Website Security

Common Downfalls Of Wordpress

Robert Wakefield
09 November 2018
downfall-wordpress

Common Downfalls Of Wordpress

Despite being the most popular content management system in the world, Wordpress have received a significant amount of criticism in recent years. While over a quarter of websites still rely on Wordpress, increasing numbers of site owners and developers are looking for alternative content management systems due to the negatives associated with Wordpress.

At first glance Wordpress may seem like an easy way to host and manage a website. Indeed, the popular CMS platform heralds itself as easy-to-use, quick to set up and simple to navigate. For first-time site owners or non-developers, these benefits may seem extremely appealing but things aren’t always as they seem.

Relying On An Open-Source Platform

Wordpress prides itself on being an open-source model, which means they take a collaborative approach to development. Features, themes and plug-ins can be developed by any individual or company and made available to users across the world.

While this does create more variation in customisation options, there is minimal oversight of the development process. As a result, users can end up with plugins or themes with problematic code and/or bugs, which could result in their site becoming unusable or unavailable.

Furthermore, compatibility issues may arise is users attempt to use plugins developed from different sources and this may be difficult for non-developers to rectify or overcome.

Is Wordpress Secure?

One of the most important features of a CMS is security. Your site, your business and your reputation relies on having a secure online presence and if your CMS doesn’t facilitate this, you’re effectively putting everything at risk.

As well as being the most popular CMS in the world, Wordpress is also the most hacked content management system. The popularity of Wordpress may attract a significant number of hackers to target Wordpress-based sites but this isn’t the only reason hackers are attracted to Wordpress sites.  

With a whole host of themes, plugins and updates, Wordpress sites can be relatively easy to hack. The use of numerous plugins from different sources, for example, can leave gaps in the back-end development of your site, which makes it easy for hackers to gain access and control of your website.

Paying A High Price For Wordpress

As Wordpress is free, many people assume they will be able to manage their site without paying anything at all. This is wishful thinking: you will need to pay for proper WP hosting, you will need to pay someone to apply the various security updates and there are costs associated with the content management system. These can quickly add up.

Many of the themes and plugins available come with a price tag, and you’ll need to keep these up-to-date in order for your site to function properly. If you want to have the best features, increased functionality and improved security, you may need to shell out for costly themes, particularly if you don’t possess the knowledge to customise CSS, HTML and PHP yourself. Hosting your Wordpress business website on cheap, shared hosting is simply false economy; it only takes one website to be hacked on that cluster or server, and your website's security could be compromised.

While Wordpress is still a widely-used content management system, a high number of users are actively looking for a more secure, cost effective and user-friendly option. To find out more about easy-to-use content management systems, contact Siteglide today.

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