Why WordPress?
WordPress is arguably the best content management system that there is. Not a lot of frameworks could boast of housing one-fourth of the Internet. Prominent among the things that give WordPress its rightful place as online kingmaker are:
- Its superlatively easy and powerful interface.
- Its world-class developer community.
- It is free.
For putting together your web application on WordPress, a rudimentary image of how we do it for our projects is discussed here.
Why Not WordPress: Going Overboard
As discussed in Pros And Pros Of WordPress For Your Business, there are a few cons to the CMS that you cannot ignore. Besides, your chances of success with WordPress depend largely on the kind of business you are running (or trying to run). For example, begin by gauging whether you actually need a web application or a website would suffice your needs. Here is a lowdown on why we choose to wean certain clients off WordPress:
- The platform is free, but you need a set of payables to use it profitably in the long run. Start with hosting, including the domain and domain privacy. Then there is the theme, of which the free ones are not likely to have all the features you need to run your business online. Then there is all the time that goes into troubleshooting and security problems with WordPress vulnerabilities. And plugins to get your work done (think how essential e-mail marketing is to any online business, and the importance of plugins would soon dawn on you). Finally, every time a new update of WordPress is available, you are faced with a catch 22 situation – Shall I update, risk breaking the site and pay my WordPress development services team to fix it OR should I not update an risk getting hacked, which in turn gets costly too? You cannot afford to ignore the inherent security issues in open-source tools like WordPress and even though you can setup the site on a very low budget, running the site does require recurring expenses.
- Take any two of the aforementioned steps, and consider them from the point of view of the first-timer in online business. How much do you know about plugins, and which one suits your business best? Then there are the glitches that cause your entire application to crash because of a seemingly innocent update (theme/plugin). Now consider that WordPress practically has no tech support: you are on your own here. Relying on community help could be frustrating to many. To avoid such a scenario, we suggest you invest time and research into hiring a solid dev-team.
- As we said, with WordPress you are on your own. Designing your own web application from scratch is a demanding thing to take on. If a protracted learning curve is not your thing, then you are not likely to get along with WordPress. After all, it is not a free website/web application handed to you on a platter: you need to get it up and keep it running, update plugins and themes with the greatest of care, and get into the know-how to make the most of your themes/plugins. Without the finishing touches of a world-class dev-team, your run-of-the-mill website/web application will not evolve to next-level.
- Finally, as your business grows, your site needs to scale accordingly. With WordPress, it means adding more plugins to do the job. Since all of WordPress and most of it’s plugins are open source, the hackers always have easy access to the source code and keep trying to hack them all the time. Adding more and more plugins means adding more and more points of probable access for hackers to try and hack your website. Sooner or later, one of them could succeed, leaving your whole business, site, and customer data exposed. That is something no business owner ever wants!
Hence, WordPress is not a one-solution-fits-all that you could resort to. It has its cons like any other tool you would use for your project. The idea is to simultaneously make the most of the pros and deal with the cons, which could be achieved necessarily by having the know-how – knowing what you want, which dev-team you want to hire, and to what extent you are willing to invest yourself. At YapBuzz we do not expect all our clients to be tech-savvy. However, we make it a point to probe their requirements till they know what they want, and realize that the more their business grows the faster they need to make headway beyond WordPress. At the very least, this technique empowers the client no matter the dev-team they end up hiring – and ensures skyrocketing deliverables.