WordPress is often considered to be the king of content management systems (CMS) and in many ways it reigns supreme, but nothing is perfect—and that includes WordPress. Fortunately, any WordPress negatives are amply compensated for the many benefits WordPress provides, but it’s important webmasters be aware of some of the negatives so they can make an informed choice before creating a WordPress powered blog or website.
A Few WordPress Negatives
Must be Updated
WordPress needs to be constantly updated, as do the various themes and plugins. Regular updates usually offer various improvements on previous releases, but they also often incorporate fixes to bugs and address security issues, so it is important that sites are always kept up to date.
Content Editor
The standard WordPress editor does not always make it easy for webmasters to get their pages to display in the way they wish them to and it lacks some features that could be useful. It’s not a huge issue, and a little perseverance can solve most problems, but the existing editor only deserves marks of about seven out of ten.
Not Optimized for High Traffic
Standard WordPress releases are more than capable of handling the amount of traffic received by the majority of small to medium sized websites, but sites that regularly get high volumes of traffic or ones that receive a sudden spike in traffic may encounter problems.
Database Reliant
WordPress stores most of its data on a MySQL database. This is a WordPress negative because such a reliance can lead to sites becoming unavailable if the database develops a problem or if the communication paths between WordPress and its database are interrupted. If this happens site visitors will be greeted by an error message, such as the dreaded, “Error Establishing a Database Connection”. Such problems often resolve themselves quickly, but if they do not specialist assistance may be required. Databases also need to be backed up regularly, but several WordPress Plugins have been designed to do this automatically.
WordPress Negatives: the Bottom Line
WordPress isn’t perfect, but any problems it may present are more than compensated for by other the benefits it provides and the abundance of plugins and themes available. WordPress isn’t the most popular CMS for nothing. It’s earned it no.1 status. When updates are applied in a timely fashion and the database is backed up regularly webmasters should rarely encounter enough WordPress negatives to be an issue.
