5 reasons NOT to build your site on WordPress

WordPress is the most popular tool on the internet for building and maintaining websites. Its user-friendly interface makes building a good-looking site simple and largely code-free. But despite being intuitive and popular, WordPress may not be the right tool for your company’s website.

There’s no doubt WordPress is complete and feature-rich, but most companies don’t need those features on their corporate sites. All that extra complexity becomes a problem down the road, so that after 3 years your company has to pay for a new site. And the cycle repeats itself again and again.

But why does this happen? After thinking about this question for a while, I decided to give a short explanation of WordPress’s main problems.

WordPress is too slow for today

You can have a lightweight WordPress site, but that’s not what happens in practice: 90% of the cases we get are WordPress sites built from online templates packed with plugins. Packed. A simple WordPress business site has at least 10 plugins installed, making the page slow, bloated and poorly visible.

Each installed plugin injects code and CSS and JS libraries into the site to work. Some plugins load huge libraries to use a tiny fraction of them, wasting bandwidth and hurting the site’s performance on GTMetrix and Core Web Vitals. In exchange for a fancier section, the site ends up heavier and slower, takes longer to load, and bounce rates go up.

WordPress can suddenly stop working

Plugins are moving parts, and just as in mechanics, moving parts are bound to need more maintenance and break down sooner. It’s a silent, dangerous problem that blows up during some automatic WordPress or PHP update and breaks the site completely, overnight.

During updates, it’s common for essential plugins to be incompatible with the new versions of WordPress or PHP, making the update completely unworkable and sometimes too hard to roll back without a backup. It’s not hard to find business owners saying “My site stopped working”, “My developer won’t answer”, “My site’s layout broke”. The owner ends up having to build the site again from scratch.

WordPress has many security vulnerabilities

What’s the alternative to breaking a site full of dependencies? Never updating it. Many professionals take that route, afraid of the risks of updating WordPress, PHP or plugins. But remember that updates are crucial to fix bugs and security flaws that have been found.

An outdated site gets slower and more vulnerable to hackers, who can inject malicious code into the server to steal visitors’ data, show ads, mine bitcoin and even inject illegal content into the site’s database.

WordPress is used by everyone, but mastered by few

Every IT professional, web designer or communications person has touched WordPress. The most basic features are easy to learn. So building a site on WordPress has become an industry standard and a safe bet for professionals… until something goes wrong.

When something goes wrong with the database, a plugin or the site’s visual layer, almost no one on the market can fix it. WordPress is a box of surprises where every site is built differently, making it impossible to spot and fix problems quickly. Professionals who truly master WordPress are very expensive and almost impossible to find. When the problem is too critical, rebuilding the site ends up being the cheapest solution.

What are the alternatives to WordPress?

It depends. For very small businesses that want a site, tools such as Wix and Google Sites are a good alternative for a very simple page without spending much time. For small and medium businesses with the resources to invest in a professional page, the recommendation is to hire a professional who uses an SSG (Static Site Generator) such as Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby or Next.js.

SSGs have several advantages over WordPress, from a considerable increase in security, performance and scalability to the longevity of the projects built with them. That’s why sites built on these newer frameworks have been outranking WordPress sites on Google and gaining more and more ground.

Best of all, in some cases an existing page can be converted to these new formats, depending on its condition.