Know your developers... Don't use Wordpress!

Posted on Jun 14, 2013

Many local companies in the Clarksville & Nashville regions are building websites based on the Wordpress Platform. Wordpress allows users with little to no development experience to customize the look and feel of a website with a few clicks. This may seem like an outstanding gain for the end user, but it comes at an extremely high cost.

1. Themes & Plugins

   Because Wordpress is so easy to use, many local companies have sprouted up offering "custom website development." Many of these companies do not have any actual development experience outside of Wordpress, lack the core knowledge to build a strong website.  They tend to  rely on already developed plugins and themes to create their client’s website. These service providers purchase these themes or "skins" and simply change the colors and graphics based on the customer’s needs. The result is an inefficient website that has been thrown together quickly, and then passed on to the client with a significant markup.

2. Initial Design

   Wordpress is not an all-purpose platform. Since its introduction, Wordpress has gained an enormous user base that uses the platform to develop their websites. The problem comes with functionality.  Because Wordpress was initially designed to be a platform for blogs and news-based websites, it is not an ideal program to use in many cases. In other words, Wordpress has been retrofitted to fit a variety of purposes for which it is not well-suited.

3. Updates

   When it comes time to update Wordpress, or the plugins which have been installed to create the core functionality of your website, you run the risk of corrupting your website. This is because when files are updated, core functionality may change with little or no support for older methods.

4. Resource Intensive

   Wordpress is resource intensive. Because Wordpress is a platform that is built to support all purposes, it was designed with deprecated functionality, poor routing, and much unneeded overhead, the application places a significant load on a web server. This results in high page loading times, broken pages, unneeded bandwidth costs, and stability issues that could have a significant impact on your website.

5. Security

   Wordpress is a relatively popular, but unsecure platform.  Because of its popularity, hackers have found ways to exploit the software relatively easily and to gain access to your database and information. There have been many cases of various plugins and templates exploiting website security and allowing hackers to gain access. Most of these hackers will utilize the exploitation of the site to send spam messages to clients and 1000's of others, leaving the end user to deal with any legal issues that may arise.

Here at VIXI Technology, we offer 100% custom web & application development. With over 15 years combined experience, we are proud to be the only TRUE web development team in Clarksville. If you are interested in re-branding your business with a new website, don't hesitate, contact us today! We will deliver a custom product that will exceed your expectations. Our professionals have expertise in PHP, MySQL, Python, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, XML and JSON.

To tell if your developer has used a pre-developed theme, check out this great tool.