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WordPress

Score8.6 out of 10

3,343 Reviews and Ratings

What is WordPress?

Wordpress is an open-source publishing platform popular with bloggers, and a content management system, known for its simplicity and modifiability. Websites may host their own blogging communities, controlling and moderating content from a single dashboard.

Top Performing Features

  • Availability / breadth of extensions

    There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Page templates

    The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 7.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Bulk management

    Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.

    Category average: 7.3

  • Code quality / cleanliness

    Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.

    Category average: 8

  • Form generator

    Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.

    Category average: 7

WordPress can be a time saver and company asset

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use WordPress for business and personal websites. Have been using it since 2008, and for many applications. It can be adapted for many needs online, and can be a great tool for a business. However, if managing it yourself it can be a headache when plug-ins and themes conflict with each other.

Pros

  • Self hosted “cms”
  • Blogging
  • Quick store with plugins and themes
  • Easily adapts to simple or complex projects

Cons

  • Having a better common source for plugins and themes to reduce conflicts would be nice
  • Built in SEO without a deducted plugin would be nice
  • Built in cache without a plug-in would be nice
  • Having better file organization would be great

Return on Investment

  • WordPress has allowed me to quickly design and deploy websites for clients and self
  • WordPress has made making a SEO friendly (with plugins) and well designed site easier than hand coding
  • WordPress makes managing websites like blogs and stores easier than hand coding
  • Much easier to learn than joomla and drupal
  • Not easy for a laymen to manage if there are plug-in/theme conflicts

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Joomla!, Drupal and Concrete CMS

Other Software Used

Drupal, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Firefly, SEO PowerSuite

Still one of the most versatile website platforms on the market.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Wordpress is our go-to platform for building websites, whether internal intranets, CRM-esque systems, or just full-on B2B or B2C sites. It's our agency-level expertise, and we much prefer it to other systems, including Joomla and Drupal.

Pros

  • Flexibility for custom coding.
  • Multiple plugin packages allowing low-code solutions.
  • Versatile styling options and ease of scaling to different media ratios.
  • Easy to maintain and update.
  • Easy to create test environments (host-dependent) and pipelines.

Cons

  • WPEngine and Wordpress fueding is ridiculous and threatens open source integrity.
  • The GUI hasn't changed much in years and could afford to be made more modern/condensed.
  • Allow more flexibility for login customization natively within the system.
  • It would be great to have more security features enabled without relying on third-party external products.

Return on Investment

  • Overall costs are low.
  • Execution is very very flexible.
  • Breadth of third party builders and themes allow deep diversity in builds.
  • Wordpress is a standard in web builds, so many external companies have built integrations/plugins to their systems.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Wix, Squarespace, Drupal and Joomla!

Other Software Used

Adobe InDesign, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe XD, Adobe Premiere Pro

WordPress, yes but no

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it to create our webiste. It was hard, really complicated to use, to include plugins, if you add one, the other one breaks, really hard to maintain, to organize and make it work. Not a very friendly system if you don;t have the proper experience. If you are not trined in every single plugin they have, you need to hire an expert and it will cost more money.

Pros

  • Advertising
  • Influencers offers

Cons

  • Have their own training courses
  • Being open makes it easy to get confused
  • Communication between plugins always has space to improve

Return on Investment

  • We ended up spending more, switching to a more firendly platform to build the site in house
  • After spending a few hundreds on WordPress, plug ins and more, we ended up swithching because to put everything together was really hard
  • Bounce rate was always high. It was impossible to lower those numbers

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Squarespace, GoDaddy, Shopify and Elementor

Other Software Used

Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, Shopify

WordPress is Pound-For-Pound Still The Best

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use WordPress in a variety of ways, including blogging, standard page content, E-Commerce, and organic SEO integrations. Honestly, there's a reason WordPress is the most used platform in the world - it simply works and works very well! Any type of online business idea that we have, there's typically an easy to use WordPress solution for it. The vast majority of plugins available help us to quickly execute ideas, and its coding is also easy enough for us to custom build anything necessary.

Pros

  • Easy to use User Interface
  • Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
  • There's always a solution available for the platform
  • Security is easy to use and robust
  • Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
  • Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

Cons

  • Security Holes - if you don't stay up to date you can expose yourself
  • Really have to thoroughly vet all plugins you're using
  • Code bloat - some plugins cause too much unnecessary code, leading to slower page load times

Return on Investment

  • WordPress allows us to almost instantly execute any online idea we have
  • Its coding structure is easy to work with (especially custom integrations)
  • Its User Interface is simple enough for almost anyone to adapt quickly

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce), PrestaShop, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla! and Drupal

Other Software Used

Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce), Joomla!, Drupal

A Go-To Website Tool for Medium-Sized Companies

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's used for our main e-commerce website and our order purchasing system is integrated to it through a WordPress plugin. Additionally, it integrates with our email marketing tool, online learning platform, and payment platform. WordPress is basically the most important part of our website and we use it daily to offer medical coding classes.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • Easy to customize
  • Easy to integrate

Cons

  • Can be complex
  • Often requires third-party assistance
  • Technical and security issues pop up

Return on Investment

  • Low website cost overhead
  • Low development costs
  • Free or cheap plugins
  • Easy to find affordable third party assistance

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Jimdo, Squarespace and HubSpot Marketing Hub

Other Software Used

Jimdo, HubSpot Marketing Hub