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:
- “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.
- “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.
- “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.
- “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.
- “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.
- 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.
