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What is WordPress and is it reliable?
Yes, WordPress is reliable due to the following facts:
- WordPress powers approximately 40% of all websites that you find on the internet today. Both big and small. From small personal blogs, mommy and recipe blogs to multinational corporation websites to large and small ecommerce stores, retailers etc.
- WordPress has been around since 2003. Therefore, that makes WordPress one of the oldest CMS’s on the internet today. There are other CMSs that are almost as old, but none are as popular as WordPress.
- WordPress is open source.
- WordPress can be self-hosted on any number of hosting providers.
So, if WordPress wasn’t reliable it certainly wouldn’t power, again, around 40% of all websites on the internet today.
In this post, I’m going to go through some of the questions as far as WordPress’s reliability issues are concerned and hopefully convince you that WordPress is very reliable, in fact, much more reliable than some of its critics claim.
I will also show you why if you were going to have a serious presence on the internet today, then there’s no better CMS than WordPress.
That’s all great, but what exactly is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system otherwise known as a CMS. Basically, what WordPress does is allow the user to build a website and put it on the internet.
How WordPress does this is that it provides the scaffolding that a website needs, a structure in other words.
Visit any website and you will find a lot of similarities, whether they are WordPress websites or not.
These similarities include:
- A Home Page.
- Header at the top of the website, which contains the name of the website.
- Footer at the bottom.
- Menu which could be located either at the top right, below the header, or in the far right or far left sidebar. This menu usually contains the categories based on subtopics of a particular website’s subject. These categories contain posts or pages which are basically articles about various other topics related to their category.
- Posts and/or Pages. Each divided into paragraphs etc.
The website layout is usually in the body of the post/page which is divided into paragraphs in the main body plus columns on the left, right or both.
WordPress also allows the user to select the fonts and the coloring of their texts etc. There is a built in block page builder called Gutenberg, there are also other page builders you can add with plugins like Elementor, ect.
I could go deeper into how WordPress lays out a website, but those are the basics. WordPress actually does much more as far as site design and organization and the above are just the basics.
Is WordPress secure?
While no content management system is 100% secure, WordPress is as secure as they come.
However, a WordPress website’s security depends a lot on the publisher of the website.
Most security issues can be prevented if the publisher just takes their website security seriously and follows some basic security practices. These are quite simple actually.
Things like keeping your WordPress website’s themes and plugins up-to-date for starters.
In addition, making sure that your website has the latest WordPress core updates is a good chunk of it.
Keeping your plugins to a minimum and making sure that the plugin developers of your plugins release their plugin updates on a regular basis.
I would personally never upload a plugin that has not been updated in quite a while for example.
Also, making sure that your WordPress website has a quality security apparatus functioning at all times, will also keep your WordPress website as secure as possible.
Since WordPress is the most popular CMS on the internet today, it is also the most popular for hacking.
Hackers simply find WordPress websites that are less secure and find ways to exploit those security vulnerabilities.
If you simply keep your WordPress website’s themes, plugins as well as its core up-to-date and include a security software program operating in the background, you should be able to discourage most hacking attempts.
Do WordPress sites go down a lot?
There’s a common misconception that a website’s CMS is closely related to whether or not a website goes down often.
Whether or not a website stays online or goes offline and crashes, depends much more on the server and the web hosting provider than on the CMS, whether it’s WordPress or another CMS.
Therefore, if you’re concerned about your website’s uptime and want to limit any downtime, then you should carefully research your hosting provider.
Read their reviews online, although do take them with a grain of salt. But reviews can be quite useful in order to give you an overall general idea of how reliable a web hosting provider is.
The reliability of your web hosting provider is much more important to a website’s uptime than the website’s CMS.
Can I host my WordPress site anywhere if my hosting is unreliable?
The beauty of WordPress is that it is open source.
This means that you have full control over everything about your website. You can control how your theme looks.
Because it’s open source it means nothing about WordPress’s CMS is proprietary, including the theme, its design and customizations, plugins you’ve installed, etc.
