Image courtesy – quora.com
So now you are ultra thrilled to have a website that your web designer created with WordPress. Claps and applauds. It is suggested to keep a roll of tissue ready because by the end of this article you are going to need it. Either to wipe your tears or to wipe your ass (if you have shat).
WordPress was/is an open source blogging platform. It was meant for users who would like to blog without having technical knowledge of php, html, css or database. But then a bunch of rascals started to fuck it up. By creating amazing worthless bloated themes, plugins and what not WordPress now exists within a cesspool of dog muck. Now you as a business owner are not supposed to know this. Because 90% of the web designers like to spin a crap out of WordPress. And glorify it whenever they get a chance. The question is why so? WordPress do not pay them to do that.
Because:
It is easy to create shit with WordPress and they are idiots.
They do not have to have an in depth knowledge about php, html or css or database.
They don’t care about you or your business.
With thousands of themes and customizable options, it could feel like being a smart choice for your website or ecommerce. But unfortunately it is not! Read on.
Would you use an 18-wheeler with fancy stickers and a fancy audio to commute to your office everyday? Yeah right, nobody does that. So why would you use WordPress that has approximately 300 files and a database to build your 25 page business website? You are not an idiot right? In 2003, WordPress was originally an offshoot of another project, b2/cafelog. It used a database to manage blog content. Today, WordPress powers approximately 75 million blogs. They are mostly non business websites. They are not meant to convert visitors into customers and patrons. If you want to blog, WordPress is the best out there. But if you want to have a business website or an ecommerce, please look beyond WordPress. You really do not want to house 300 extra files on top of your website files.
WordPress assists you in creating and managing how your website looks and behaves. On the server side it uses Php to process all browser requests. Depending on the WordPress theme and plugins being used the load time of your website will be affected significantly. During heavy usage, it can beat the shit out of your cheap shared web hosting and making the website completely breathless. Result? Your visitor sighs and leaves your website for another one. Although a good hosting environment might be able to make up for the delay, but since you have used the cheapest option to design your website you are probably using a cheap fucked up web hosting too. So the combination of WordPress and a cheap web hosting might just frustrate your users and that to our mind, is not a good news in any way!
As per a Strangeloop study, just a single second of delay in loading your page can cost you 7% loss in lead conversions, 11% lesser page views and 16% decreased customer satisfaction. To top it, Google generally pushes the slow loading website down the search results which means your website could be stored for even fewer clicks and views. Sounds exciting? No right?
So much customization to be excited for. It is like wearing a trouser with zippers on all sides. To pee you use the front one. To shit you open the rear one. To scratch your ass you open the side ones. Well that is what your web designer is excited about. And he/she got excited you too. But there is a catch. Your rear zipper might give away while you are in the middle of a business meeting. And that is not good news! WordPress has tons of customization available in the form of themes, plugins and bull crap. The more the customization the more the failure points. To top that off, If your WordPress installation is using 10 plugins they are probably written by 10 different people from 10 different countries in 10 different ways. For a serious business website, we find that really really scary.
You are bound to get ready for a world of hurt once your website in WordPress is up. WordPress websites are more likely to break down every three to four months and with the constant change in online technology, they need to be regularly updated and fixed. A lot of users are not very fond of cPanel. Besides, the process of searching and uploading themes and finding the best plugins for your website will cost you a lot of time. You might have to hire more than one WordPress developer over the next few years to constantly work on your website to keep it up to date. Let’s not talk about cost cutting?
WordPress is not primarily user friendly and you will feel like an idiot if you try to edit it! Remember it was not designed keeping users in mind as it is meant to be used by coders. Especially the WordPress backend is so confusing that it might be gruesome and annoying for anyone to use it. It might be fun for coders but it is definitely not the platform that business owners can use.
If your WordPress website is not being maintained and updated regularly, it might be a target for hackers to break in. If there is a hole in any of the plugins you use, it could lead the hackers into doing all kinds of nefarious activities. There has been numerous cases of compromised plug-ins in the past and Google has immediately blacklisted these pages. Besides, at any given time only 22% of WordPress users update and maintain the latest version. We are sure you don’t wanna count your website in for a hacker bonanza!
You might hear WordPress developers claiming that it is the only platform which works well with SEO. Although this might have held true a few years ago, Google’s newest algorithms prioritizes top notch web design, useful information and good quality blog posts. Today, SEO is all about clear and crisp quality content and informative blogging. Nothing else works and let no WordPress developer explain anything else to you!
If you spending around $10 to host your website site every month, your website could be slow. WordPress needs multiple resources to ensure that it loads faster. Maybe a few visitors a day will not hurt however as your web traffic increases, you will require a higher level of technical knowledge and an expensive WordPress hosting plan to be able to handle this annoying business.
If you are a small business owner it is likely that you have limited resources and you would not want to invest all your resources to make sure it simply does the bare minimum. Remember, your website is the most powerful and important marketing tool for your business and it is advisable that you do not rest it upon an expensive and unreliable CMS platform such as WordPress. What you need is an user friendly fully functional website which looks good, is secured, stays up at all times and above all, which lets you manage and build it over time.
If you want to get the best out of WordPress, WordPress.com is the best bet. It takes care of the backend infrastructure of the WordPress CMS ensuring that you have a smooth experience. You also get custom support. However, the most modest ones comes at around $1500 (wait, what?) each year for one website and this might be extremely unaffordable for a lot of business owners, especially the small and medium scale owners.
Owing to the ever increasing competition to garner viewership and consequently conversion, analytics is the only way to understand where your business website stands. Starting from understanding the kind of users who visit your website and how they came across it to click progression, time per page, keyword search, bounce rate and conversion rate, there are numerous metrics for you to look into in order to ensure that your digital presence remains at the top of the game. Unfortunately, WordPress has no analysis software for you to look into and is no friend to your business analytics! Even if you think about installing a plugin such as Jetpack, it does not have a detailed data like Google Analytics or other platforms made for business analytics. Collecting and analyzing data is imperative for your business growth and ignoring it because of an inadequate functionality could be hazardous.
When you are dealing in serious business, especially for your business or your clients’, you would want to ensure that your versions are controlled and your components separated. Of course there are cases where WordPress might not only be a good a choice but the best choice. Websites which are mostly heavy content based such as history or architecture related. However for anything apart from this, using a framework (or a framework based CMS) can ensure more productivity in the least time and help you maintain your sanity.We hope that you will consider these technical aspects before you power the digital face of your company.
Hexadesigns is a web design company located in Kolkata, India. We take advantage of the latest trend and technologies to design, redesign and develop websites. This is our blog where we publish information for the general people and web developers for their knowledge enhancement.
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