When it comes to creating a website for your business, you may be tempted to go with WordPress. After all, it's free, easy to use, and has a lot of customization options. But before you make the decision to use WordPress, it's important to understand the drawbacks of this platform. WordPress is an open source platform, which means that after a WordPress or theme update, you may have to spend a lot of time adjusting the site to fit the way a plugin works or trying to change a plugin to fit the way the site works.
Additionally, due to the number of factors, WordPress is still a very slow platform. Page loading speed can be reduced with additional running processes due to heavy plugins, crowded databases, and frustrating code base. Other factors that can slow down your WP website include huge and heavy images that are not optimized for SEO, unreliable hosting, heavy themes, unoptimized homepages, unreliable CDN and many other factors. Unfortunately, WordPress sites are also an easy target for hackers.
The security system used by WordPress is not enough, so it's too easy to hack your site. If you are concerned about the secure future of your website, you should take this into consideration. There are things you can do to secure a WordPress site, but they require some coding knowledge. Any vulnerability of the website can have a negative impact on its credibility and could spread viruses to its users.
While Squarespace has fewer customization options than WordPress, the simplicity of the platform helps you focus on what really matters. However, if you want to add features to your website, your agency would have to look for plugins on WordPress. If you really want to customize WordPress and make your website stand out among your competitors, you'll have to learn a lot of things like CSS, PHP, HTML, etc. If you have a small brochure-based website where you can tap content from time to time, any CMS including WordPress would probably work well. However, if you want people to take your business seriously then you need to switch to self-hosted WordPress and get your own domain name.
When you install WordPress, the basic function available to you is to add new posts, share them via social media and create static pages. If you build a website with WordPress, you'll find that you'll spend a lot of time working on the website. The WordPress backend is so confusing and annoying that all my clients refuse to try editing it for themselves after their first attempts. Talk to any WordPress enthusiast and they'll tell you that it can be used for just about anything from a simple blogging tool to creating the next Facebook clone. But if you want to develop a powerful, secure and functional web platform that is scalable then look at the above list of WordPress pitfalls and think twice before using WordPress.