All of which can be self-hosted anywhere you choose. Try doing that with Wix.
So, if you take the trouble to design it, buy some extra plugins or other design tools to make it look just right, it’s yours.
You could take it and have it hosted on any web hosting provider you like.
Therefore, if you’re having security issues, unreliable support, unreliable hosting, downtime and loading issues, you can pack up your entire website and move it to a more reliable hosting provider.
This is contrary to a more proprietary and closed source CMS which I will go into below.
Is PHP the coding language of WordPress reliable?
PHP some say is a dinosaur in the realm as far as programming languages are concerned.
Many developers say that PHP coding is too clunky and bloated which can cause errors when writing it or adding to it. Thus, making it outdated and unreliable as a coding language, especially when compared to newer, hipper, and as some claim, cleaner looking and functioning code, languages such as Ruby, Python, Liquid, etc.
However, if PHP was so bad, then why does WordPress not only continue to grow, but is still by far the most widely used and popular CMS for building websites on the internet today?
Although there may be some thread of truth to WordPress detractors claims, the fact of the matter is that there are more resources and support dedicated to WordPress than any other CMS out there by far.
In fact, PHP is still one of the most popular coding languages in the world.
However, the good news is for you, the “non-coder”, is that you don’t need to know PHP or any other language for that matter in order to build and maintain a WordPress website.
That is the beauty of WordPress. And WordPress is getting easier all the time, especially for non-coders.
However, if you plan on making a career out of building WordPress websites, then you definitely need to learn PHP in order to do so.
Other languages which might be useful to learn for your WordPress website would be JavaScript which could add some extra bells and whistles.
Then of course there is HTML and CSS. Although many coding enthusiasts will question if HTML and CSS are real programming languages.
Nonetheless knowing HTML and CSS can really help you decorate your website and customize it exactly how you like it.
Then again, with WordPress you really don’t even need to know HTML or CSS to make great looking websites.
There are just so many resources available that are already pre-coded and even give you a way to upload it to your WordPress website, that you can just upload and activate to get the same functionality. It’s that easy.
Is WordPress dying or will it be around for a while?
According to this survey, “Usage Statistics and Market Share of WordPress, May 2021”, it looks like WordPress is going to be around for a while.
It’s growth and continued dominance in the realm of Content Management Systems mean that if you build a website with WordPress, you know it’s much more than likely it will be around for years to come.
You won’t have to worry about it disappearing any time soon and along with it, all the hard work and custom designs you’ve made to your website either.
Whereas as other, “closed source” proprietary platforms, could be out of business tomorrow, leaving you with a website you would have a hard time self hosting, let alone growing or possibly selling.
WordPress, in other words, won’t leave you, nor your website twisting in the wind…
Are WordPress sites easy to sell?
WordPress sites are probably the easiest websites to sell. Since WordPress powers around 40% of all websites, most are very familiar with WordPress, the ecosystem, the CMS etc.
WordPress websites are also easily transferable from one web hosting provider to another, if your buyer has a web host they prefer. Everything, including your theme, all your plugins, content etc. can be zipped up and migrated.
However, selling a website that is on a closed source, proprietary platform will be much more difficult and may not be as valuable.
Is WordPress truly reliable? Conclusions.
WordPress is one of the most reliable CMSs on the internet today.
The combination of WordPress being an open source platform along with its history, huge library of resources, support forums, themes, plugins as well as it’s long history on the internet means that you can not only rely on it for building your website, but you know that your website along with its coding, customized theme, etc. is going to be around for a long time.
You won’t have to worry about WordPress closing up shop and going out of business tomorrow either and in the process taking all your hard work in building that great looking website out of business with it.
In my opinion, WordPress is just the most reliable CMS on the internet today.
Judging from its popularity, with over 40% of all websites on the internet today powered by WordPress, I am not alone. Neither will you be if you decide to go with WordPress.
