The Things You Can’t Do with WordPress
This article is here to help you understand what WordPress simply can’t do for you. Authored by Lucy Benton, instantshift.com. Lucy is a specialist in digital marketing and content writing who currently works at BestEssayTips. She focuses mostly on the worlds of technology, gadgets, and the Internet. InstantShift is leading design and inspiration related community for web designers and developers daily resource, inspiration and premium web design and development. Image courtesy of studiostoks via Bigstockphoto.
WordPress is awesome and we absolutely love it. There’s no better open-source content management system like it because even its closest competitors, Drupal and Joomla, are nowhere near in terms of user-friendliness of the interface as well as functionality.
Because of this reason, more than a half of all websites in the world use WordPress to power them. Many people who use the platform often wonder whether there is something it can’t do because all the functions they need are there.
“Is there is something WordPress can’t do for me?” Answering this question is certainly an interesting thing to have to do, especially if you’re not a tech-savvy person who think WordPress is perfect is all areas (in many, it is).
Do you think this question could be answered? Read below to find out. You’ll be surprised at the end, I promise.
WordPress Can’t Get Your Website Found
If you have been using the services of WordPress developers to install the system on your site, you may have heard them praising its abilities to improve your ranking in the results of search engines. Well, by saying this, they try to mislead you a little bit because the system is not really designed for a complete journey from the installation to being positioned on the first page of Google results.
It would be unfair to say that they were lying, either. Of course, the developers of this incredible platform have tried their best to deliver a cleanly marked-up version of a website, so it would be easier for Google and other search engines to discover it and show in the results. However, even the best SEO design in this case won’t help if not supported by an outside effort.
So, it should be said that having a clean WordPress website is just a small part of the process that must be completed in order to be found by real viewers on the Internet.
“But how? My content is perfectly suited for Google search and it has a great value for the viewers!” I’m afraid I have to disappoint you here a little bit because even the best content in the world is not going to automatically attract thousands of viewers to your site. As the result, the content won’t be displayed on the first pages of Google search.
The only way to eliminate this issue and work your way up in the search results is to attract viewers, and there is no way WordPress can do that for you. Although a good-looking design of the website can be effective in encouraging people to stick around and browse some more, the marketing is something that you and only you can deliver.
How to Fix That?
There are a lot of free methods used to market a website like SEO and guest blogging, but we are going to talk about some paid ones. They are much more effective and deliver appreciable results much faster. Your selection in this case consists of Facebook ads, retargeting, and PPC.
- Facebook Ads. Since the company was founded in 2004, more than one billion people have joined Facebook and use it on a constant basis. By utilizing the platform for advertising, you can target people from a particular location and even users who like similar pages (not mentioning age, interests, and other great ad options).
- Retargeting. This advertising method places a tracking cookie on a computer of a visitor to your website and shows the pages with products they viewed. As the result, the viewers are tempted to visit the site once more and take a look at the product once again. Retargeting is great for online promotion because it does not require conversion of leads that requires contact data of every visitor to the site.
- PPC. Pay per click advertising is another sophisticated method to market a website on the Internet. You as an owner of a site need to pay a fixed price for every click your banner receives in Google, and your primary objective is to convert that user into a lead or customer. The service can be very cheap for those on limited budgets; for example, GoogleAdWords, users can lower daily spending limit to $5.
WordPress Can’t Build a Website for You
A lot of people think that loading a WordPress theme along with the content is enough for building a website. Well, folks, it’s a bit complicated than that.
The first thing here is to remember that providing the theme with a content is a really challenging process. WordPress developers and other people spend days and even months trying to figure out a suitable content for the website.
In order to ensure that the content is good to go live, one needs to gather, create, polish, and organize it in an effective and efficient manner. Just imagine how much time this task takes for those who need to build a corporate website with dozens of pages.
Another thing that often gets overlooked is the effectiveness of stock WordPress themes. Imagine this: you have found a good-looking theme and decided to use it for your website. Of course, you already have a vision of how an ideal theme performs to meet all the needs of the company and viewers. However, after using the theme, you discover that the theme needs some tweaking.
In many cases, “tweaking” takes a lot of time and effort. Of course, you had no way of knowing how the theme performed, so you used its visual appearance as the deciding factor, assuming that every one of them works well.
