It’s not that the platform is bad per se. In fact, WordPress is pretty much the best web framework and platform today.
WordPress drives over a third of the world’s web-sites, almost two-thirds of the CMS market space and most of the top companies use WordPress somewhere in their portfolio. It’s open-source, extensible, well-supported, easy to port to and from, and truly democratises publishing. WordPress has been our sole focus for over a decade and will continue to do so for the next decade.
What’s the catch?
The primary issues are performance and security. It’s just too easy to add in extra stuff, it’s far too easy to grow a site into a kitchen-table mess of outdated plugins and functions. This can create a serious performance and security issues down the line.
If you don’t stay on top of the platform, keep it up to date and regularly clear out old stuff whilst focussing on performance, then over time it slows down, gets bloated and can present security risks. You *must* keep on top of security updates, you must stay focussed on the overall site performance.
Using Google PageSpeed (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.connected-uk.com) can quickly tell you how your site is performing (in the eyes of Google) and your site should be aiming to score 90 or higher out of 100 for both desktop and mobile.
This is not always as easy as it looks, many sites use lots fo bloated third-party plugins and scripts to deliver essential functionality but the odds are you could easily improve your scores just be carrying out regular audits on the site. We do on our site, currently scores are 94 and 99 for mobile and desktop respectively.
Happy optimising, the New Year is a great time to review the make-up of your site and put it on a diet – oh, and make sure those plugins you do use are up to date and secure.
