As WordPress comes close to celebrating its 18th birthday, let us take some time to reflect on how this platform started and where it stands today.
According to WordCamp’s data, over 75 billion websites have been built using WordPress. That means that almost 40% of all websites online are powered by this specific CMS.
Impressive, right?
Over the years, WordPress has become a go-to solution for building all kinds of websites, business and personal. Almost every other marketer will recommend that you build your business website using WordPress because of the low-cost, great support, customization possibilities, media management, and SEO-friendly perks it brings to the table.
However, even though this is not necessarily bad advice, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Especially if you’re looking to build a business website for your organization with specific requirements. There are certain things you need to consider before you opt for the most popular solution out there.
While WordPress has definitely a lot of goodies that make it an interesting solution, there are several downsides to this platform.
Since building corporate websites is our bread and butter, we at Share IT have decided to create a post that will help you understand what you need to be careful about when it comes to building your corporate website with WordPress.
The reason why we’re writing this post is simple. We want to equip our readers with the non-BS info they need to make an educated decision before deciding how to build their next business website.
As we already mentioned in one of our previous posts on this blog, we have over a decade of experience creating complex websites for our clients who run big businesses, and none of them were simple solutions. Creating a website requires a lot of planning, back-and-forth communication, and great commitment and attention from our best developers.
From our experience, building websites for enterprise-level businesses is in many ways similar to building skyscrapers. You need to have the best crew and a sound blueprint before you decide to break ground and start building a foundation.
Since this is a difficult job where simple mistakes and bad estimations end up costing companies a lot of money, we at Share IT tend to go above and beyond when it comes to educating our customers and making sure that our potential partners are aware of all the pros and cons a specific strategy brings before we decide to, metaphorically speaking, “break ground”.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s focus on the downsides that come with opting for WordPress as your website-building platform.
In a nutshell, WordPress is one giant blank space where you hang what you like and need. The system operates with the help of plugins that bring specific functionalities to the platform.
Even though this seems like a simple solution for bringing advanced operations to WordPress, plugins can often be considered as a double-edged sword.
You take risks with each plugin you install. Each plugin is created by a different person (who you don’t know), which means that you’re directly inviting an unnamed individual to your digital office and allowing them to run free and create a mess wherever they like.
One more thing that you need to bear in mind when adding multiple plugins to your website is compatibility. There is no guarantee that all the plugins on your website will work harmoniously together. It takes only one corrupted plugin to cause chaos.
However, whenever an update happens, people get a bit nervous.
That is because these updates tend to cause issues with the theme they’re using. If the new update doesn’t sit well with your theme, your website might break. Maybe not in its entirety, but there have been cases where people’s themes went bananas because some of their plugins were no longer compatible with the new updates.
For most companies, this level of uncertainty creates too much unnecessary stress. A lot of businesses that have robust websites with high traffic amounts on a regular basis, cannot afford to gamble with WordPress.
WordPress has a couple of security vulnerabilities that are a frequent pain for everyone who uses this platform. There are three common types of malware that you watch out for:
Backdoors - when hackers get access to your account through abnormal methods such as FTP, DFTP and WP-ADMIN. This attack is reserved for websites that have outdated software or holes in their security. It’s nothing short of a complete nightmare dealing with this problem.
Drive-by downloads - this is a bit more complex play. A hacker comes by and downloads a payload to your server, informing you that your website has been corrupted and that you need to install an antivirus which just happens to be their product.
Malicious redirects - this is an ugly one. Hackers place redirects on your site that take anyone that visits your domain to pages with malicious content and viruses. Nine times out of ten, these are pornographic websites with lots of notorious content on them that breaks your device down. This not only causes problems for visitors who land on your page; it also destroys your brand reputation because your domain becomes connected to bad content.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other security problems that you need to think about when building your website with WordPress.
Since a lot of people use this platform, hacking it has become almost a routine process. As a matter of fact, around 40% of WordPress websites have more or less the same back-end, which makes it super easy for hackers to figure out security vulnerabilities and exploit them with ease.
Thank you for taking the time to read our latest blog post. We hope that it helped you learn a thing or two about the blind spots that you need to be aware of before you decide to build your company website using WordPress.
If this is too much uncertainty for you to bear and you want to build your company website with different tech - we’re happy to talk to you more. Reach out to us and we can schedule an exploratory meeting to talk about how we can set you up for success.