The cons and pros to using a CMS like WordPress for a website
First, what is a CMS?
A CMS is a Content Management System. It is a system that allows the user to create and manage a website without having to write any code themselves.
| Pros | Cons |
| Very popular ~ Thousands of plugins and themes ready | Maintenance ~ You are responsible for keeping up with new updates |
| Easy to manage ~ Creating posts and pages is very simple | Performance ~ A website with too many plugins can run slowly |
| Flexible ~ Can create many different types of websites such as stores or portfolios | Ongoing costs ~ You have to continuously pay for it to keep your site online |
The single most difficult thing to do in WordPress and why
WordPress makes basic website management easy and simple, but it gets difficult when you need something highly customized. It is difficult to try to keep up with performance if you try to go outside of its intended framework. It tends to conflict with plugins and themes. Plugins can easily break. In fact, when I was resetting my site for a project, somehow, the plugins got really messed up and it logged me out of my dashboard and wouldn’t let me get back in. I had to call WordPress support services a total of three times and it took days for them to get my site back to normal.
It is possible to work outside of WordPress’s intended framework, but you must be very careful. I think a good example of this could be if a business wants a completely custom checkout system that works differently from the standard WordPress/WooCommerce checkout. It is difficult because you would have to deal with code and probably wouldn’t be able to use most of the common checkout plugins without altering them greatly.
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