Is WordPress worth it?

Hi, I am Praneeeth.

In this blog, you will learn Is WordPress worth it?

You will definitely end up satisfied with the answer to our question.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Here is a 30000-foot view of the blog.

Let’s find out.

When we are talking about wordpress we are essentially talking about wordpress.org, the open cms.

So in this part, you will learn exactly 10 pros and cons of wordpress cms and why you should choose wordpress as your cms for your website among the rest of other cms on the internet.

Pros of using WordPress for your website.

Here is a quick overview of wordpress pros.

You have complete control of your website.
You have unlimited plugins and themes for free.
It is a lot SEO friendly.
It is user friendly.
It has a large community.
It is a great one for a tight budget

Let’s start from every point in detail.

You have complete control of your website.

The number one thing about wordpress[.org] is the control the cms gives you.

Man, it is awesome.

You are a free bird with wordpress on your website.

There is no limit to what you can do with your website.

WordPress gives you unlimited control of your website,

Well, in control, I basically mean,

You can change the code of the themes and design and customize the way you want it to look.
You can add any number of users to your website and give them roles to access your website.
You can add any type of multimedia you want from images to videos to audio, etc.

The things you can do on wordpress are limitless.

Another thing is that you have complete control of the monetization part of your website.

You can run ads.
You can run and sell products.
You can do affiliate marketing.

It is endless.

WordPress.org is a free cms which means it is basically a software that is open-source and free.

You invest in a domain and hosting and you get complete control of your website.

That’s it.

You have unlimited plugins and themes for free.

You know, there are over 50000 free plugins and 5000 free themes mostly optimized for SEO are there on wordpress which you can download within a matter of few clicks.

Whatever feature you can imagine in your mind, you can add that on your website inform of the plugin.

A plugin is an external software component that adds a specific feature to your website,

For example,

You want a,

You want to check broken links on your website, you have a plugin for that.
You want to add an author box on your blog, you have a plugin for that.
You want to add social shares on your blog, you have a plugin for that.
You want to make your images automatically compressed in size, you have a plugin for that.
You want to make your SEO a piece of cake job, you have a plugin for that.
You want to add new features and widgets to your blog, well you have a plugin for that.

Well, whatever you can imagine in the back of your mind, whichever feature you can think of you want in your blog you have a plugin to help you do that on wordpress.

Everything is done within a matter of few clicks and install and activate, that’s it.

You don’t need to worry about coding work and other technical works.

Well, talking about themes,

You have one of the fastest and smoothest themes on wordpress that are absolutely free for beginners.

You know,

You have over 5000 themes available for you to download from the theme section of your wordpress dashboard.

You have free website builders like elementor and thrive builder for free to help you build and customize your website exactly the way you pictures your website in the back of your mind.

You have absolute control of the look, feel of your website.

If you want to make your website look like next level and professional one without getting your hands on coding works.

You can try out, hiring freelancers, you can get things done in a few bucks.

It is just awesome.

It is a lot of SEO friendly:

WordPress cms are the largest cms in the world by managing over 35% of the whole internet websites on wordpress.

You see, the google search engine results are full of websites that are managed on wordpress.

What exactly do I mean by SEO friendly?

Well, I am talking about,

You have a good permalink structure.
You have titles, metadata structure in the right order.
You have themes of the websites both optimized for speed and mobile-friendly.
WordPress websites are great at the navigation of the websites, there are categories and tags you can use to improve user experience on your website.
WordPress pages are easily understood by search engines.
You have lots of free SEO plugins like rank math and Yoast to help you do SEO of your blog.
You have multimedia in wordpress very optimized for SEO like alt-text.

It is just unlimited.

It is user friendly:

Look,

The interface of wordpress is very much user-friendly.

Even the nontechy guys like me can handle and get addicted to the wordpress interface very easily.

It is a very smooth and simple interface.

Within a click of buttons, you can add a new post, image, change the settings, add or delete posts, schedule posts,

It all happens in a matter of clicks.

It has a large community.

Comparing to other CMS on the internet.

WordPress has the largest community and support in terms of open cms software is concerned.

Joomla, Drupal, and other open-source cms fall behind wordpress here.

Just think about it,

You have software that is powering over 35% of the total websites on the internet.

That is a crazy figure.

Of course, you will have the support of your web hosting platform for your wordpress settings and if you ever stumble upon a problem in your wordpress website you can get an answer from the experts very fast,

You should know something very important that wordpress.org is an opensource cms which means it is free to use the software.

There is no owner of wordpress.org.

Anyone can use, modify the code of wordpress for their use,

That is why you have thousands of plugins and themes for free.

In that case, the people who help you in wordpress forums are working for free,

They are not getting paid for working, they are working in order to contribute fro the wordpress community their share and give the platform their support.

So, the community is very helpful and cheerful.

Read, my guide on everything you need to know about Webhosting for your website.

It is a great deal for those who are on a tight budget.

You should go for wordpress.org, get your hosting from any hosting providers such as Bluehost.

You can get hosting for about 60 dollars at maximum for a year with a free domain name and SSL certificate for your website.

As compared to other cms both open and closed,

Such as,

Joomla.
Drupal.
Squarespace.
Wix.
Weebly.

