I Hate WordPress! Playing The Devil’s Advocate.

I hate WordPress is a common rant, but why?

“I hate WordPress!” It’s a nightmare!” The worst piece of software ever created on the planet! You might be reading this and thinking, “Wow! This person is so full of it. WordPress isn’t that bad.”  Well, here are 17 reasons why some people rant, “I HATE WORDPRESS!”:

1. It’s hard to use.
2. Lack of features.
3. WordPress is simply too popular.
4. A target of hackers and other online criminals.
5. The learning curve is too steep.
6. It’s not as user-friendly as it could be.
7. The admin interface could be simpler and more intuitive.
8. The process of creating and managing posts and pages could be more straightforward.
9. It’s not as flexible as some other platforms.
10. It’s not always reliable.
11. Limits creativity.
12. The interface unintuitive and difficult to use.
13. Tired of having to constantly update plugins and themes.
14. People use WordPress instead of hiring a proper Developer.
15. WordPress uses PHP instead of more “Modern” and “Newer” programming languages.
16. WordPress Editors.
17. Page Builders.

As a WordPress enthusiast myself, compiling this list was tough to bear. But in all honesty, some of them are legitimate gripes. I can’t deny that. But, most are just a matter of opinion or simply wrong.

Personally, I’m not saying WordPress is terrible, just playing the devil’s advocate here. 

Besides, I don’t want to go into too much detail because then you’ll think that I hate WordPress too, when in reality I just love it! 

But do many people really hate WordPress? I don’t think so. If they did WordPress would be the most popularly used CMS on the planet powering over 40% of all websites on the internet today.

However, it seems most just don’t use it enough to know what the good and bad about it are. Suffice to say there are many reasons why people dislike WordPress but maybe they’re just not using the right platform for their needs or need a little more time before making an informed decision on whether or not they like WordPress.

Do you agree with me? Do you hate WordPress?, and if so, then why? 

Well many complain that it doesn’t allow for very much customization, the templates are boring and outdated, and there is a lack of themes that don’t look like something from 1997. Plus, we all know how slow it can be at times! If you want to learn more about what I’m talking about, read on! 

WordPress: A Love/Hate Relationship.

Here’s the thing: WordPress is a really great platform. It has huge market share, and it powers over 42% of websites on the internet. 

There are tons of plugins and themes to choose from, and you can customize your site as much or as little as you want. 

But there’s one thing some absolutely hate about WordPress: its seemingly complexity. 

If you’ve never set up a website and launched on the internet, things like hosting and nameservers can seem daunting enough. 

But when you get what looks to be the perfect theme and can’t get it to look the way it does in the demo, well that’s absolutely frustrating! Isn’t it?

When I tell someone I’m a WordPress enthusiast on any forum, there’s always someone who immediately says “Oh, yeah. WordPress is crap. It’s awful. Garbage.” And then without fail, I have to defend it and try to convince them why they may be wrong or that not all WordPress sites are bad. This happens often enough that it becomes tiresome and even occasionally infuriating.

The purpose of this post is to explore various cases in which a person may have a negative opinion of WordPress and find some common ground for evaluating its weaknesses while also reminding the reader why they should be optimistic about it’s strengths.

What is the worst part about WordPress?

For most people, the answer to that question is themes and plugins. When you hear someone say “WordPress”, the next word in their sentence is almost always “themes”. 

Some themes are just poorly coded and bloated with features nobody needs or wants. These poorly coded “free or cheap” themes are often inherently insecure because the theme authors don’t know any better and do things like hard-code login URLs, allow PHP injection with short tags and other similar nonsense.

The next thing you’ll hear is a list of plugins that people don’t like. Many plugins contain security vulnerabilities, are just plain poorly coded or simply not updated regularly.

They will then say that WordPress itself isn’t terrible, but the “community” is what makes it bad. Whatever that means.

Another thing you’ll hear from die hard developers is how things were better before WordPress was popular, “back in the day”. 

Of course, these people will cite the obscure CMS that has only two plugins and isn’t available for download anymore because it’s so outdated (even though that site still works perfectly fine). Or that they’ve built the best site in the world from scratch.

Are they wrong?

Let’s assume that everything I just said is 100% true. Is the answer really to stop using WordPress, or do these people either prefer something prebuilt, turn key and proprietary like Wix or Shopify or are they developers who resent the competition WordPress increasingly gives them?

