Why you shouldn’t create a website with WordPress

I was previously an entrepreneur in two of Finland's leading hosting companies. I was involved in them for more than ten years. We hosted tens of thousands of WordPress sites on our servers and our own site was also made with WordPress. So I have gathered experience from not just creating a WordPress site, but also hosting WordPress sites for customers.

While WordPress is a working tool for creating websites, I still would not recommend it to all clients, especially small businesses. Why not? Because time is money for small entrepreneurs and, on the other hand, there is often not too much money to spend, at least in the early stages of a business. In my experience, WordPress websites are hard to implement and laborious to maintain even for WordPress experts, not to mention the inexperienced entrepreneurs who have none or close to zero experience in website creation.

Here I have listed reasons not to choose WordPress as your website platform. After the list, I will go through each item in more detail.

• You are a small company
• Website creation
• Expenses
• Addons and templates
• Optimizing
• Coding
• Security
• Updates
• Support

Are you making a website for your business? Are you using your website mainly to show information about your company's products or services and also want the contact information to be displayed there? Maybe you also want to add a contact form, a photo gallery or even a map? Would you also like your website to be easy and effortless to maintain? In that case, you shouldn't even consider using WordPress to create your website.

There are many other options which make website creation much easier and maintaining a website less time consuming. In addition, the created website is more likely to be more impressive and work more reliably and faster than WordPress made websites.

So what should you use instead of WordPress? A website builder. If you want to create and maintain websites easily, website builders are designed for it. Oidom, for example, is a website builder where we put a lot of effort in usability so that our customer can create and maintain websites as effortless as possible.

Plugins and templates are nice in WordPress in the sense that there are a lot of them and you can add almost any functionality you want with the plugins to your website. You could also say that plugins are one of the best parts of WordPress. However, there are also problems: uptime, safety and speed.

Plugins and templates are the biggest cause of problems encountered in WordPress. While I was working in the hosting industry, most of the questions from customers and also website developers were about WordPress no longer working. By far then the biggest reason was that some plugin had issues. Sometimes updating a plugin or the actual WordPress caused the website to not to work, sometimes a new plugin will conflict with another plugin.

Disabling a plugin or a template is usually the emergency fix you can do, when there are problems. It is not an actual solution, as the functionality of the plugin will not work (or in case of template, the site will use the default one) at all and may have a major impact on the website. However, disabling a plugin usually gives you more time to find an actual solution for the problem when at least some part of the website is again working.

The safety of plugins varies. The level of the code varies as it can be written by professionals but also by hobbyists. At worst case, I have seen plugins contain even viruses (rare though). Hacking to a WordPress site is usually done through plugins. Unfortunately, not even the service provider is  able to block all attacks. Hacking in WordPress happens unfortunately often. One more problem is that plugins can really slow down WordPress a lot. Websites can consume a lot of CPU and memory and can therefore be very slow.

For these reasons above, the recommendation in WordPress is to only deploy the plugins you really need, and use only plugins and templates from trusted developers.

Why does website speed matter? According to research, website visitors will leave if the website does not load in a couple of seconds. In addition, this will be even worse if the loading speed of the website varies a lot. In addition, search engines like Google nowadays value fast websites, meaning they rank better in search results compared to slow websites.

Wordpress is not particularly fast even if it is just installed empty. As you add new plugins to WordPress, your website will start to slow down a little by little. Thus, if you create your site with WordPress, your website speed should be optimized. Sometimes website developers use plugins for almost everything they do on the website. I've seen almost up to a hundred plugins deployed on a single website.You are then likely paying a price when you consider the speed and stability of the website. In addition, the speed of WordPress is also affected by the fact that WordPress is dynamic. This means that your browser will have to wait for a response from database or for different scripts to load when you visit the website.

When the WordPress website slows down, website developer adds a cache plugin to WordPress if he hasn't done it before, which speeds up the site. Caching works by serving home pages as static content. Caching plugins, while very useful in WordPress, have their own problems. The problems are usually with incompatibilities with different plugins or sometimes the cache might be filling up disk space. Cache can also be problematic if the data must always be immediately visible after a change. For example, online retailers may have problems updating product prices while the cache still stores old prices in memory for some time. In addition, caching does not always guarantee that all pages on a website load equally quickly, so page loading speeds can vary.

In WordPress, it would be optimal to make all the pages on the website work as fast as possible without a cache plugin. Thereafter it is a good idea to add a cache plugin. This way, all pages would load pretty well. However, this often means a lot of manual work. It may also be the case that at this point, many plugins will be removed from the site so that they do not slow it down. One option may be to increase the capacity of servers: however, it may consume unnecessary resources and increase costs. In addition, increasing power doesn’t always help when there might be a bug in a plugin and thus the bug may eat up all the available resources.

