Author: Joshua Eastman
So you are here because someone has told you something about WordPress that was concerning, or you are seeking personal validation, either way we wanted to explain some common misconceptions about the platform we live on here at Beyond The Brand Media®.
There are a million misconceptions about WordPress and those that develop on WordPress out there. We wanted to tackle a few we encounter on the daily.
WordPress Is For Beginners
Well I will start with exactly what you wouldn’t expect to hear. WordPress is a great place for beginners. WordPress has over 21,000 free plugins and tens of thousands more out there directly from developers.
WordPress is a great platform, it is versatile has a huge community and serves 61.4% of all web traffic at the time this article was written. That is right it makes up 34.6% of all websites in the cloud. Pretty crazy right?
Here is the deal, WordPress offers a ton of solutions to an end user who wants to build a site, plug and play is the term we hear a lot. This works great for people just starting out on a personal blog or maybe even their own E-commerce solution. As time goes on all of these wonderful plugins and themes that brought your site to life age and change.
WordPress has constant and never ending updates, it needs a hosting solution which also has endless moving parts to make sure your site runs as best as it can. These updates and changes can destroy your site, cause security concerns and just break from old age and lack of updates. When you get a developer they can unlock the potential to do literally anything vs using premade functionality and can fix or replace any functionality that comes along with a site getting older.
When you use pre-made plugins their use can get pretty complex and leveraging what they can do with one another can generate a large amount of sales every year or lose them!
So is it for beginners? It is for everyone, that is what makes it great, working with an experienced developer will always be better than being self taught. After all if I hopped on a football field I could say it is just throwing a ball and running, but I would get crushed by the years of training and experience of a pro-football player. If you are looking for a someone to work with on a custom site feel free to reach out to us, we are always happy to help even if it is giving you some advice to do it yourself!
WordPress Is Not The Right Choice For High Traffic Websites
This is information spread by developers on other platforms. WordPress makes up some of the highest traffic sites on the web, this includes high traffic websites like The New Yorker, Techcrunch, and Variety.
WordPress is a self hosted website solution. This means you are in total control over the amount of resources it has (Or you could go with a managed hosting solution). You have unlimited resources and WordPress can scale. We manage sites with a million unique visitors a month at peak and other WooCommerce sites that server over three thousand transactions a month. When we stack these up against some of the commerce giants out there guess what? They run fast and are limitlessly scaleable and flexible.
WordPress is a perfect solution for high traffic since you have the control to do as you wish and are not limited by a pre-made package that works for “everyone”.
If you are wondering if WordPress is the right solution for a high traffic site just make sure you have a competent developer. Some of the pre-made hosting solutions out there can get into the thousands of dollars per month for hosting alone when you start getting a lot of traction so it is good to understand that scaling a WordPress site has infinite options allowing you to do whats best for your business not someone else’s.
WordPress Is Not Secure
I want to lead with this… WordPress is secure. We often hear people say that they believe WordPress is less secure than other proprietary software. WordPress is widely used as it is a very secure solution for websites.
That being said there are many solutions out there to increase the existing security that WordPress offers. Malware and brute force attacks are common place on the web and not something specific to WordPress. Like any other platform a Firewall can be put in place as well as server hardening services.
WordPress is used for almost 40% of the websites out there for a reason and everything is vulnerable on the net. The thing to remember here is this. WordPress has millions of security options while pre-made solutions have one. I think you can guess what would be easier to exploit. If you are having any doubts about using WordPress give us a call and we can answer any questions you might have.
WordPress Does Not Support E-Commerce
If I told you I knew of an e-commerce platform that serves more than 42% of the e-commerce websites on the net what would you want to know next? Probably how to get setup and running what is the most wide spread and successful e-commerce solution out there.
You probably guessed by the nature of that last paragraph that I was talking about WooCommerce. Whether you want to sell digital products, downloads, memberships, fully customizable products or just sell your time you can do it all on WooCommerce. The possibilities for what you can do with WooCommerce are unlimited when working with a developer. When you deal with companies like Shopify or Big Commerce you are stuck with the apps they offer, with WordPress and a competent developer you can make that plugin a reality and do exactly what you want the way you want to do it.
We Get It You Love WordPress
You got it! We love it, we live it, we breathe it. WordPress has helped us help customers take over $26 million dollars in transactions and serve websites over 1 billion times… Let that sink in for a minute then ask yourself if you want to get started on your WordPress site? If you are and you don’t want to go it alone than reach out and talk with us, I guarantee a badass wordpress ninja will answer the phone and rather you want to work with us or not we will leave you with some very valuable knowledge.
