If you have ever spoken to someone about WordPress, then you will know that people either love it or hate it. I’ve used WordPress for over 5 years now, and while there are issues, it really isn’t as bad as people say. There are issues with every web platform.

WordPress has been around since 2003. There are going to be website designers and developers that have used WordPress before it got really good, and since they had a bad experience, they are always going to put WordPress down. That’s just how this industry works.

With WordPress having frequent updates and constantly innovating, I think it is the best way to build a website in 2022. But… not every website. I think websites like brochure sites, B2B, B2C, eCommerce sites, and booking sites are best suited for WordPress. If you’re handing the site over to the client, then again WordPress is fantastic.

Try handing over a custom-built fully coded site to a client and see how they deal with it when they need to make an update.

I could go on all day, but let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of WordPress and why it isn’t bad anymore!

Let’s start with the pros.

It’s easy to use

If a client has asked you to build a website and they want to manage it after the initial build has been completed, then WordPress is the best CMS for this. It’s easy to update content and write new blog posts. That’s all most clients will ever want to do. As a developer, it is also very friendly.

WordPress is very flexible

The ability to use plugins makes WordPress very flexible and easy to start small and build a much more robust and feature-heavy website quickly. Everything is modular and can be ‘bolted on’ rather easily.

Great Community/Documentation

Everything in WordPress is fairly well documented. If you need to learn how to add new menus or widgets, or sidebars, or themes – there is great documentation on how to do that stuff as a developer. Plugins alone have massive communities, and most of the times plugins are where you will have some issues.

You can customize it

WordPress is open-source, so you can customize it to do what you want. Enough said really on that point I think!

Fantastic for SEO

When new business owners decide to use squarespace or Wix, they find very quickly that they can’t get much traffic to their site organically. Whereas WordPress you can use great plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank math to rank higher up in the search results.

Let’s have a look at the cons

It’s popular for hackers

Yes WordPress has a rep for being hacked. I think the first ever site I setup in WordPress, it actually got hacked. That was 5 years ago! Now there are a lot of fantastic plugins like Wordfence that can help really secure your site. I would also change the /wp-admin to something else so it makes it harder for hackers to find.

Themes are bloated and have issues

Many themes are “bloated” resulting in poor performance – As with anything open-source, there is a lot of “bad” code out there in WordPress land. A lot of themes are bloated with poor code, etc – it takes careful selection (or a custom theme) to get something that fits the user’s needs and is lightweight/quick. If you’re not experienced with fixing themes or dealing with support, then maybe a theme isn’t the best idea for you.

WordPress is not perfect, but it is a great CMS for what it was intended for – small to medium-sized websites. Like any CMS/software it has its deficiencies – however, it also has some great strengths (ease of use being one of the biggies). It’s a great tool to keep in the “Web developers toolbag” but like anything else, you don’t need to use it for everything.

If you’re not a fan of reading, here’s a video our founder created on why WordPress isn’t bad.