Why we refused to build WordPress websites?
Why we refused to build WordPress websites in favor of a more advanced platform.
Many of our competitors still use Wordpress as their main website building CMS. We also started with Wordpress. But the more we worked with it, the more we wanted to leave it.
In this article I describe all main problems with this platform
"Wordpress is a free cms"
To fully use this CMS, You need to buy premium themes and plugins.
For example, we are located in Estonia and we need a multilingual website. The best Wordpress translation plugin is The WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). And it is paid.
However, many people download illegal versions of this plugin. First, it is not safe due to the fact that many releasers inject malicious links into the illegal version. Secondly, You lose Your possibility to be intime updated. In latest updates developers fix security errors, optimize plugin’s work and add new functionality.
Multilingual Wordpress
As written above, most of our websites need multilingual functionality. And even the most powerful and popular WPML plugin has problems.
But the worst thing, in our opinion, is the performance drop. No matter how WPML developers assure us, no matter what tests they provide, the fact remains – WPML plugin loads the system very heavily and everything starts working many times slower. And caching will not help here.
Website management
Ok, we developed a Wordpress website. Now we have to work with it. Edit the content, add the content. How does Wordpress with a premium theme installed look inside? Typically this is Elementor, Visual Composer, WP Bakery or any other builder.
The simplest example: we have to change the block with the image and description. We change the image, title, description. And if the website is multilingual? Again we change all these things on a separate page (in wpml the translation is a separate page). And we have to do it again and again in several languages. For such simple work, we waste a lot of time. And if there are several blocks? And if You need to completely change something?
Of course, there are solutions like Advanced Custom Field plugin, but usually websites are created on premium themes where all the information is presented as visual blocks.
Development difficulties
Rarely Estonian developers code their own solutions, usually they use ready-made plugins. It is hard to do a refactoring to a client's needs.
There are several reasons for this:
- features of Wordpress architecture
- wishes of developers to implement absolutely all functionality what is not needed
- it is hard to find the part of the code we need to change
- there is no single approach to plugin development and everyone develop them as best they can
Because of that, plugins do not adapt to the business, but business adapts to the plugins. It leads to complicated things that should be easily done.
Not all is under control
Do You want to change simple things? This is possible but only with tricks.
For example, Do you want to change the notification's color in a specific place? But color is already written! Maybe in different places? What do we do? We do a dirty trick, overwriting old styles that are not used anywhere else.
Do You want to remove unnecessary fields from the checkout form? We should write a special php function in a special file to remove the field.
The Wordpress approach is surprising :)
Vulnerability
Several times, our clients’ websites have been hacked because of illegal plugins and themes they used before. Nowadays, the number of hacker attacks is increasing.
Updates
Something on the website stops working correctly because of updates. Updated Your Wordpress website? Developer of the plugin has not released an update yet? Go to the old version with vulnerabilities in the core.
Please note that this article was written for people far from development. In this article we did not consider deeper things as code quality, architecture features, development features etc. In our opinion we have to take all these things because they affect the quality of Your website. And the quality of Your website affects the search results.