In order to avoid having to provide customizations and other “tweaking” that wastes your time, do not rely on stock themes too much. Do your research and select a reliable theme that won’t cause any delays and frustrations.
How to Fix That?
According to WP Beginner, there are a number of ways that one should take into account before making a selection of a theme. Specifically, it needs to be compatible with all browsers, have mobile friendly pages and a responsive design, provide plugin support, be translation-ready and friendly to SEO.
It is also recommended to consider buying a premium theme instead of using a free one. The reasons for spending the money are different: first, premium themes receive more updates and are more stable. Second, they have a unique design that prevents the site from looking amateur. Third, all premium themes enjoy ongoing support via email ticketing, live chats, and public forums.
Also, one needs to remember about feature-heavy and lightweight themes that ensure the speed of the website. Selecting a feature-heavy one decreases loading speed, which can be very harmful to conversions. 79 percent of web shoppers say they don’t return to a slow-loading site because they have other options.
Lastly, look out for coding. A poor quality of coding is evident in elements like wildly scaled images and inline CSS injection and has a tremendous effect on the performance of the website. Only a good code can satisfy the needs of visitors and your company and provide a decent user experience. Oh, one more thing: if you found out that a theme has a poor coding, it usually means that it has not been updated in a long time. These themes are not worth the attention.
WordPress cannot Power an Ecommerce Website
If you need to set up an ecommerce site, forget about WordPress. The platform was built for an entirely different purpose and cannot function as an Ecommerce engine. Although a number of plugins have been released to improve the ability of the platform to perform this function, they never made it a decent engine.
It may be enough to cover areas like social media engagement, content creation, and relationship building, but it can’t deliver on customer support, shipping, pricing strategy, inventory control, returns, and many other areas. Simply saying, WordPress can’t your business perform like it should.
No self-respecting business owner would trust plugins and themes to develop a business because of security considerations. Of course, WordPress is good looking and functional, but in addition to being built to perform other duties it is also highly vulnerable to attacks.
This platform powers 74,652,825, and the number increases every day. This incredible popularity of WordPress makes it vulnerable because the hackers are more interested in “working” with it.
How to Fix That?
Just go with a true eCommerce platform that is capable of meeting all requirements of your business. The list of the most popular ones includes Magento, BluePark, Volusion, Big Commerce, and Shopify. All of them are cloud-based but you can explore your self-hosted options as well.
Cloud-based platforms are usually recommended because they do not require capital expenditure, provide high quality technical support, have more security options, and do not require fees and maintenance charges.
WordPress cannot Save You from Complexity
According to WordPress.org, there are 49,371 plugins currently available for downloading. Most of them are designed well and work great. Thanks to them, the functionality of the website is enhanced to advance your business.
However, there is one little thing that you ought to know. All of these plugins are made by professional developers and most of them are intended to be managed by people with a technical background. Using some of the plugins is therefore not recommended for people who do not have any expertise in this area.
If you decide to run the website using plugins anyway, you should be willing to learn quickly. Otherwise, your system will become very complex and you’ll be having a hard time managing everything. Often, people without a technical background spend more time on plugins than on publishing content!
How to Fix That?
Avoid using too many plugins on your website. If you don’t have experience using them, it’s probably a good idea to consult someone who does. However, it’s always recommended to use a limited number of plugins to avoid reducing the loading speed and crashes.
WordPress cannot Extend your Business
The functionality of WordPress is designed to meet the needs of small businesses such as blogging. The question of whether it is suitable in case of larger business raises serious doubts. Clearly, at a certain point, you as a business owner will decide to expand the functionality of the website but completing this task in WordPress is impossible.
The functionality of the website powered by WordPress is limited by plugins. Moreover, the theme you are currently using probably has been downloaded thousands of times by other people, so you lost your uniqueness as well.
How to Fix That?
That’s why platforms like Adobe Muse are recommended for small businesses instead of WordPress to avoid functionality limits that hurt doing business. A lot of discussion has been done to compare WordPress and Adobe Muse for business use, and more opinions slowly began to favor the latter. For example, check out this Medium article to know why.
The Bottom Line
WordPress is awesome and we love it. However, it can’t do everything we need in some cases, and now you know when exactly. This is not to say that we should blame WordPress developers because they designed a great CMS and people are trying to get most out of it.
Thanks for reading!
