WordPress is one of many CMS options for your website. Like everything in life there are advantages and disadvantages to using it.
Advantages
- Popular
- A lot of support is available
- People have created a lot of different features
- Simple
- Uses Templates
- Easy to use
WordPress is the most popular CMS out there. A massive portion of websites you visit are using WordPress. This means there is a lot of support for it on the web. If something has gone wrong with your website, the problem has likely happened to someone else as well. This means some bugs can be fixed faster on WordPress websites than on another CMS. Another advantage of being the most popular is getting a lot of different options. There are people whose full time job is developing additions for WordPress. The amount of different plugins (additional features) will blow your mind.
WordPress uses a template system that they call “themes”. They adjust how your website is displayed, skipping a lot of the hassle involved with displaying your content. You find a theme that you like, and with some configuring it is done. There are a boat load of simple templates available. If you don’t like the way your website looks, or you have outgrown a templates usefulness, you simply switch to a new one.
There are a ton of guides on how to use WordPress’s admin section, so I don’t need to describe it here. It is organized in a manner that makes sense. All the basic features are easy to understand, and all the advanced features are where you would expect them to be.
Disadvantages
- Popular
- common target for hacking
- run of the mill CMS
- Old code
- A lot of “overhead” code
Popularity comes with several disadvantages. As stated above, WordPress websites make up a large portion of websites on the internet. This makes them an ideal target for hacking. An exploit of WordPress is worth more than an exploit for a different CMS. All WordPress websites need security countermeasures. They will be targeted just for being a WordPress website.
WordPress in my opinion is really normal. Although you can change it up with themes, without some major custom editing, it still looks like a WordPress website. I may only notice it because I make them. I don’t think that is the case though. I think most people notice when a website is using WordPress. I think that it even effects people’s opinion on the value of what’s on the website
The core code for this CMS is pretty old. They can’t modernize the code without causing a large amount of destruction. So they are stuck with using inefficient and limited code. After a while, you end up with a lot of extra code that is hard to replace. Newer CMSs don’t have this problem yet, so they run clean and efficiently. Some are even designed with the intention of never letting their code end up like that.