WordPress.org Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

My favorite thing about WordPress is that there is so much potential variety and so many different types of websites that you can create.

What I dislike about WordPress is that it is unnecessarily complicated. You have to access your site through the back end in order to make any changes and some things seem very limited.

We've solved the problem of having a platform that allows us to use our own hosting service and something we can create ourselves. The benefits are being able to create a website ourselves instead of having to hire the job out.

I like being able to use the site for anything

It's kind of hard to navigate. I haven't used it in a while but when I did it was hard to navigate

Reaching a greater audience

WordPress has many templates to choose from that allow you to build a website that fits your specific company culture. We host over 100 products and do not have many issues.

WordPress requires knowledge of programming and website design that the average person does not have. We also host this through a third party, which gets expensive. When WordPress updates, I have to manually change a few things each time.

WordPress powers our main website. We have thousands of unique visitors come to our website and buy products.

I like that I can customize the web pages and that depending on what I need, there is a function for everything.

Does not seem very user-friendly and dislike that it is hard to resolve issues.

We have a working website that allows our clients to upload forms in a quick and easy format.

I like that you can schedule your posts, so if you happen to post on a Saturday you do not need to be at your computer!

The integration between .com and .org, the templates are not very user friendly and there is no support when trying to figure out simple things.

Gaining followers to our site, posting more to help drive traffic.

Nothing. I did not like anything about it except that it was free.

Really don't like anything about Wordpress. It is difficult to use, it doesn't look good, really not worth the time.

Used it for a small museum, good that it was free but you get what you pay for (or in this case what comes free).

I enjoy that I can use a template and the library of plugins and add ons are massive.

For someone who has never done web design, you still might need some training on wordpress. I had to turn to youtube to learn a lot about wordpress as they didn't offer any training really.

Making company information more accessible to employees via website used on phones/email.

I love the flexibility of this platform, you can really do anything with it, and the fact that it's free and has thousands of plugins and themes available is a huge plus.

The site constantly needs updating and monitoring. Updates can break the site, but not updating can leave you vulnerable to hackers. I don't recommend this platform to my any clients who don't have the resources to keep it properly maintained. Also, unless a user is planning on paying a good developer to build their site, they'll likely be using a lot of plugins, and these can slow the site down significantly.

I've used Wordpress for marketing sites, e-commerce sites, and larger crowd platforms. It's highly extensible, so it's perfect for a growing business, or one that changes tack often.

Access to the program. The mobile app is convenient.

It's complicated and the cost to too great for a complicated system.

None. I have not realized any benefits.

It's pretty user friendly for non-programmer type people (me).

Templates often break and it's too slow on our server. Have had several problems getting the contact forms to work.

Just a temporary website for our start up.

many themes, options and the ability to create a functioning website in a very short amount of time it is great for a frontend WYSIWHYG style blog creator

PHP code structure creates messy backend pages, but overall, the complexities pose possible security risks, be wary of constant hack attempts, and be sure to add a defense plugin, constant updates are both pro and con

WordPress allows a lot of design without a lot of design knowledge, and changes are immediately live, this has saved in processing time

With no coding experience, Wordpress makes it possible to create a website using a template design and manage content additions. For someone who's not proficient in coding, or who has literally no coding experience, this can be good. I think Wordpress is great for what it is: a way to make a website without having too much worry about coding, and a way to allow business owners to add content to their blogs. However, I think in terms of long-term: hard-coding + having a basic IT/web team is best.

You need to constantly update it, otherwise, you're susceptible to security issues. I know two Wordpress sites that have recently gotten hacked. But then the issue is, if you update, sometimes plugins aren't compatible anymore and you can break parts of your site. It's a constant back and forth. Another irritating issue is that how to find certain parts of the site or certain functions constantly changes, depending on how the web developer built it. Though that can sort of happen on hard-coded websites, it's not quite the same. You can have 10 different Wordpress websites and the way to edit some part of changes for each one. Home page is in Pages, or home page is only editable in Appearance > Editor, etc. The fact that there are many default settings that aren't ideal for SEO is also a setback. For instance, Wordpress by default will create pages that result in many duplicate content. Such as a /tags/, /categories/ etc. with duplicative content. I've taken on sites where they had a /tag/ page ranking instead of the actual page. And though that's due to the lack-of-SEO knowledge from the prior web team, if that site had been hard-coded instead, that might not have happened. SEO is so much about getting every possible factor as close to perfection as possible, and there's a lot you need to know about what Wordpress does in order to make sure you're not screwing up some SEO factor. And the way it's coded will often auto-pull certain things to other parts (like the name of the page determines the link in the menu, etc.). Though all this is changeable, it can be very frustrating figuring out how to change all these little things. It's also a lot slower than using a basic code editing tool, such as Coda. Making a quick content change in Coda is super fast. In Wordpress, it involves multiple clicks, waiting each time for something to load, again and again. Takes longer to do simple tasks.