The core of WordPress may not be perfect, but it’s free and easy to use. The only reason people think WordPress is terrible is because it’s popular and therefore has a lot of themes and plugins available. 

Choosing a less popular platform will not magically make your website more secure, but it may put you in the situation where there are no readily made solutions to the problems you’re having.

It’s easy for people who have never used WordPress before to say that they hate it, but there is a reason WordPress has over 40% of the CMS market share. It’s also easy for them to say that things were better before WordPress was popular, but at the time it wasn’t even an option.

I don’t know about you, but wouldn’t you much rather give your website visitors the best experience possible? If not, go ahead and try Joomla or Drupal or some closed source proprietary CMS like Wix, Webflow, Shopify or some obscure CMS nobody has ever heard of. 

If you do care about giving your users a good experience, WordPress is the obvious choice.

Of course, if your needs are so great that standard WordPress is not enough, you’ll have to hire a developer anyway. 

That’s why PHP is used in the first place. Because it makes sense for larger-scale projects.

Half of the problems people complain about are just symptoms of bad themes and plugins. 

If you’re looking for themes and plugins that solve specific problems, don’t use crappy free themes and plugins. 

Being willing to pay money gets you much better quality control than just using whatever is available for free.

Is WordPress on the decline?

The short answer to this question honestly is: maybe. It’s difficult to say precisely because WordPress has become so widely used that it would be hard to find a blog or website online which didn’t use it in some form or another, and making an accurate evaluation of its overall usage rate is impractical. 

That being said, many people are claiming that WordPress is on the decline, and that it is being overtaken by Ghost, Wix, Webflow, take your pick.

I think this view comes from a misunderstanding of what WordPress actually is, and what it can do. It seems to me that many people see WordPress as just “a blogging platform.” This may be because it started out life as just that, a blogging platform built on PHP and MySQL.

The misconception that WordPress is just a blogging platform comes from the fact that its initial goal was simply to make it easy for people to create blog posts, and this goal has been successfully accomplished. 

But very few people actually use WordPress as a platform for publishing personal blogs anymore (in fact, just a small percentage of websites actually claim to be running WordPress as personal blogs).

What about those who just want a simple website?

WordPress is actually much more than just a blogging platform. It started out as a system for creating blog posts, but its goal has long since evolved to become “a content management system” (CMS) which makes it easy for anyone to create and manage a website.”

The benefit of this is that WordPress now powers over 40% of all the websites which exist on the internet, meaning it can boast around millions of active users. 

What’s more, if we take into account those who claim to use WordPress but are not actively using it to run their websites, then the current number of active users is likely closer to over a billion.

Isn’t WordPress Too Basic?

The second issue which people raise with WordPress is that it’s too limited in its feature set. It’s true, that some critics would claim that it “doesn’t do enough.” So why does WordPress lack in features compared to competitors?

The answer is simple really, it’s because of the sheer number of websites which are using it. 

The company behind WordPress (Automattic) are only a small team considering the size and popularity of its CMS. Don’t forget that it’s open source and many who are actually involved in the development of the WordPress.org ecosystem are not even employees of Automattic, but are actually diehard volunteers. 

They have to work hard to balance adding new features with ensuring that existing users don’t run into any problems.

In fact, they have achieved this balance so well that they still manage to release two major updates a year, and these updates contain quite a few new features with each release. 

This may not sound like a lot, but it is when you consider just how many users will be affected by any change made to the system. It’s quite daunting.

Why do developers seem to hate WordPress?

Many complain that it’s bloated, slow and technically inferior to other platforms. Many developers hate WordPress because the platform has a stifling effect on creativity, encourages shoddy work and “hacky” designs. 

Themes lose their integrity. 

Plugins break apart functionality instead of enhancing it. And that’s just within the community of users who are trying to use it to sell products, maintain websites and create dynamic content.

“WordPress is a great tool for making sites that no one likes,” many complain.

They also claim that, “It’s popular, but it has earned this popularity through the sheer number of people who use it and the ease of use that has come with it. It’s far easier to make a WordPress site than one from any other platform and this is reflected in the quality and popularity of sites built with it,“

This perpetuates itself because there are more and more WordPress users everyday. But, is that a bad thing?