You get it,

These companies provide less service compared to what amount they charge.

Read my guide on why blogging platform is important?

These platforms cost a lot and the return to investment is very bad as compared to what you can get on wordpress investing about half the price what you would typically invest in other platforms for your blog.

And believe me,

WordPress is not just limited to creating a blog,

You can also create,

A forum.
An online e-commerce store.
A membership site.
A static business website.
A news website.
A government website.
A magazine.

There is no limit to what you can do with your wordpress cms with ease as compared to what you can do with ease on other cms.

The software itself is free and you own the software and the website completely.

You can create whatever you want.

Another beautiful thing about wordpress because it is open CMS is that,

It is really very flexible.

You can add any external software without any technical hassles.

You can add email marketing software.
You can add and integrate security software.
You can add any lead magnets popups or custom themes software.

The best part in wordpress is the ease of use, it is primarily focused on daily website owners, not on developers when you are talking about cms software like Joomla and drupal.

Of course, you need to invest some of your time in learning the terminology in wordpress but it is definitely worth it compared to site features with other cms.

Read, wordpress vs Joomla, vs drupal-A detailed comparison.

Cons of using WordPress for your website.

Here is a quick overview of the cons of using wordpress.org cms on your website.

Security is largely dependent on yourself.
You need some coding and learning time.
Lots of plugins impact the speed of the website.
You might end up buying a paid theme later.

Let’s learn everything in detail.

Security is largely dependent on yourself.

When you are talking about the security of the website you would typically think that your blogging platform will take care of things.

But,

Because you have wordpress hosted on your servers not on specific company servers so you need to be responsible to some large extent for the safety and security of your website.

When it comes to the security of the website,

I am talking about hacks and malware on your website.

There is a high risk of wordpress websites getting hacked because,

WordPress is very popular.
More websites are using wordpress, which means more data is there on wordpress.

There are many cases in the past where hackers primarily focused on and targeted wordpress websites over other websites to hack.

Click here to learn a few cases.

Well, you don’t need to get tense about security and get nervous and freak out about it.

There is a world-class security team always monitoring the core code of WordPress and it detects the malware and bugs instantly and they every 50-60 days bring up a new update of themes and plugins and wordpress versions.

What you should worry about and be responsible for on our part is that,

You should monitor who is logging in to your website, what is the role of the user who is logging in to the website.
You should enable 2 step authentication which is when a user tries to log in to your cms, you get a notification and you can allow it or not.
You need to be very mindful of the themes and plugins you install.
You need to always have a backup to make sure that the work is safe.
You need to have SSL installed on your website.

Obviously, your Webhosting quality also plays a huge role in the security of the website.

You need to learn some coding and invest time in learning things.

You see, what makes wordpress really awesome among dozens of other blogging software is that it gives you a huge amount of control over your website.

When you have complete control offered you obviously need to invest some time in learning things on how things work on wordpress.

You need to set up,

Url structure.
Install plugins.
Do the basic setting of wordpress.
Customize themes that need some time.
Setup menus and categories of the website.
Learn the differences between terminologies of wordpress.
Learn some tutorials on how to use wordpress.

And the reason you need to have some coding knowledge is,

If for instance your wordpress plugins crash,

You should be able to delete those plugins in FTP of your website
You should be able to customize the coding of the theme to add some custom links to the theme of your website.
Customizing your website style using CSS.

Well, you don’t need coding skills in adding complex features to your WordPress website, that is where you can take the help of plugins.

But,

Using website builders like Elementor you need to invest some good amount of time in watching video tutorials and reading guides on how you can use the plugins to customize the website you want it to look like.

Ultimately, you need to give some time to learn things.

Lots of plugins impact the speed of your website.

For everything, there is a positive and negative aspect.

Like a coin has both head and tail similarly plugins help you add new and complex features on your wordpress website without you doing any coding work on your website.

But,

You have over 50000 plugins that are a lot.

You have one separate plugin for one each separate feature.

In that case, you might end up installing and activating a bunch of plugins.

But,

That is not good,

More plugins installed on your website, more storage and files it required and more time it takes for your server to load the website.

More plugins will impact the speed & security of the website.

You also have a threat of security of the website if you use plugins that are not updated for a long time or which have bad ratings.

You need to be very careful with what type of plugins you install on your wordpress website.

You might end up buying a paid theme for your website later.

You might not need to invest in plugins for your wordpress websites like most of the plugins you get for your wordpress websites are incredible and fine.

You don’t necessarily need to invest money in buying plugins for your website.

But,

You might want to invest money in themes.

I am not saying, free themes that are available on your wordpress are not optimized for speed and mobile.

No way,

Most of the themes on wordpress are mobile-optimized, a lot of testing goes behind the screen by the wordpress team.

They test the themes and plugins before making them public for installation,

So, you can expect without a doubt.

Mobile-friendliness.
Speed optimized.

From the themes, you get on wordpress, but you know that extra customization you crave, that extra customization features,

You might have to invest some more money in buying the theme for your website.

This one is not completely mandatory for all the people who own a wordpress website.

But, if you want to make your website look professional and like a government entity kind of thing, you might need to invest a few more hundred dollars in buying the license of the theme.

That’s an additional cost on your expenses in wordpress website along with hosting and domain name.