Ability to add content easily without coding extensive coding training. Ability for clients to add content to blogs themselves.

I like that it's a huge platform with seemingly limitless possibilities! There are dozens of templates, hundreds (if not thousands) of professionals who can give tips of the trade and advice on how to use WordPress. It's scalable, so your WordPress web-presence can grow with your organization, or shrink with it.

The back door/admin side of WordPress is a nightmare. It seems like there are three different ways to accomplish the same task, and finding the right way to do something is a pain. Even changing your profile settings or finding out who is the site "owner" or main admin is infuriating. There have been many times when I've felt victorious in figuring out some needlessly complicated problem, and two months later I'm faced with the exact same question because my fix didn't actually fix anything.

WordPress operates as our blog, so it helps us tell stories, publish essays or inspirational thoughts for our followers in a relatively cheap way, with many identifiable contributors. Having multiple pastors on staff that our congregation want to hear from makes the many-contributors thing very helpful in gaining interested readers.

I like that Wordpress gives my team a way to edit our website ourselves and curate our content.

While Wordpress is great in that it allows us to cut out a "middle man", it is far from intuitive. It's easy to get lost in the interface and only one person can edit a page at a time.

We're fulfilling our need for an online presence and effectively showcasing the work of our very accomplished clients. We've noticed a large uptick in our interaction with readers, who now frequently contact us through the "contact form" we've set up.

I liked that it was used by bluehost.com. It was easy to set up the account, however, trying to format the website to look the way I wanted it to proved to be quite a challenge. The customer service is also not very helpful.

I dislike that it is not user friendly. For a company that states that anyone can create a website with them, I have found that statement to not be true. It is very hard to navigate if you want your website to look a certain way.

I am working on directing traffic to my website. However, with it not looking the way I want it to, I am not getting the traffic that I am wanting. I have not realized any benefits yet.

WordPress easy to install and use, and it offers a reasonable selection of themes and plugins. No background in web development is required to get it up and running. SEO optimization is decent.

It's deceptively simple. Even though you can implement it easily, implementing it correctly is a different matter. It's full of security holes, especially compared to Drupal, and the updates don't necessary fix these problems (or any of the other problems you may have as a user). Despite the several available themes, it is surprisingly difficult to create a website that doesn't look like it was made by someone without web development experience. It also has no support for ecommerce, which is a significant flaw.

As far as I can tell, the best use of WordPress is as a basic blogging platform. It serves that function simply and effectively.

The many, many plugins allow intricate customization of personal or professional websites and blogs.

The site itself is not user-friendly, in that someone who has never heard of WordPress before will likely have a difficult time adjusting to the many features and plugins. There's no reason a site like this can't be more simple.

I use WordPress to create and update blogs for my clients. The benefits include increasing website traffic, increasing brand exposure, and producing high-quality blog content.

Wordpress has been established pretty much for the longest amount of time as far as website builders go. For people who are extremely HTML savvy, Wordpress shouldn't scare them too badly.

Everything has the tendency to break, extremely quickly. We had a Wordpress site for over ten years, and so many other website builders nowadays have much better capabilities.

We needed a platform to sell our books at our nonprofit press. For over ten years, we had struggles and constantly had to update and figure out plugins, and we needed to switch from it. So we switched to Squarespace and we are so much more efficient and better because of it.

Relatively easy to manage and update in comparison to old school code-only websites.

Let me count the ways... 1. It breaks... a lot. Especially plugins which are unavoidable. Also the amount of plugins needed to have a decent site... 2. It is not easy to edit or create new pages unless you are already very familiar. Not for beginners or non-professionals.

Wordpress allows you to create a website...that's about it. In a world where things like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc. exist if you are trying to DIY it, Wordpress is not the solution. If you are a professional or company, there are even better platforms.

The interface is sleek and modern. At first glance it seems like it would be easy to use, but this is only true if you use a template. There are many templates to choose from, however.

