If you’re in the market for a website, you’ve probably been sold on Wordpress as being the best choice for creating a website, and considering that Wordpress’ market share is 44.3% of all websites, you may be feeling like Wordpress is the right choice for you. So if this is the case and Wordpress has such a large user base, why shouldn’t you build your next website in Wordpress?
We’ll breakdown 10 reasons why we think you shouldn’t choose Wordpress for your website, but this doesn’t mean we still wouldn’t recommend it. The point we’re trying to make here is that Wordpress isn’t the Swiss Army Knife that you might have been told it was.
10 Reasons To Avoid Wordpress
1. Not Scalable
One of the issues with Wordpress is it’s lack of scalability, meaning that when you want to start making your website do more, you will soon begin encounter limitations. If you’re merely publishing articles and pages, this might not seem like an immediate issue, especially when you can use a page builder like WPBakery or Elementor to handle all of the heavy lifting. However, when you want to start extending things, like adding more content types, more complex references across the site and turning the site from a blogging platform (the original purpose of Wordpress), into more of an application, you will have to start using plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, to start extending out the functionality.
From our experience, a lot of sites that do begin to scale, often feel frustrated with the limitations of Wordpress due to the fact that they can’t structure content in more advanced and intuitive ways, without feeling like they are hacking the site, and even then maintaining large amounts of content can become overwhelming.
2. Performance Limitations
If you want Google to give you a better ranking, and if you want more users to stay on your website, then you need to make sure it performs well. If you’ve ever clicked on a Google result for a website, and waited a second or two, and the page hasn’t loaded yet, chances are you hit the back button and went to another site in the list. That’s how most people are; impatient, and their expectations of a site is that it will load quickly.
The issue with Wordpress is that, more often than not, you are piecing it together with lots of different plugins, and usually a Page Builder, like WPBakery or Elementor. The problem is, over time plugins begin to pile up, Page Builders are also built quite generically, meaning you end up placing a lot of additional html overhead into your page too. To add to this, Wordpress doesn’t cache things by default either, so in order to begin optimizing the site, you also need to start adding plugins that will help you optimize the site, including a CDN if you want to take your performance seriously.
The bottomline is, Wordpress isn’t really built to be performant, Wordpress was built as a simple blogging platform, a very long time ago. So while you can get a performant Wordpress site, you have to jump through some hoops in order to get it to do so, unlike a next generation web framework like Next.js, Gatsby or SvelteKit; which were built for the modern web.
3. Wordpress was built to be a blogging platform
That’s right, Wordpress was built to be a blogging platform, and works best when it comes to posting articles. Other frameworks which began around a similar time, like Drupal, were built to be extended, and even have seen large updates to adhere more to modern coding practices, making them a lot more intuitive and easier to extend.
So while you can definitely extend Wordpress out, you will, overtime, begin to encounter limitations depending on the expectations you have of it. For instance, it’s entirely possible to turn your Wordpress site into an e-commerce site, using WooCommerce. But ultimately, you have to remember that Wordpress was built as a blogging platform, and have performance limitations out of the box unless you do something about it, meaning if you wanted to scale out your WooCommerce store, you would find the management of a large product base hard to keep track of natively, and you may become frustrated with the overall speed of the store, unlike a solution like Shopify, which was build to run e-commerce stores.
4. Customization
You can totally customize your Wordpress store, that goes without question. Wordpress has been around since 2003 and has a gigantic plugin store with lots of options, on top of that it is possible to have a developer go in and extend things out, however, if you are planning anything serious with your Wordpress site, beyond it being a marketing website, we wouldn’t recommend Wordpress.
The reason why we wouldn’t recommend Wordpress if you are planning any serious customization, is because the way content is structured and stored inside Wordpress. By default this can be very challenging as there is no centralized way of expressing specific content with specific field types and relationships, unless you were to use a plugin like Advanced Custom Fields, but even then you will come up against challenges. This is because Wordpress uses a very simple database schema that wasn’t really built to scale out to lots of different content types.
Take Drupal for example, which is built on top of the Symfony framework, which allows for a much more advanced expression of the way content is created, including taxonomy, media types, advanced relationships and any other content types you could think of. This is all very natural for Drupal and means you can craft out a scalable solution, unlike in Wordpress which feels like you are having to push the envelope to get it to do things it wasn’t built to do.
It can also be hard to provide a consistent experience, with a combination of page builders and wysiwyg editors, maintaining brand consistency and cohesion can be more challenging.
5. SEO is tricker with Wordpress
Configuring SEO with Wordpress can be a lot more confusing than it needs to be, and without a plugin like Yoast, would lead to a lot of confusion. Yoast will provide suggestions and analyze your content to help you when it comes to matching the correct keywords. But SEO with Wordpress is a lot of work, so while we definitely would recommend Yoast if you plan to do anything serious with your SEO, you will likely run into a bloated sitemap with lots of different Post types which you don’t really want pages for, or to be indexed, and you will have to stay on top of your content.
