I started my career building WordPress sites for clients, and at the time, it was one of the best things I could have been working on. That was eight years ago and a lot has changed including my preferred tech stack.
For building applications, I like to use a “modern” tech stack (Vue.js, Express.js, Node, PostgreSQL). Sexy, new technology is fun to work with and makes me feel smart. However, I see a lot of folks speak poorly about WordPress, and I just don’t get it.
Why I Continue to Use WordPress
It’s incredibly quick and easy to build and re-build a website. I redesigned this site in 2 days. The available drag-and-drop page builders are great and allowed me to completely change everything without touching a single line of code.
It just works. I don’t need to jump through hoops for the installation process, or pore over archaic documentation sites. Plugins and themes need upgrades, but it’s not like managing a giant list of NPM dependencies, trying to get the right versions so the project will run. There is so much value that comes from things just working as advertised.
It solves so many problems that could otherwise be a bit of a pain: user accounts, content management, forms submissions, media hosting and management, SEO, form submissions, integrating payments, eCommerce. It’s all either built in, or easily solved with a plugin.
The ecosystem is amazing. Every day, there are tens of thousands of developers working to make my WordPress website even better without me needing to do anything.
There are WordPress developers everywhere which is good if you have questions or need help. It also adds to the competition if you are a WordPress developer yourself.
It makes owning a website super affordable. The software itself is free, and most sites can get by just fine with a $5/month hosting account as long as you don’t use a million poorly developed plugins.
Building a site with WordPress means I can hand it over to non-technical team members and they can take it from there. I don’t have to be bothered to make every little typo fix. It saves me a ton of time to do dev work for things I actually want to work on.
The single best thing that WordPress has done for me is freed up my time to focus on the main purpose of my website which is to write. I don’t get distracted with tech stack decisions or little bug fixes, it just works.
Things I Don’t Love About WordPress
Maintenance. With WordPress, you have to keep updated versions of the core software, the theme, and any plugins you have installed (which can be many). This
It’s definitely not sexy development. You often have to do things the “WordPress way”. While there are some programming skills that will transfer to other paradigms, many will not (or at least they didn’t for me).
WordPress is free, but you still need to host it somewhere. When compared that to many of the alternative static site builders and hosts, you could be looking at WordPress costing money, and a static site being free. I’ve thought about switching for these reasons, but I never do because WordPress hosting can cost as little as $3 a month, and I really am not interested in the amount of work and upkeep I would need to make for a static site. That work is a bigger cost for me than my hosting bill.
Some folks complain about performance. This may or may not be true. If you use a lot of bad plugins or themes, then your WordPress site will likely be slow. It will probably also be slower than a static website, but that doesn’t make it slow. My site runs on WordPress and is plenty fast for my needs.
Tips for using WordPress
Before you get started working on your WordPress site, make sure you have access to the hosting account, the server files (FTP), and the database. That way, if something goes wrong, you will be able to fix it.
Never make changes using the built in theme editor. Never!
You should always have scheduled backups running on your site in case something goes wrong. Most hosting providers offer some sort of backup service. Take the time at the beginning to make sure it’s running. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Here’s a list with a lot of some of my favorite WordPress tools.
- Theme: Blocksy
- Page builder: Elementor
- Forms: Forminator
- Performance: WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache
- Performance: WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache
- Performance: EWWW Image Optimizer
- SEO: Rank Math SEO
- Analytics: GAinWP Google Analytics Integration for WordPress
- Security: All In One WP Security & Firewall
- Backups: WPvivid Backup Plugin
- Antispam: Antispam Bee
- Developer tool: Advanced Custom Fields
- Developer tool: Custom Post Types and Custom Fields creator
- Developer tool: Query Monitor
- Misc: Code Snippets
- Misc: Safe SVG
- Misc: Really Simple SSL
- Migration: All-in-One WP Migration
- Migration: Better Search Replace
- Local development: Local
You can view all of my favorites on my WordPress profile page.
Bottom Line
WordPress is great for folks that just want to build a basic website that’s easy to make changes to. If you’re good with design and don’t want to muck about with too much coding, the drag and drop page builder is a blessing.
If you are a developer there might be other cooler, more modern technology stacks to work with, but that doesn’t mean you should hate WordPress. It has allowed a lot of folks to leave their full time jobs to pursue their own clients. If that’s something you might fancy, it’s worth giving it a go.
Finally, for the folks that like to hate on WordPress because that’s the ‘cool’ thing to do, just stop. It may not be the best tool for every single thing, but it does what it does really well. There is a reason it powers 1 in every 3 websites, including the White House website.
If you have thoughts on this that you’d like to share, ping me on Twitter. I would also appreciate if you share it, or sign up for my newsletter if you enjoyed this content.
This article was originally published on austingil.com
Top comments (13)
It actually is, for me the most important aspect has been the ability to hand it out to clients and they being able to manage their sites with very little intervention on my part.
I also work with non profits and they do appreciate this low developer dependency.
other key aspect for them has been the hosting provider.
many non profits can benefit from AWS/Microsoft credits, but the cost of cloud management is high, so they are better off with a managed hosting such as cloudways or even siteground.
my WP stack revolves around elementor pro, woocommerce, yoast seo and other.
I’ve been using Underpin for my WordPress development over the last couple of years. It’s helped to clean up my WordPress code a bit. It’s also helped make writing in WordPress feel a bit more modern. You should give it a gander sometime.
github.com/Underpin-WP/underpin
hello dear Austin Gill,
many thanks for posting this.☺
and for sharing your experience, ideas and thoghts.
Thank you for the supporting the community here: i like your ideas:
The ecosystem is amazing. Every day, there are tens of thousands of developers working to make my WordPress website even better without me needing to do anything. There are WordPress developers everywhere which is good if you have questions or need help.
Great thoughts: thanks for all you do and share here.
keep it up - we look forward to see more support for the upcoming WordPress Version 5.9
with all the great features like
Full Site Editing (FSE)
Query Loop
Block-Theming
Gutenberg etc. etx.
Great things and enhancements ahead. The global WordPress-Community is waiting for this. And is curious about some news that cover all the good news. 🙂
see:
wptavern.com/query-loop-the-ins-an...
wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-beta-1-...
Look forward to hear from you -
greetings
I also started my web development carrier with WordPress, creating custom websites, but that was more than 10 years ago and it was a pretty cool new thing being a WordPress developer.
These days its not soo much, and I think its mainly because a WordPress developer can be many different things, most of which are not actually developers but rather implementers, so if you say you are a WP developer you also need to explain what kind of developer you are, and it generally isn't considered much in todays job market.
But I do agree that it is still a great tool for making websites for small businesses, or even larger ones that can benefit from WP features.
One thing that is not great today about WP but was much easier 10 years ago, would definitely be the freelancing market, the competition has gone way up, and its much harder to find good clients.
WordPress is the best! <3
YES!
Hello everyone, I'm facing an issue with my WordPress Blooket Join website's loading speed, and it's affecting user experience. Can anyone provide tips or suggestions to improve the site's performance? Your help would be greatly appreciated
WordPress remains highly popular because of its user-friendly interface, extensive themes and plugins, active community support, SEO-friendliness, and e-commerce capabilities. It continues to be a dominant force in the CMS space, empowering users of all technical levels to easily create and manage content on their websites but it requires a lot of care and updates
awesome i love your aticle - youre a true hero!!
keep up your great project - it rocks
WordPress is awesome. Especially for freelancing
However, WordPress is the basis for 1.14 trillion websites worldwide. It's not "sexy", but it's hugely popular. 😀
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