When You Should Choose WordPress As Your Website Platform

Geoffresh SEO Web Design uses two Content Management Systems (CMS) as their web design platforms: Joomla and WordPress. Our servers are specifically designed to deploy these CMS platforms and are optimized such that either of them can perform the best they can. But which platform should you choose for your website—WordPress or Joomla?

We explore the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress in this article. 

To WordPress or Not to WordPress?

Strengths of WordPress

1. Built To Blog: WordPress is primarily a blogging platform. That is where it really shines. You have the ability to create beautiful blog posts and link them to one another. This platform also has a beautiful discoverability feature of related posts, that appears at the bottom of every blog post—this inherent feature encourages the user to keep reading your articles or posts.
2. Community At The Ready: WordPress is a popular platform that has a very active community. So if you are looking for a "how to" article or are unsure on what settings to change to achieve your objective, you will most likely be able to find others who are looking to do the same thing, and have published instructions/their experience online.
3. Plethora Of Plugins: WordPress also has the advantage of having many different plugins to extend its functionality so you can turn your WordPress platform into a ecommerce solution, a front-end user login section, or even a calendar booking system. This, however, is also its weakness. 

Weaknesses of WordPress

1. Too Extension Dependent: WordPress, for its popularity, has many MANY extensions that must be kept up-to-date by the developer as the WordPress platform updates, the developers need to update as well. If an extension has been abandoned by the developer, then you will not be able to update your WordPress site to the latest version of WordPress without worrying about your plugin not being supported, or working properly. So being at the mercy of extension developers is one weakness we can't stress enough.
2. Jetpack Et Al.: In addition, out-of-the-box WordPress has a few plugins that we usually recommend to remove, like Jetpack which can slow down the website unintentionally.
3. Too Plugin Dependent: Speaking about website speed, the more plugins you use, the bigger the chance there will be processes running in the background. The platform doesn't have specific optimization and tracking systems already built-in. So unless you know how to edit your website template, you most likely will need to add in a few plugins right away regardless of your use case. 

When Do We Recommend Using WordPress As Your Platform Of Choice?

Going back to its strengths, we highly recommend this platform for bloggers and website owners who want to take charge of their website and add to it when inspiration strikes. WordPress is a very simple platform to learn and is relatively "safe" for most website owners who want to login and add content on their own. WordPress, in general, can usually be deployed and get to an operational level very quickly since its main point is to look good as a blog.

It can also be extended into an e-commerce site, but that can become a bit expensive to deploy. However, when you do invest in transforming your website with those enhanced e-commerce features, your website will be quite robust. You'll be able to see where your users are abandoning their carts or if they are bumping into an issue with purchasing, and other neat data you wouldn't have access to.

So in the final analysis, if you choose WordPress go all in to get the most out of it.