So, your nephew finally designed a WordPress site for you and your company. It has all the features you could ever dream of in a website—it went up in a single day, it has a contact page where people can directly reach you, and it even has landing pages that are SEO optimized! The clients are flooding in like Black Friday shoppers and your homepage is hotter than Miami Beach in July—things couldn’t be any better. Annnnd it’s gone. A plugin auto-updated and crashed your site.

WordPress is the go-to content management system for small businesses looking to go online—and we couldn’t tell you why. Running 35 percent of the entire internet, it’s riddled with security issues and lackluster design features. The simple fact is that WordPress sites are no longer competitive with alternative platforms. Don’t believe us? Here are our three biggest reasons why (and we could name plenty more):

WordPress sucks for creative ‘Non-techies’

Editing or updating a WordPress site is like putting a Band-Aid on the sinking hull of the Titanic. If you don’t understand CSS you’re in for a world of hurt. You’re bound to the theme’s design, and if the template author didn’t build in a way for you to remove the “fixer-upper” style wood paneling, then your best bet is an actual sledgehammer. If you do understand how to use CSS on the other hand, you’ll be scratching your head wondering why your code seems to have no effect on the site.

At its best, WordPress does 70 percent of what you want

We have yet to meet a client who can live without that other 30 percent. Want to add a page that shows off all your cats, their names, weights, and ages? Good news, there’s a broken plugin for that! Now, if you want to add their likes and dislikes - you’ll need another plugin. Second plugin broke the first one? Heck yeah it did! In better news, the first one exposed a security flaw that the WordPress team hasn’t caught up to yet--and when they do--you can update your site to the latest version and break both plugins! WordPress plugins may help you do what you want on the cheap, but they turn your site into a house of cards.

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WordPress security is non-existent

Security on WordPress is about as intuitive as a single-digit passcode—it’s like putting an unlocked chastity belt on a frat boy. Okay, we’ll begrudgingly stop with the analogies. Every time a plugin or a theme is updated, there’s a realistic chance the whole site could get hacked. And unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done to fix that as it’s just an inherent flaw with the open-source nature of the platform. The only thing that gets hacked by Russians more than presidential elections is WordPress. We’ve seen it happen far too often.

We want to like WordPress, but the hard reality is that it isn’t suitable for modern web design. There’s a reason why the nation’s biggest companies don’t use the platform—it only fills one specific niche. If you need a one-page landing site that can go up in a day, maybe try WordPress. Just get ready for that landing site to get spam messages. If you need a basic website that’s more than one page, run for the hills and avoid WordPress like COVID-19.

Think our criticisms are overblown? Send us any WordPress site and we’ll show you that it has more holes than some aged Swiss. 

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Mintleaf is a creative marketing agency based out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It serves the greater Seacoast Region and specializes in videography, content marketing, social media and web design.