WordPress is not very customizable, and it is hard to create nice websites because so many of the templates are subpar. The ones that are nice you end up realizing don't fit your needs exactly the way you thought they would. It is frustrating to use. Don't let the option to adapt your own HTML fool you. It doesn't interact well with background code and its hard to identify problems. It takes forever to setup and forever to edit anything. Don't plan to do anything marginally complex.

We used WordPress to design and maintain our website. We are able to reach more customers and increase familiarity with our products by having the website.

-With no desire to customize anything you can write a blog -Most hosting platforms have support for the installation natively -There's a ton of themes you can buy and implement when you get fed up trying to get anything custom working

-The difference between .org and .com is not very clear nor is there a need for two different but almost the same solutions -Upkeep is a constant battle especially the more clients you onboard -The interface gets filled with bloat from any add-ons you have faster than Internet Explorer Search Bars -Incredibly unfriendly to designers -Not exactly any better for coders -No actual support outside of community users forums -Lack of real training courses -Lots of misinformation and half learned tips

I can't say there's been benefit other than physically getting their site online. There are better platforms to accomplish this though.

I don't like much about Wordpress. If you're hosting a very basic blog it is great for that - post something with a title and some paragraphs and you're good to go.

Wordpress makes it unnecessarily complicated for any normal individual to use their product. The UI is very outdated and the UX is terrible in many ways. As a designer, it shocks me knowing the amount of businesses who use Wordpress to host their site. You have to use a plugin for pretty much ANYTHING you want to do in order to make a functioning website because Wordpress is built for extremely basic blogs and that's it. You also have to use a separate site builder to design pages if you want to customize the templates, which are often glitchy and hard to use. The templates are mostly outdated and very limited. In fact, the entire site structure is very limiting. Things are in weird places navigationally, which just sets anyone up for failure.

I've noticed many businesses use Wordpress to host their site because it is seemingly the easiest thing to do, and they are given support if they run into problems. You don't have to code a site from scratch and can (somewhat) easily manage it in the future if you have a simple template. However, I've noticed

Easy to develop a website in cheaper cost.

Sometimes process will be very lengthy, hard to use.

Development of website

I love the end result and the professional overall look of the final site

I do not like how the process to create a website is not user friendly at all

Problems have been the unclean and not easy to navigate menu. Benefits are how to videos online everywhere to help.

Wordpress is simply software for hosting blogs. However, it can be adapted and expanded beyond that scope (sometimes improperly).

Wordpress is plagued through out its existence with bugs and security exploits. While open source it is not a line of business product and should never be used as one. However many individuals use wordpress in this manner and learn to regret it.

Wordpress is useful for seo work where you need to

Wordpress allows you to make websites without coding, but also allows for some use of code to customize

I hate the user interface, It's not intuitive or user friendly at all!!

To create a website without coding

I can't say I really liked much about WordPress. I thought I could learn, but there just wasn't enough helpful information for me to figure out the software.

I dislike how complicated it is to get the site actually live on the internet. Needless to say, I almost completely lost everything I did to my website, and then had to contact customer support and even then, I had to jimmy rig it. I don't understand why anyone would really want to do all the back work to get their website running. I want my website to be customizable, but also streamlined to make it easy to use.

I haven't solved any problems with WordPress. I had to change programs because that was just way to complex for me.

I did not like WordPress, it was very time consuming and difficult to understand or learn. There was minimal assistance and minimal information online. I almost ended up deleting everything I had spent time working on by accident because it was so hard to get my site live on the internet. Not happy.

I do not like how complicated it is to get the site actually live on the internet. I do not understand why anyone would really want to do all the back work to get their website running.

I will not be solving any business problems using WordPress any time soon. When using it, my problems became worse.

Really nothing. Maybe the add ons, but they are also a reason I hate Word Press

These sites are so slow and the add ons make it so easy for your site to either be hacked or for it to go down.

Websites

It's Free. Has a huge user base. Rollback feature.

As an asside, I'm a programmer that's acustom to having control over the entire application at the code level. A WYSIWYG editor seems to put blinders over my eyes and I feel imediately powerless. This is true for any such CMS tool, not just WordPress. This being said, however, WordPress is least user fiendly WYSIWYG editor that I have tried. It's editor took days to become remotely familiar. The data tools were so confusing I nearly destroyed a clients database.

I'm not using WordPress for any of my businesses related work. I only use it if a client has a site on WordPress they need me to update. I cringe at the thought.