While WordPress is a popular and widely used platform for building websites, it is not necessarily the best platform for everyone. Whether WordPress is the best platform for you depends on your needs. Here are some pros and cons of WordPress to consider. Of course, we also explain why we Using WordPress.
In short, WordPress...
- Is user-friendly: WordPress is known for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for beginners to get started.
- Is flexible: With thousands of themes and plug-ins, WordPress offers many ways to customise and expand your website.
- WordPress is highly scalable. It can be used for small blogs as well as large corporate websites. The platform grows with you.
- It is secure and stable. WordPress is used by millions of websites and has become a robust and reliable cms over the years.
- Has a large community: WordPress has a large and active community, which means you can find lots of support and resources to help you solve problems or improve your website.
But also has drawbacks...
- Security: Because WordPress is so popular, it is a target for hackers. It is important to keep your website up-to-date and take security measures to protect your site.
- Performance: Some WordPress themes and plug-ins can negatively affect the performance of your website. This can lead to slower load times and a poorer user experience.
- Potential compatibility issues: With so many plug-ins and themes available, there can sometimes be compatibility issues that can disrupt your website.
Whether WordPress is best for you will have to weigh up for yourself, we build on the knowledge we have accumulated over the years to develop our website. The fact that WordPress was active on more than 40% of all websites, worldwide, last year says enough about the suitability of the CMS, in our view. The websites range from very complex, graphical websites. Think of websites for festivals, these are more often more focused on design. But of course also small websites for the bakery around the corner, simple blogs to high-traffic websites of large multinationals like Sony and Microsoft.
Versus Drupal
WordPress and Drupal are two of the most popular content management systems (CMS) used to build websites. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages compared to each other. Drupal quickly becomes quite technical and therefore less suitable for a 'layman'. The steep learning curve makes website maintenance a lot more complex.
Because it is somewhat less popular, there are also fewer themes and plugins available. As a result, more will have to be developed 'by yourself'. This quickly adds to the cost of a project, which will increase more quickly as a result.
That said, it is a popular system, especially if you have the budget or are a bit more technically inclined yourself. The disadvantage of Drupal can then actually be an advantage; you can develop a fully customised website that is completely tailored to your use case.
Versus Joomla
Like Drupal, Joomla is also a popular CMS. Where Joomla used to have quite a market share, it has now been surpassed by WordPress. Like Drupal, Joomla has a steep learning curve and is therefore somewhat less accessible.
With Joomla, the range of themes and plugins available is a bit more limited. But equally, several larger developers have developed themes for both WordPress and Joomla, for example. In case you can't or don't want to go for a customised solution, of course.
Joomla is less suitable for smaller websites. The system is primarily intended for medium to large websites.
Why do we use WordPress?
For us as an online marketing agency, there are many different benefits to using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) to build websites for our clients.
With thousands of themes and plug-ins available, WordPress offers many opportunities to customise and extend websites. However, we aim to build our websites as 'clean' as possible, with a select number of plug-ins. Over the years, we have built up a fixed set of plug-ins that we install on almost every website. As an added benefit, this also makes maintenance a little easier, as all WordPress installations share the same plug-ins.
It has an intuitive interface and is easy for beginners to understand. We simply need to provide less explanation and training to our customers when they want to manage the website. Because we manage our websites with a page builder make virtually any user can make adjustments and immediately see what has been edited. This also makes any errors easier to fix. Which only enhances user-friendliness.
WordPress is also scalable. It can be used for small websites as well as large and complex websites with high traffic and functionality. This means we can offer our clients a platform that can grow and evolve as their business grows. For example, at Alona Marketing, we have websites in our portfolio with 1,000, 5,000 and even more than 25,000 visitors per month.
The limitation here is often in the hosting. This can grow steadily with the number of visitors to the website. Because WordPress handles this without any problems, it saves us work and our customers are helped quickly. Fortunately, we have a regular partner for this, who always thinks along with us to provide the best possible hosting for our clients.
In short, WordPress offers online marketing agencies (like Alona Marketing) many advantages, including flexibility, usability, a large community and scalability. This makes it an excellent choice for online marketing agencies like us looking for a platform to build websites for their clients.
