Wordpress Good OR Bad?

Tools
#22

Honestly, I did my portfolio site with WordPress. Heck, I do most of my projects with WP these days, despite having the tech knowledge to do what I want from scratch or other libraries.

It may be a bit lazy, but it’s great to get a project up-and-running quickly. With a little bit of CSS elbow grease and some PHP knowledge, you can do just about anything you want with it.

2 Likes
#23

I didn’t mean that using WordPress is lazy, I meant that sites that look like WordPress sites were lazy.

4 Likes
#24

Eh, it feels kinda lazy.

I could do everything from scratch. Maybe I even should do it that way. But right now, I’m not at point where that’s possible for my personal projects.

#25

Not sure why you would though. I think efficiency and knowing what to prioritise are important skills. Great tools exist. We should use them and focus our time on building new great tools.

2 Likes
#26

I think WordPress is the most friendly-user today and definitely is good, I don’t see why it should be bad.

#27

Wordpress definitely is a pretty solid entry point. I’d say its massive popularity is driven by its relative ease of setup and use. I use WP for my main domain & portfolio work.

I’ll throw a bomb in here though: I think for small, stable, maintainable sites, you can be better off going with the new breed of static site generators for two main reasons: 1.) security / maintenance & 2.) performance.

I pay for my hosting by the data usage, not monthly, so I’ve been looking at the static approach to really scale them well (and also to prevent adding unnecessary stuff to it)

#28

I’ve used Wordpress off and on for around 10 years and it amazes me how its flexibility has kept the community growing. Since this thread is an old one, there are more options for design now with Wordpress to make your site look unique and put it’s ease of use on level with Wix.

The only themes I would use today are a builder-style theme that offers WYSIWYG style designing of your site:

At least with Divi, it is just as fast loading as any of the old-style WP themes that require hacking at PHP template files to make them sing. My Divi sites score 90+ on Pagespeed. Load speed being a big UX factor for any site, and probably better to focus on than SEO techniques that haven’t worked for 6+ years.

I agree with what Trey implied, Wordpress takes some maintenance to stay secure because of it’s popularity, this is what I do to make it easier:

  • Turn on auto-updates so you get the latest security patches and features.
  • Add a multi-factor login plugin to your site, I use WPMUDev’s Defender which also includes other security features.
  • Keep the plugins to a minimum, and only use ones with a fair number of installs unless you trust the developer. Most security breaches with Wordpress come from plugins, not Wordpress itself.
  • Skip the SEO plugins, just use Grammarly and good UX content strategy for your audience :slight_smile:
  • Pick a Wordpress specific host, it’ll save you time and frustration. I use and love Kinsta, their entry level is reasonable and includes easy SSL/HTTPS with that. Here’s their list of recommended plugins that cover most of what a UX/Design Consultant’s site needs.
#29

If you have very less or no knowledge of coding language. So wordpress could be prove goldmine for you as a development tool. It is a robust CMS that helps us to develop websites without coding…ANd elementor is also a great plugin for wordpress…

#30

Its a best platform. Flexibility and durable amazing

#31

Wordpress provides convenient maintenance. There are really many different themes that can be used to build a websites. DIVI deserves attention here. This is a good set of ready-made themes with which there are no problems. For small projects, our opinion is the perfect solution.