With Website builders, on the other hand, you usually don’t have to worry about caching. At Oidom, our customer does not need caching plugins. Websites created with Oidom are already static, so there is no need to serve a static version of the site separately using cache. In addition, Oidom uses revolutionary technology: the pages behind the links on the page you are visiting are pre-loaded in the background. You can try this technology by visiting our homepage (Oidom.com) and then click on the links you can see on the top of the page. You will notice that the pages open instantaneously. It's because those pages are already loaded in the background. At Oidom, we use other nice technologies as well, such as CDN (servers around the world and websites are downloaded from the nearest server). With the help of CDN, websites created with Oidom load quickly all over the world. At Oidom, we have used various technologies to ensure that the website always loads quickly and the load times are consistent.

Updates are a hassle in WordPress. There are updates as WordPress gets updated, but there are also constant updates to plugins and templates. Updates are crucial because they can fix security vulnerabilities. Fortunately, nowadays there are many ways to update WordPress automatically. Unfortunately, those updates can cause your website to not to work at all after the update. Most often, the culprit for such a problem is a plugin or a template. Problems in updating are very common in WordPress. Thus, the person who develops and maintains WordPress site, must ensure that the updates take place on time and that the website still works after the update.

On Oidom our customers do not need to do updates to software, because we take care of it.

In WordPress, you can go a long way without coding skills. However, if you make a website with WordPress, then it is very good if you have coding skills. It is because coding skills make it easier to solve a variety of problematic situations that you will face with WordPress from time to time. It might be useful already when creating a site and editing a template, or an error occurs after a plugin update.

As mentioned earlier, WordPress is often hacked due to plugins, because their level of coding varies. Therefore, you should be careful with plugins. In addition to plugins, one route to hack WordPress is due to the fact that WordPress is dynamic. Dynamic websites connect to the database where static websites do not. Dynamic websites are not as secure as static websites, because when connecting to a database, it is possible to do a so-called SQL injection or XSS attack. Because a static website does not make a connection to the database, it cannot be attacked that way either.

When making a WordPress website, it's also a good idea to note that the developer of the website should be familiar with the best practices of WordPress security. For example, securing the login page, securing the wp admin folder, and also keepinf everything up-to-date are an essential part of WordPress security.

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An installed WordPress version does not have customer support from WordPress. Thus, when you need help, you should turn to someone else, such as a hosting provider, the WordPress community, the developer of the website, or the developer of the plugin. In these cases, it might not be clear who should solve the problem you face, if anyone.

WordPress is originally a blog platform. It’s not the easiest or most intuitive way to make a website. When you log in to a WordPress you will see the dashboard (like the image above). From there, you can manage your WordPress site. There are also other views from which you can try to see what the pages you edit will look like, but usually you will only see parts of it or the page may look completely different when published.

In this sense, website builders are easier, when you can directly see where you are on the site and what the different pages will look like when editing them. WordPress has already tried to address this problem with the help of the Gutenberg editor. However, that is not the same thing. The biggest difference between WordPress and website builders is that in website builders, they have thought about the usability part  from the beginning, when in WordPress they have tried to add it afterwards to a product for which it was not designed. This could be compared to an electric cars. Tesla's technical lead over many car manufacturers has been based in part on the fact that they have designed their cars to be electric cars from the beginning. Website builders like Oidom have been designed to be as easy as possible from the start.

This article is not intended to prohibit anyone from using WordPress. There are certainly cases where WordPress is a good option. However, many make relatively simple websites with the intention of maintaining them, but not with the intention of spending a lot of time creating and maintaining websites. That is why I also wanted to remind you that there are very good and, in some cases, better options. So it is worth at least getting acquainted with the different types of website builders. As a website builder, Oidom is a very modern and good alternative to WordPress when looking for an easier to maintain solution. We are constantly developing Oidom based on the feedback we receive.

Here is a little list of Oidom's features:

• Static website, so in another words fast-loading secure websites
• On published site, the pages of the links are pre-loaded in the background, so the pages load immediately
• Highly fault tolerant (websites are served from multiple datacenter’s and multiple servers)
• CDNs, so the websites, load quickly all over the world
• Updates on behalf of the customer
• Easy to use interface
• No need to know how to code
• No need for cache
• Website and editing the website work on mobile devices
• Responsive (mobile friendly) websites
• Features come from one trusted party
• Embed code can be added by other developers
• New features are constantly being developed
• Oidom's own customer service
• Free trial

You can register and try Oidom for free here.