Starting your wordpress.org website ?
WordPress (wordpress.org) CMS powers more than 30% of worlds websites, thats more than Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Blogger and other small blog CMS’s like Ghost, combined. Yes it powers more websites than ever and the community seems to growing fast. If you wonder why and what is the reason behind this, its very simple – its the community itself.
There are more wordpress clubs now than 5 years ago, most of them offer easy to host website designs that any non-designer can start with i few days or in few hours without any coding knowledge. Its just like editing a word document. However is it really as simple as that, if so why does any one need a professional designer or programmer to do this job.
Let’s get into this in depth analysis – before that, we request you to share this article on social media sites so that everyone will be aware of what they get in to before starting or planning a WordPress website.
First lets see the pros – the advantages of having a wordpress website.
Easy to Use Interface
WordPress has many drag and drop builders such as Visual Composer, Divi Builder, Elementor and more. These plugins can help you design any page in a very simple way. Most of these plugins have thousands of videos online that can help in designing your page in just minutes. More over the wordpress interface is as simple as word document editing, if you would like to have a simple page with out many images or graphic design, then any one can do with a wee bit of struggle.
Open Source and Free
wordpress.org is an open source CMS and is being developed by a huge coding community, these community members are growing day by day. So wordpress is here to stay, wordpress.org repository has thousands of free themes and plugins that you can use. More over most of the web hosting providers provide you with one click install scripts like softaculous, quickinstall or even cPanel default wordpress install – which can install wordpress on your website with one click. Softaculous will help you with backups and automatic updates option. WordPress.org has made it very simple to install their CMS on any website with few steps, so any one with a bit of patience can learn and install and design their own website or blog.
Premium Themes
There are thousands of premium themes that can be bought for as little as $19 (in some cases just $5) or a maximum of $99 from many providers like themeforest, elegant themes, tesla themes, themify, studiopress, mythemeshop, visualmodo and many more who offer you a lifetime license of all their themes for as little as $49 or $399 – and on the other hand themeforest sells thousands of themes on their website for prices starting from $13 to $99 or more. While most of these themes look different and meant for different needs. You have a whole lot of options to get your site designed and also to get inspired.
Vast Design and unique template option make wordpress a preferred choice for many developers, designers and web design companies.
Comfort
If you want ease the process of optimizing your site then wordpress provides you SEO plugins that can help you do exactly that. Not just SEO, be it speed of website, chat, forum, social media linking, security, ecommerce, memberships, community, directory and any possible website idea that pops up in your head – wordpress.org and other premium providers have a plugin for you. And its easy to go around the admin panel for any one to find any option around most of the time.You can design any website or convert any business idea in to reality with wordpress themes and plugins.
While there are many Pros in addition to above, we are providing you with main options that you need to look at or worry about. The rest are Perks.
Now lets talk about the Cons – the most important aspects to consider before your start your project in wordpress. These are way more serious and will kill your site in an instant before you can avoid it. So be sure to go through them and in coming few weeks we will also be providing you options to avoid or save your website from these problems.
Security
While there are many plugins that can help you secure your website, these are the plugins that can create conflict and stop your site from working. There are plugins like All in one security, wordfence, sucuri, ithemes security and few paid plugins from codecanyon. WordPress websites are prone for hacking, if you leave your website untouched or not updated for a while, probability of getting your site hacked by some one is high. Any outdated wordpress theme or plugin is vulnerable and will get hacked.
Web Hosting
Most of the new themes that come with heavy plugins like visual composer and other drag and drop plugins, needs your a ram of at least 512 MB and sometimes even 1GB or 2GB. While shared hosting is not an option to run your wordpress site with these plugins, as they restrict RAM and CPU usage, on the other hand VPS or dedicated hosting will be quite costly. A typical cloud hosting or vps with cPanel will cost you $20 + every month with at least 1 or 2 GB RAM, even amazon lightsail charges $10 for 1GB RAM and single CPU core resource – And if the website grows then you will have to upgrade these to better ones which will cost you even more. Few providers like wpengine charge as high as $249 for 30 GB of storage. Each and every hosting provider has wordpress optimized hosting which will not only give you dedicated RAM and CPU but also protect you from BOT traffic and other security threats. On the whole the hosting will be a cost factor that you need to consider before getting started.
Updates
In addition to WordPress core, any typical premium WordPress theme purchased from any provider will have at least 5 plugins, in addition, you might have to use few plugins for security, backup, SEO and other things. On the whole, you will at least 12 plugins, themes and core to take care of and update regularly so that it can run smoothly. While most of them are developed by a few developers who spend day and night working on them. Some times its too late for you to update them or for theme or plugin author to release them. Those few days will enough for an experienced hacker to bring your site down.
Way more Flaws
There are many flaws like structured data for website, SEO, security, permissions and management. This CMS needs lot of improvements, even though the community is growing and has made tremendous progress in the last few years, it still has way more to develop. As the commmunity is growing, even hackers are growing to bring your site down for money or fun.
We hope these will help you decide on your next WordPress Project – we look forward to your project and any interesting projects made on wordpress can be shared on the comments below so that every one can check it out. If you think that your WordPress websites need attention and professional care, remember AAPTA, we we are just a click away to help you project grow.
