Is WordPress the Right Choice for My Artisan Website?

If you’re thinking about creating a new website or refreshing your current site, you may be contemplating a switch to WordPress. You’ve heard a few good things about it and your friends say that it’s super easy to use but you’re not really sure if it is is a good solution for your needs.

In this blog post, I will highlight some of the pros and cons of using WordPress so you can decide for yourself BEFORE you make any time commitments to trying it out.

Pros

  • It is SEO friendly – WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic mark up which makes your site very attractive to search engines. If you choose to add on a Plugin, like Yoast SEO, you can make your website even more attractive to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
  • It is Media friendly – WordPress can handle images, audio, and video content easily and gives you an intuitive way to integrate your media into your content.
  • It is easy to use – If you have used word processing software like Microsoft Word, you’ll be able to understand and use the post and page editing features of WordPress.
  • It gives you complete control over the design of your website – WordPress is so easy to use, it makes creating and managing a website available to almost everyone. It gives you the freedom to do everything yourself if you’d like to so you are no longer dependent on a designer or developer.
  • It is adaptable – A WordPress site can be basic or complicated. It has the power to stay simple or expand into a multi-purpose, efficient machine that helps you run all aspects of your business including e-commerce, lead generation, and discussions with your visitors. It lets you decide.

Cons

  • There are a lot of themes to choose from – There are 1,000’s of themes to choose from in varying degrees of quality. If you’re not careful, you may spend hours searching for the perfect theme only to find that it doesn’t do what you want it to do. Of you like a theme for a while and you get shiny-object syndrome and waste another chunk of hours transferring your site to a new theme.
  • There are a lot of plugins to choose from – See above but add in the danger of choosing a rogue plugin that crashes your site. Not pretty or fun and certainly a huge time suck if you’re not careful.
  • Updates can be problematic – WordPress is open-source, so there are fairly consistent updates that fix things, add things and overall have the intention of making WordPress better, but sometimes these updates can cause problems on your site. Cleaning up the mess is time-consuming and stressful.
  • It is open-source, which can mean security issues – An open-sourced platform is usually considered a good thing but the flip side that people forget is hackers can take advantage of the code more easily when it is freely available. Protecting a WordPress site is doable, but it means using a plugin and adjusting settings which can complicate things.
  • Comments aren’t always a good thing – Since WordPress was originally created for bloggers, the default is to accept comments on all of your posts. As much as I like having good conversations with people, the internet can be a crazy place full of crazy people (and bots) who are more than willing to ruin your day with tons of spam or hateful comments.

Take a look at your priorities and decide if you are willing to work with some of the good and bad points of WordPress, it can be a great option for you. I just wanted you to be aware of some key pros and cons before you invest any time.