Are WordPress developers even real developers?

“WordPress is a blogging platform and therefore not a serious concern for software developers”. I hear this argument too often and I am going to argue that it’s wrong. 

Yes, WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform but it has grown since then and the latest version (5.8.1 at the time of writing) includes everything you would expect from a typical Content Management System (CMS).

WordPress is used for more than just blogging. It has grown into the most popular CMS in the world. So it’s far from being just a blogging platform.

That’s why developers complain that “instead of developing software, programmers are wasting their time creating themes and plugins for WordPress“.

What are some typical WordPress rants?

There are many reasons why people hate WordPress. Here is a list of the most common complaints:

• “I hate wordpress because it’s so slow and I can’t deliver my website on it.” It’s so slow because it’s a famous CMS and everybody is using it! That, and people don’t use optimized hosting services.
• “WordPress have many limitations for customization… For example I can’t change my website logo or choose template on my own.” Of course it takes a lot of time to learn how to install new anyway.

• Also, ”if something breaks I can’t fix it, and no one will help me with that either.”

Typical complaints are from users who don’t follow WordPress best practices or don’t know how to make their site run faster.

Templates can be changed, logos can also be changed and many free services exist to change the default logo. 

Many users just want a nicer blog without having to learn how to code or spend money on premium themes and plugins, which are quite cheap nowadays considering the value they provide in the form of flexibility and customizations you can do to them without learning a single line of code.

That’s in addition to access to premium themes support and forums. These can be an education in and of themselves.

Some other rants include…

“Wordpress is overrated and people think that it’s the only CMS suitable for business websites”

“I hate wordpress because it’s complicated for beginners.”

Sure, if you want a website which is a direct copy of Facebook, but you don’t know how to code websites and the only customization allowed is changing the template or uploading a new logo, then yes WordPress can be complicated.

Why does everyone use WordPress if so many hate it?

Admittedly, my very first WordPress website was a complete mess. I had no idea what a CMS was, or how it worked, and yet I managed to create a functional website all by myself! 

However, there were zero security holes, zero performance issues and zero downtime. Not bad for someone who didn’t know a single line of code.

So why then do so many think that WordPress is bad? The answer is that they are just not using it properly. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that I am some amazing developer who can work wonders with anything he touches.

Still very far from it actually, as all of my own projects are still built on top of WordPress, without knowing a single line of code after 10 years.

Some people just don’t need a CMS. I you’re someone with basic HTML and CSS skills, or at least willing to learn, then there’s no reason why you couldn’t create your own static website by hand. 

WordPress was not meant to be the silver bullet that solved all of your problems. But for most people, it often makes sense to use WordPress instead of building their own website from scratch by themselves.

WordPress is not an application: it’s a CMS. Once you understand what separates WordPress from other common application frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django), then everything becomes clear and much more manageable. 

I hate WordPress, conclusions.

Still hate WordPress? People hate WordPress because they expect it to be something that it’s not. If you want a custom website which nobody else has, then you need to either pay somebody or learn how to create your own from scratch using HTML, CSS and PHP. 

Otherwise, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t use a free CMS such as WordPress. It’s really good at what it does.

As long as you don’t expect a CMS to be something that you can’t have, then it’s hard to hate WordPress. Especially if you learn how to properly use it and follow WordPress best practices.

If you hate WordPress because you need a fully custom website built from the ground up just for yourself, then WordPress is definitely not the way to go. 

But for almost any other project, there are at least some ways in which you can customize it without having to do anything too drastic.

Just remember that nobody ever said that everything should be customized. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to invest time into re-inventing the wheel.

Bottom line, WordPress is great. It’s free, open-source software that allows you to build websites of all types and sizes without having programming knowledge or technical skills. 

There are many reasons why WordPress is still the best option for your website creation needs, but I will mention just a few here so you can see what makes it so special. 

First off, WordPress has an extensive library of themes which allow you to customize how your site looks on both desktop and mobile devices with ease. 

Secondly, using plugins helps extend WordPress functionality in ways that would otherwise be impossible on other platforms like Squarespace or Wix. 

Finally, there are plenty of tools available within the platform itself both free and paid to make managing content more efficient. 

So if you’re not a “coder” or “developer” and simply want to get a website up on the internet without being beholden to some closed source proprietary CMS, then WordPress is still the best!