When to use and when to NOT use WordPress

by Mike McLeland Webmaster As we’ve noted in previous articles about WordPress, we’re a really big fan of WordPress – for lots of reasons.  WordPress is easy to setup, manage and update. In our opinion, WordPress is the perfect option for many small and medium businesses in Plano and Frisco.  It’s true that WordPress started out as a blogging system, but that was years and years ago. Over the past several years, WordPress has evolved into a full-featured web Content Management System (CMS). That means you can use WordPress to manage your whole website, not just your blog.

With over 70 million websites running on WordPress and almost half of the top 100 blogs using it, there’s no doubt about WordPress’ popularity. Wordpress currently owns 55% market share for all CMS and this number is growing every month.

In fact, if you’re new to online technology you’ll almost be convinced that WordPress is the only option for creating blogs and websites.

In addition to the above, there are thousands of professionally designed WordPress themes — with more becoming available all the time. WordPress themes allow you to have a professionally designed website without the expense of having a custom website developed.

More importantly, WordPress was designed to be extended and that’s exactly what programmers around the world have done. There are thousands of WordPress plugins available that add functionality to the core system. So whether you need a simple contact form or a full-blow ecommerce system, there’s a plugin to meet your business needs.

Lastly, WordPress is very search engine friendly. As Google Engineer Matt Cutts says, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.” And with the free Yoast SEO plugin, your site will be even more search engine friendly.

With all these positive things about WordPress, there are certainly times that WordPress is not the ideal solution.

If you are building a website that’s primarily not about content management, or your content architecture looks very different from posts, pages and comments, then you are probably better off building a fully custom website.

If you’re building an eCommerce website with very complex requirements, such as multi-currency, multi-sourcing, multi-payment or with thousands and thousands of products) don't use WordPress. WordPress rocks for setting up a basic online store, but if your business lives and dies by its online sales, WordPress is probably not your best solution.

Probably the biggest reason not to use WordPress is that as a website owner, you must constantly update your website. This is designed to be a good thing but when you consider the frequency of WordPress updates and the compatibility issues that come with it (updating plugins etc.) then it’s not necessarily a good thing.

With every update, you risk issues with your website template – which often costs thousands of dollars – and some of your plugins.

Website Maintenance in WordPress is a whole issue on its own; you can’t use WordPress without constantly updating it and you have to be ready to make changes to your template or plugins when you update.

If you have the budget, a designer or programmer or the resources to manage these updates, WordPress is great. Otherwise, you might want to stick to using other solutions.

Author Bio: North Texas Web Design provides Plano website maintenance and Plano WordPress web design for businesses in the North Texas area including Plano and Frisco. We provide web services at an exceptional value: Professional, affordable, and designed with your goals in mind.  Call us today for website maintenance, hosting, web design and SEO services.

Sponsor Ads

• Ad Space Available - Rent it Now!

Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

Comments