Reasons NOT To Use Wordpress.

The immense popularity of the CMS, Wordpress has misled many to think that it must be the best option for everything. However, as with many things, popularity doesn’t necessarily equal superiority. An apt example would be pop music (but I’m sure many One Direction fans would disagree with us there)

So with that point in mind, this article is going to outline the main reasons not to use Wordpress. Our points are in no particular order, so without further ado;

Wordpress Is Bloated.

Wordpress began its life as a humble blogging platform, but as its popularity has grown so has its feature set, in order to satisfy demand. I can hear you thinking “so what’s wrong with that?”

Well, the biggest gripe we have is that in its attempt to satiate demand it’s increasingly trying to be everything to everybody. The result? It’s fallen short in a large number of areas. And what’s more is that it’s now so bloated that for the vast majority of simple sites that need to be created it simply carries too much baggage.

This is a point that is echoed by developer Ben May, when he says “Instead of starting with a blank canvas and building up, you get something half built, and if you don’t want it, you need to actively remove it”. This to him is an “amateurish and hacky solution”, and is something which we would largely agree with.

Wellfire.co encapsulates this whole issue wonderfully by saying “don't use a Swiss Army knife when you need a power drill - or just a single blade”.

Wordpress Doesn’t Have Special SEO Superpowers.

Wordpress is often touted by many as having some mystical special power that makes it inherently better for SEO. Like it’s been anointed by the search engines or something.

But, although Wordpress sites can be very good from an SEO perspective that is more down to the person/people building and maintaining the site and less due to the platform itself. An inexperienced person can very easily create an SEO unfriendly site on Wordpress and vice versa.

Furthermore, many of the “SEO benefits” that Wordpress claims to have are pretty standard practices that can be just as easily achieved through clean HTML markup without getting Wordpress involved.

Wordpress Restricts Web Designers and Developers.

As professional designers, we design for a reason, not just to be visually engaging. Everything we do relates to usability and functionality to engage with the end user. The problem with Wordpress is that it restricts the Designer. As developers, we have the capability to build anything the client would like bespoke, but sometimes Wordpress doesn't allow us to implement that. So Designers can get frustrated because their ideas are not possible within Wordpress. If we were to use Craft CMS as the content management system, there would be no restrictions, we could simply design and build anything we want.