WordPress is currently the most popular content management system out there, especially for blogging. Most of the blogs on the internet today are built upon WordPress, from sites like The Verge to the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I personally have quite a few sites on WP as of today, however, on the contrast, I’ve had quite some disappointments with the platform lately. I feel like the developers behind the company aren’t doing the best to improve it, or to add new features and functionalities. Here are the top 10 reasons why I hate WordPress:
10 Reasons Why I Hate WordPress
1. Constantly hacked! There are bots crawling the web for WordPress installs and trying to hack/brute force them.
My advice for existing users: Use a simple server-side firewall and site-side live protection (there are many great plugins for this, like WordFence, etc., as long as you set it up right and have the right hosting-side protection set up)
2. Non-standards based coding methodology.
3. Bloated and legacy codebase.
4. Not object-oriented.
5. Too much fluff!
6. Varying degrees of quality in 3rd party plugins and themes, including unscrupulous developers who highjack your site in various ways.
7. Requires plugins to do basic things, such as speed up your site, have a decent contact or enquiry form, and security, to mention a few.
8. Slow as hell!
9. Constant bugs, conflicts, and issues with all the different moving parts and plugins.
10. Tries too hard to be all things to all people, in turn creating lots of unnecessary garbage.
I asked a few of my comrades to put forward their opinions on this topic. Here are their thoughts..
Dylan: Sorry Wilson, can’t agree with you here. Many of the problems you list have to do with using poorly designed/coded themes and plugins. As for hackers, well, whatever is popular is what they will target, no matter what it is. Don’t have time to answer everything nor list my 10 reasons to love it, but user-friendliness, versatility, easy of use are among them. I can teach WordPress to 65+ y.o. who have no clue about computers. You are a software engineer, so maybe the problem is right there: you should code instead of using the tools made for the rest of us?
My Response: Very few of the reasons I list have to do with poorly designed/codes themes and plugins. In fact, one of the reasons listed specifically states there are too many poorly designed/codes themes and plugins. Also, only numbers 6 and 9 have any relation to that. And as a non-developer, as most WordPress users are, how are they to know/determine what is and isn’t poorly coded?
Andy: It is far, far, far (can I write ‘far’ enough times?) easier for the average Joe to learn just enough to overcome all the problems you’ve listed, than it is to ‘go elsewhere.’ Almost everything you’ve listed is either insignificant when it comes to the pursuit of a good and successful website, or is quite easy to overcome. And with WordPress, you have a metric shit ton of resources, sites, support forums, code snippets, etc. that you can use to do stuff, or overcome stuff, when you want to. Go elsewhere – or have something custom developed – then you do not have this and might even have to continually pay a developer to tweak things when you need it.
I agree with all of that.
What are your thoughts? Are you satisfied with the current state of WordPress? Let me know in the comments..