Your Website On WordPress – Is It Worth It?

The fact of the matter is that WordPress was a nice idea, it offers those without any real experience in web development to take a good crack at designing and producing their own website, and it does provide some nice looking results as well as being user friendly and pretty basic to understand. Not to mention with the number of people using it you can very easily find someone who will be able to answer your questions and offer you advice, it might even be a more cost effective way of producing a website for your company. However, if you want to be successful and have a functioning, useful website then it probably isn’t worth it.

WordPress releases updates fairly frequently, which means that issues with the security get fixed pretty quickly and new features become available, as well as a number of plug-ins. Of course the issue with this seemingly wonderful fact about WordPress is that you have to actually go and install the updates, they won’t just happen automatically, this leads to one of two problems. First problem is that you forget about checking for and installing the latest updates, you then have an issue with the security of your website because the exact same system is used for everyone and it is open-source, meaning everyone knows exactly how it works and how to change it and when a way around the security is discovered it is only a matter of time before every malicious user on the web is aware of it. Suddenly you’ve got a load of stuff in your website that you didn’t put there and your database has been injected with code designed to steal the confidential details of your customers. The alternative is that you update however in some cases (because the plug-ins and updates are produced by individuals and in most case these are volunteers) updating the system can result in a loss of functionality until a patch is released. Because the individuals produce the plug-in the patch is left to them – it could take a while to be released.

WordPress does have built in SEO – it is said that Google loves WordPress and will rank sites produced in WordPress higher than others (although this cannot be proven due to the fact Google do not make the algorithm for this publically available), the main factor here is that it makes it easier for you to tag the contents, create URLs and a number of other handy things that help you get seen in searches. Of course any decent web development company would provide all of this anyway and would not limit the search results the way WordPress does (limiting the number of results shown so your older content simply won’t appear in searches). Investing in SEO would still be the smart choice if you want it to make any difference of course, so if this is the area you are most interested in WordPress most likely just isn’t worth it.

Although WordPress boasts a PHP syntax of its own this is complex. It would take an experienced developer to customize sites completely and even for a competent developer just getting the basic PHP functionality could be an awkward learning curve that could be completely avoided if you were to simply have a full website developed by a developer who was capable of giving you what you want in the first place. Of course if customization isn’t your thing there are a number of templates available for WordPress – true enough they won’t be unique, there will probably be at least a dozen other companies using the same design and it won’t make you stand out or further your brand, but who needs all that?

The basic rule of thumb is this; if you want a website that is secure, effective, functional and unique you should most certainly hire a web development company – these can provide SEO, website hosting, development and design and you’ll be sure of what you’re getting the whole time. Better still should anything go wrong you can trust that someone who knows what they’re doing is dealing with it.