WordPress

About WordPress

WordPress traces its roots all the way back in 2003. Like other Content Management Systems, WordPress boasts rich and powerful features like a graphical content editor, integrated blog, rich community of plugins and themes, user login, comments, and more. However, unlike Wix and HubSpot, WordPress is open source. That means that WordPress is free to download and use, and 100% of its source code is accessible by users.

WordPress does require at least some technical knowledge of or technical assistance with setting up a domain, configuring DNS, setting up a database, server configuration or purchase of hosting. However, once deployed, its front- and back-end require no more technical skills than those needed to manage a social media profile.

While WordPress has a lot of great features out-of-the-box, its diverse and vibrant market for themes and plugins offers users powerful tools to create a dynamic, feature-rich website. In keeping with WordPress’ open-source tradition, nearly all of those third-party options offer highly functional, sufficiently powerful free options as well.

Costs

Although WordPress itself is open source, WordPress is only some of the software needed to create, serve and manage a website. Users will need the hardware to run it, the infrastructure to manage its data and expose it to the web, a properly configured domain and DNS to make it accessible to users, and a robust security framework to keep the site, its data, and its users safe. While many choose to pay service providers to fulfill these needs, more complex or larger scale use cases may require the technical skills to procure or bootstrap these requirements internally.

Why Use WordPress?

WordPress Pros

WordPress offers its users a powerful platform to easily accomplish some of the more complex, dynamic tasks many websites need. These include features such as user profiles, logins, blog posts with comments, a tagging system and hierarchy for organization, integrated search, and a graphical editor to design and create posts and pages. Once its installed, WordPress requires only basic technical familiarity to begin using.

  • Free and Open Source
  • Wide array of free and paid themes and plugins
  • Robust features not available on many proprietary platforms
  • No technical web development expertise required to use the dashboard and editor
  • Highly customizable
  • Frequently updated by its community of developers

WordPress Cons

Although WordPress is award-winning for the clean and simple framework that bootstraps a menagerie of rich and powerful features, the fact that the WordPress core is only software means there’s much more work to be done to get it up and running. While many web-hosting providers offer convenient one-click installation and graphical backend management, some knowledge of domains, DNS, hosting, and databases are required to install and launch.

  • Requires a connection to a properly configured and compatible database
  • Users will need to serve the software themselves or purchase hosting
  • Marketplace contains some poorly developed plugins that may break your site
  • Requires technical expertise to install, configure, and maintain
  • Tightly coupled versioning of the core, themes, server config, and plugins can lead to breaking updates

What Now?

With an open source approach to making the web more accessible, WordPress and its highly engaged community of users and developers genuinely help make a better web for everyone. Although less technically-inclined users will need the guidance or assistance of a pro to install, troubleshoot, and manage the deployment of their WordPress website, its rich and powerful set of features can be enjoyed by all.

Cover Photo by WebFactory Ltd on Unsplash

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