Had it been better if I was using WordPress for my website?

I often get to hear this question. Well, it depends on the requirements and other criteria. Going into more detail, the answer turns up into exactly what WordPress is—and what it isn't.

WordPress is basically a blogging application. It was originally created to make it easy to publish Blog. A Blog is a shared on-line journal where people can post daily entries about their own views which they wish to.  It is kind of a dated series of entries which can be text or multi-media. As it is on the internet, content on the Blog is for public viewing. Viewers can express their own thoughts. Such responses can either be filtered by the editor or kept forever.

Since its origin in 2003, WordPress has sprung up from a simple blogging tool into a content management system (CMS). Although WordPress is used by nearly 12 million sites, it is still a blogging tool and as a result has limitations sometimes. So actually arises the question—Is it right for your site?

Concerns when determining whether to use WordPress

Financial factors of using WordPress:

WordPress is free and it is really very simple to obtain and set up. You need a web host that handles WordPress and MySQL database. Most web hosting companies provides these features. So you can install it on all web hosting servers.

Developing a WordPress system and modification in pre-written code may involve time and can be costlier. From a development aspect, creating the code for personalization of WordPress site is more time-consuming than to just write straight (X) HTML/CSS. You can save this overhead by implementing freely available themes and available Plug-ins.

Maintenance of the WordPress sites may be cheaper. As it is easy to change the content of the WordPress pages, the site owner can edit their own content, saving them of the load of paying a web developer to do it for them.

Many plug-ins and widgets are free. If you need special features on your website, you can just download a plug-in or widget that will fit to your needs. This can help to reduce development costs.

 Something Technical related to WordPress

WordPress is easy. As opposed to the interfaces of other content management systems (CMS), WordPress is the most convenient for the person to understand to get around. This is very essential if the maintenance of the website is to be done by someone who is non-technical.

The WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editor used in Wordpress for editing the content or text of a web page, often does not match to what we expect to see.

In the standard set up, the WYSIWYG manager box does not indicate what the articles will really look like on the live website since it doesn't refers to the appropriate CSS files. If the person making the changes is aware of this and understands which tags to use, this isn't a problem then. However, the normal webmaster may try to force the styles to get a good look and feel, which may save design information on an inline base, which beats the whole objective of having exterior CSS files and themes. That means that if you apply a new theme later on, you'll have to go back and make sure that every page looks right and doesn't have undesirable designs.

In most situations WordPress repairs issues presented by an individual But it is often discovered that it regularly overwrites HTML value any individual has particularly joined in the articles modifying box. For example, if you use the HTML portion of the content modifying box and then go back and modify the same content in the WYSIWYG portion, your customized value or code might be over-written, which may create your web pages w3c-invalid if the code it writes doesn't match with your DOCTYPE.

WordPress comes with a large number of plug-ins and widgets. Many of these plug-in and widgets are free.  As an incredible number of websites are using WordPress, a large number of Plugins and widgets have been designed which do almost anything you can think of. But as these plug-in and widgets are free, the original author of the plug-in gets less rewards or incentives to provide support for the plug-in if there is a security issue that arises or if the plug-in doesn't work with a new edition of WordPress or conflicts with some other plug-in. Incase the plug-in having problems which is quiet popular and widely used, might be fixed right away. But if the WordPress website which has been personalized and coded as by one individual or group, that individual or group can manage any issues which may occur

WordPress can be slow at times and can cause a site to load much more slowly which would otherwise load quickly. A popular site running WordPress can affect other websites which are hosted on the same server, as well.

WordPress is not flexible enough. Regardless of  the plug-in and widgets, some tasks  just can't be done easily in WordPress. For example, it can be complex process to include some external software like ecommerce and database applications, into a website which is operating on WordPress. Some solutions to this involve iframes and other not worth using, since that can cause search engine optimization (SEO) problems. Luckily, there are many ecommerce and database plug-in for WordPress as well as programs developed to perform with it—so except when you absolutely must use certain application, this may not be an issue for you.

Previewing offline 'yet to be published page' is another issue. Because WordPress is database-driven, any changes you make must be saved. If you want to review your changes on the internet, you must have the page published first and later when you make changes to the writing of this page, you can click "preview" and see the modifications done for the purpose of improvements. This may or may not be an issue for you. The only way I know of to get around this is to set up a local web hosting server like XAMPP or WAMP on your own pc operating WordPress. Work on this server making changes to the site. Once those are confirmed, you can transfer them to the live server.

WordPress has got good backup.  There are plug-in available which can automate the backup process.  A standard database backup is huge because all the tables are backed up every time. To avoid this you have to select the specific tables you wish to back up. If the disk space is really not an issue for you, then this doesn't matter except for the time involved in both backing up and restoring it.

Many security issues were uncovered in the software. This may be the biggest concern for WordPress site owners. Whenever a security hole is found in a WordPress feature or in a plug-in, this immediately concerns all those who are using that feature or plug-in. If you are using your own customized software for your website then the risk of being hacked is dramatically reduced since you won’t be a target and also you would have taken care of things personally.

So to summarize if you have a simple and a basic website and need an easy, hassle-free way to update the pages, then yes, WordPress is likely the best solution. If you have a highly customized website with custom code or think you might add custom code in the future, then you should study your plug-in options available carefully before deciding to use WordPress.

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