About our favorite CMS, good ol’ WordPress, today, we bring down the hammer like Thor on 10 of the most prevalent myths. I can easily vouch that you can achieve quite the impossible with WordPress, having experienced this benevolent piece of software firsthand. Do you have any doubts? To do their bidding, check out these 20 big brands that bend WordPress.
When I people throwing misconstrued “fun facts” or lies about my beloved WordPress, is which is why it irks me to hell and back.
To make sure that you can see WordPress in its utter and sheer glory, here today, we destroy the 10 biggest WordPress myths, some of which might have kept you from getting in and experiencing a platform like none. Let us now place this baby into fifth gear to debunk the myths surrounding them.
1. WordPress is simply a Blogging Platform.
In its initiation, WordPress has been a blogging platform, and I will not be refuted on this. However, it’s evolved and grown into a super-powerful content management system over the years, powering a whopping 25% of the Internet to this day.
It cannot all be personal diaries or blogs when it comes to these websites for sure. Especially with all the sweet features, the CMS is famous for, we most definitely must have different WordPress-based websites out there.
You can extend your WordPress installation to power some of the greatest internet hits such as Time, CNN, TechCrunch, Mozilla Firefox, eBay, and Microsoft, among others, with the custom post types, widgets, pages, add-ons, and plugins. Just for personal blogging, do these guys run? I surely hope it is not, as it sort of ushers us to the next myth though some of these names own top-shelf websites that pull a lot of traffic.
2. WordPress Is Not Scalable
You will often see the comments questioning the platform’s scalability as we do not know whether that is because WordPress is free or just a community project that came out of the blues. When the traffic grows, how will my site perform? In a case of a traffic spike, which features will be suffering? When you become famous, will WordPress come crashing?
More often than not, you will find a client who is worried WordPress will crumble under the increased load though it is the idea that WordPress was once a blogging platform that evolved into a CMS. It is not valid. Everybody is pining for a piece of WordPress pie, from the small-scale bloggers to prominent multinational corporations.
It has everything to do with your web host and not WordPress if your site goes down due to the traffic spikes. WordPress will support your site regardless of the size or the amount of traffic you generate, provided that you have adequate server resources.
3. WordPress is Insecure
Do you have any idea of which software is 100% foolproof? The hackers will exploit even the smallest of vulnerabilities in any software and not just WordPress. WordPress attracts attack after an attack because of the sheer volume since it is prone to security breaches as WordPress is quite a popular platform.
The Internet would be a bedlam right this minute was it not for the core and security updates that the platform receives regularly. Every other day, people would lose their sites left, right, and center. The web would break, and WordPress would go the way of the dodo as the losses would be massive.
WordPress is growing bigger, better, and more secure every dawn as it has been more than 10 years since this platform has hit the web. The CMS one update at a time is strengthened through the contributions from the massive WordPress community.
As introduced in WordPress 4.3, “Billie,” each update brings better features and stricter security measures such as enhanced password security features. You can also bolster your WordPress site’s security using plugins such as iThemes Security among the rest.
The WordPress site’s security and more so that all your valuable content starts with you when all is said and done. At all times, you need to keep your WordPress install, themes, and plugins updated. To be aware, at all times, to fight against a hacker’s strike, you need to get in the habit of creating regular and full-site backups.
4. WordPress is FREE and Inapt for Commercial Use
WordPress being a free product is excellent news for the guys who love free things, which means the same for each of us. Where WordPress is concerned, what does free exactly mean here?
WordPress is free in terms of its read usage rights liberty for the starters. You can take WordPress, modify it, tear it down, make copies, and create your unique version without having to seek permission from any authority is what it means.
It means that it belongs to no particular company or person as it is open-source software built by a community of contributors. You need to download the script from WordPress.org and install it wherever you are good to go as you need not pay to use WordPress, the CMS.
It is for free that a service such as WordPress.com will let you use WordPress on their platform. You get a subdomain through it. You can also use WordPress on their media for free instead of standard web hosting, where you have a choice among various easy-install options due to the other similar service managed by WordPress hosts.
So, what is the difference here? In terms of features and flexibility, the free flavor of WordPress is served at WordPress.com. To afford personalized hosting completed with your domain name, you can also pay a stiff premium price. The cost can quickly rise to $3000 each month.
Most business enterprises will shun the free, open-source, off-the-shelf solution in favor of a bespoke CMS tailor-made for the specific needs as you move on.
Somebody needs to tell these guys that they are missing out on an opportunity to save a significant amount of money and get a platform that is quite versatile or as formless as water, as it might be a bureaucracy, bigger budgets, or someone who is trying to cut corners. WordPress is free and is right for commercial websites, so you need to get over the TMI.
