What Are the Common Misconceptions About WordPress Websites?

There’s a number of these – some more specific for certain industries. I’ve covered some of the common ones in Misconceptions by Clients Looking for a Web Platform and 15 Obstacles That Enterprises Report in WordPress and Development Partners.

If I have to sum up the ones I heard or read pretty much every week:

  1. “WordPress is a simple blogging platform” – not really. It’s an application framework on top of a mature Content Management System. It had started as a blogging platform and evolved over the past 14 years – just as we, humans, evolve and get smarter and wiser with time.
  2. “WordPress can’t scale” – some popular websites built on top of WordPress successfully generate hundreds of millions of page views a month. WordPress.com itself is already in the billions.

    There’s no reason it won’t scale – but yeah, you can’t expect it to fly with a $5/mo shared hosting account.

  3. “WordPress is inherently insecure” – the Core platform is quite secure. There are certain vulnerabilities every now and then – but compared to its popularity and utilization, those would be a fraction of what an average dev team will introduce when developing a new CMS. Most vulnerabilities are due to external factors.
  4. “WordPress is built on top of PHP – therefore sucks” – PHP powers about 83% of the web. Facebook and Wikipedia are two popular examples. WordPress itself powers 29% or so.

    PHP is not the most elegant or consistent language itself – but neither is JavaScript which is used in 99.999% of the websites out there anyway.

  5. “A serious business should stay away from WordPress” – a number of Fortune 500, Inc 5000, enterprise companies rely on WordPress. Celebrities use WordPress proactively. Most blogs and magazines online use WordPress.

    A small WordPress website can grow and handle a solid amount of traffic. But your technical team should be capable and knowledgeable of the platform. Gluing plugins together will certainly not work – and same goes for a Swiss Army knife premium theme.

  6. Confusion around WordPress dot com vs. dot org – the fact that Automattic named their hosted blogging platform WordPress.com is a delicate matter and users keep confusing that. Media doesn’t help when they mix up terms occasionally.

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My name is Mario Peshev, a global SME Business Advisor running digital businesses for 20 the past years.

Born in Bulgaria, Europe, I gained diverse management experience through my training work across Europe, North America, and the Arab world. With 10,000+ hours in consulting and training for organizations like SAP, VMware, CERN, I’ve dedicated a huge amount of my time to helping hundreds of SMEs growing in different stages of the business lifecycle.

My martech agency DevriX grew past 50 people and ranks as a top 10 WordPress global agency and Growth Blueprint, my advisory firm, has served 400+ SME founders and executives with monthly ongoing strategy sessions.


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