your website, speed it up and make it really good for users. Basically when you install WordPress on your site, you will have to make some adjustments. For instance, you will have to activate SEF URLs for better SEO, so search engines such as Google can find your pages and content more easily. The visual editor might also cause problems for newbie users, because by default some important features are hidden, which the user have to figure out.
Source Code
WordPress gets regular updates but despite the frequent updates, there are still parts of the core where old PHP techniques are used for global variables, functions, and classes. WordPress produces bloated code with its WYSIWYG visual editor and you can easily see this when you write an article in the editor and then toggle to HTML editor where you can see the source code.
Some free themes and plugins have been found to have hidden codes and links to suspicious websites. When removing these codes, the theme and the whole website will stop working. In some cases the dashboard can also be affected, disabling the option to change the theme or modify your site as you wish.
Customization
For you to be able to implement some customization in WordPress, there is the need for some good knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You also need to understand the WordPress framework itself to be able to modify the files and functions to archive the results you want. SQL queries are also hard to customize because you need knowledge of MySQL and PHP or you need to hire a web programmer to make your website in WordPress so it is better to make one from scratch without using any CMS.
Updates
WordPress core gets a monthly update. But some plugins can have daily updates. Updating your plugins or theme every day can in such cases be frustrating. You don't have to do it, but it is recommended. However if you have already modified your theme or the plugins you are using, watch out, because the update will overwrite all your modified files. Will not create a backup or a copy of the files you have edited, so you will lose your modifications. In this situation you will need to live with the constant update notification.
Server Resources
WordPress websites use a huge amount of server resources because the core WordPress and third-party extensions includes a high number of PHP functions and SQL queries. There are problems regarding CPU usage and nobody seems to know the solution or even to identify the source of the problem. If you buy managed WordPress hosting some plugins that are heavy resource consumer are banned. So you will not be able to install the necessary plugins to your site, because your hosting provider will not allow that. Caching your website is one way to reduce resource usage by your WordPress website.
Conclusion
You now know some of the major problems associated with the use of a WordPress website. What is important here is that you should be able to have solutions to address these problems. These problems do not suggest that the WordPress CMS is bad. No, it is not bad. The fact is, that it is the best CMS around, and it is powering over 75 million websites world-wide. Its key plus is that it is very simple to use and is free.
However there are still some cases when you should not use WordPress for your project: if you want to create a simple website, which does not need to be updated. In this case you can create the site in plain HTML and CSS. You should not use WordPress for sensitive projects that need high security. You should also avoid using WordPress if you can't afford a reliable web host that supports WordPress Hosting.
Comments
Post a Comment