5. WordPress Doesn’t Come With Support.
The following is how a typical software company works. There is a need. You look out for software that you can pay for while searching for a reputable company. You contact their support team, and you are sorted out if you have experienced problems using their software.
There is no single company or person who owns the platform, nobody pays to use it, and when you are stuck, you are stuck when it comes to WordPress.
The WordPress Codex is built with WordPress, a great community of developers, translators, bloggers, designers, support reps, and others. You have never seen this type of state-of-the-art documentation. WordPress boasts of a very active support forum frequented by the community members, as this is not all.
WordPress maintenance service providers, and tons of ready and available freelancers, are the resources and a slew of independent companies that will shock you as they are going to answer your woes whenever required.
6. WordPress is Inadequate for Ecommerce
To get your attention to WordPress’s versatility, do I have to keep dropping “CMS” everywhere? It was hard to imagine you could use WordPress to build an eCommerce store in the early days of WordPress.
WordPress eCommerce plugins make building an e-store as easy as pie, as the WordPress community has seen the influx of countless frameworks. Woocommerce, WP eCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads among the rest, you can create completely functional WordPress-based eCommerce sites using these.
As an online store, WordPress is relatively easy to set up. Most of the bespoke CMS built specifically for eCommerce cannot compete with WordPress as it stands as a matter of fact. No one would have guessed WordPress as an eCommerce site builder.
7. WordPress Sites Are Slow
Websites are no longer just a series of graphics, HTML pages, and CSS all stringed together. Websites have grown in size and functionality with the birth of new technologies. It might force you to believe WordPress can slow down your server with the advent of new technologies. It might cause you to think that WordPress can slow down your server with the idea of installing software to start building websites.
We ensure that it is uber-fast to set up and use as WordPress uses the best web standards. WordPress is SEO-friendly from the word go as provided by the best coding practices.
With the cheap hosting providers and or poorly coded plugins, the slow site speeds are mainly associated. To invite poor performance among the other issues, cheap hosting providers host mostly your site and a million and one other sites on a similar server.
Into such vital files such as the header.php, slowing your speeds as unnecessary objects load before your content, poorly-coded plugins add the junk code. To the security of your WordPress site, buggy plugins will also pose a threat.
It will be useful to rock the party as you choose the best WordPress hosting and reputable plugins.
8. WordPress Plugins are Dodgy
If you are installing shady plugins from wherever and then cry foul when shits hit the fan, it is something that you are too. You will not assume all the plugins, whether it is free or premium, all are flawless no matter the amount of faith you have in humanity. It would easily be a disservice to yourself.
From the vendors you cannot trust, this is precisely why you should steer clear of plugins. Always go for a high number of downloads, great ratings, reviews, and excellent support to avoid plugins that ship with bugs, outdated and inefficient code, poor support, and security issues.
Plugins extend your WordPress site’s functionality in ways unimaginable, allowing you to tap into so much potential that it would be very hard or expensive to achieve without the said plugins as a side note.
It is how your court trouble in terms of poor performance and heightened security risks is there as you simply do not add plugins. All this because of your due diligence.
9. Management of WordPress Sites is Difficult
It can be sounding daunting to the beginner as management of about any site and not for the WordPress site. Control of the sites is an entirely different thing though the WordPress site is one thing here.
Including the comments’ approval, monitoring security, updating themes, plugins, WordPress core, and tracking traffic are various tabs that you need to keep. It can get pretty messy fast when you have a couple of WordPress sites all over the place.
For instance, if there is a nifty plugin known as ManageWP that helps you keep track of your WordPress installations from a single central dashboard and this all if you are not planning.
Your site maintenance duties are reduced to clicking a few buttons, and your work is done with ManageWP in place. We have got your back covered if you are looking to learn more about the management of WP sites.
10. WordPress Isn’t Responsive or even Future Proof.
Are you worried that with advanced web functionality, WordPress install will not play well? What are future technologies? You need not worry a single bit if WordPress is future-proof is your guess so, but it is what it is! WordPress is always primed for the future with regular updates and the best web standards.
What do you think about the responsiveness? Will your site fit in the various screen sizes? Your site will be responsive automatically, provided that your WordPress theme is responsive.
You can always use WordPress mobile plugins or create a mobile-friendly version of your site if your WordPress theme is not responsive for reasons that are known only to you.
You have a powerful CMS that will drive your site for days, months, and years to come as WordPress takes on technology after technology as they come.
Juhi Dave
Juhi Dave is WordPress Developer at USS LLC. At USS LLC she provides Custom PHP Development service and Wordpress Website Development service. She likes to share some tips about web development