On top of this, if you are using a Wordpress page builder like WPBakery or Elementor, you could end up with incorrect heading tags or other sorts of structures added in by third party plugins, including duplicate content and incorrect canonicals.
When you build out a site in something like Drupal you can leverage the Metatag module which allows you to set site-wide defaults for different content types. For instance you can have it auto-populate your OpenGraph and Twitter Card tags, with a near exhaustive list of available properties. It’s also possible to add Schema default also, for rich search results.
With a headless solution with something like Next.js, SvelteKit or Gatsby, paired up with a CMS like Sanity, Drupal or even Wordpress, things can be done with a lot more intent, including having better control over correct tags, including headings, and the prevention of duplicate content, you also end up with a much more performant site, which only adds to your SEO ranking.
The bottom line is, with Wordpress, while it can be a great solution depending on your use case, the addition of third party plugins, and non-careful placement of Page Builder elements, can overtime lead to a lot of mess and bloat, that could easily be avoidable.
6. Wordpress is vulnerable to exploitation
Just like all sites, Wordpress is vulnerable to exploitation, however the Wordpress Plugin Market contains tens of thousands of plugins and themes, with a large amount of these being open to vulnerability due to poor coding practices, for instance, Wordfence, which is a WAF (Web Application Firewall), shared it’s 2022 State of Wordpress Security report in which over 1000 XSS vulnerabilities were detected, while a lot of these vulnerabilities are preventable, a lot of plugins, because they often contain legacy code, can open up security issues, and if you’re storing sensitive data, or taking payments, this can be a problem.
Most website owners, usually when they want some functionality, they will look for plugins, click and install them, without really knowing who wrote it or how long ago it was made, so on top of bloating out their site with additional code, they are also potentially opening up the door to vulnerabilities.
When you go with a custom solution, even if it’s Wordpress, things can be developed more intentionally, with good coding practices that can avoid these issues, before they become problems.
7. Plugin mess
With Wordpress, when you want some new functionality, 9 times out of 10, you will browse the plugin marketplace, download something and install it, this then needs to be configured. However, when you do this, unless you’re a developer, you can’t often know what is being added to your web site. For instance, you could meet with performance degradation, broken styles, unexpected behavior or security exploits, to name a few.
When it comes to updates, usually you will run these through the administration panel to keep your code base up-to-date. The issue with this is, a change could impact your site. So in this instance, you now have to go and figure out how to go back and fix this, and if you have ads running, this can cut into your spending if a problem is introduced onto an important landing page, or you face a performance impact.
With a lot of Wordpress sites, unless they’re using good modern deployment workflows and practices, will usually consist of a single deployment, with no development or staging server, or version control. Meaning rolling back changes or updates can be more of a headache.
If you do intend to use Wordpress, we recommend asking what kind of workflow will be included to help you mitigate this.
8. Poor Revisioning and History
If you want a more collaborative experience with Wordpress, you might be disappointed, because Wordpress wasn’t really designed for a collaborative experience, and revisioning and history is pretty basic with Wordpress. This can be aided with the use of plugins, or site builders like Elementor, which keep track of your page changes, but fundamentally, if you’re looking for a collaborative experience involving approval workflows and the ability to roll content back, you will meet limitations.
9. Poor Data Structures
Wordpress stores all of its data inside of a simple table structure, and any extension to this data has to be done with manual customization, with no standardization, meaning that a lot of plugins will have their own data structures and way of doing things, and migrating between these could be a heavy lift. This also means, if outgrow your website, or want to switch layout builders, you’re usually locked into the page builder you began with. This isn’t so bad if you only have a few pages or a smaller site, but when you have a lot of diverse content, this can be a large task to migrate out.
10. Bloatware
With Wordpress, whenever new functionality is needed, likely the first place you will go to is the Wordpress plugin marketplace and install a new plugin, and sometimes pay for them. Overtime though, depending on the plugins you have installed and how much you use them, you will be accumulating code and bloating your site codebase, that can decrease your site performance, and also potentially leave your site open to risk if those plugins are older plugins or haven’t been updated for a while.
Keeping track of what is actually install and what you are actually using is important.
The more things that are added to your Wordpress site, the bigger likelihood of it slowing down, this is because a lot of themes and plugins are done in a generic fashion, so you may be pulling in a lot of stuff that you don’t actually need.
Summary
In closing, we’re not against Wordpress, for a lot of people it makes sense and it could be all they ever need; but we would only recommend it to those looking for a more affordable solution to content management, who don’t need a large amount of varied pages and content types.
For those who do want better structured content, a more collaborative experience and ultimately a more secure and scaleable solution, we would recommend composable alternatives, like a headless site using a technology like Next.js, SvelteKit or Gatsby.