What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source content management system.
Written in PHP. Database server – MySQL.
Scope of application – from blogs to complex news resources and corporate websites of companies where articles, comments, videos and graphics are published very often.
In simple terms, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system in the world.
Why is WordPress so popular, the main answers:
A huge number of additions, lots of information about settings. According to official statistics, the market share of WordPress among other competitors exceeds 55%. More than 58 million websites in the world exist on WordPress. Every seventh site in the world was created and works on WordPress. If you need some plugin, there are tens of thousands of them. On the Internet, you will find a huge number of free themes, templates and plugins. And if you have any questions, you will easily find the answer.
Free of charge. Yes, WordPress is a free system. For a beginner, who wants to create own blog or a small project, this is an important moment and a big advantage. Why pay money for other website management systems if there is a free solution?
Cross-platform. WordPress is installed and used directly on almost any server, any hosting. There is no need to install anything on the computer. It means that you can manage your website from any computer running any operating system.
Easy to install and use. The whole installation process takes no more than 5 minutes, and you do not need to be a programmer, to understand the code and technical nuances! The developers tried to make the system as simple and user-friendly as possible, so even absolute beginners could quickly figure it out.
Built-in editor. It is simple and easy to use WordPress thanks mainly to the intuitive built-in editor. Formatting text, links, inserting images and videos – all this can be done in a couple of clicks.
WordPress weaknesses
Security. Do you think is WordPress a secure platform? It will be okay if you say no, many programmers think so. But this is not always the case. WordPress has security weaknesses, but nowadays there are no completely secure platforms.
It is difficult to monitor security because it’s written carelessly (a bunch of plug-ins, themes, etc.), and it’s simply unrealistic to keep track of the features and vulnerabilities of all of them. Moreover, WP is one of the most popular platforms, that’s why it is hacked very often. (there are a lot of websites created on WordPress, and if some vulnerability was found, then 99% that it will be everywhere).
Installing and using third-party plugins and themes is another WordPress disaster. Developers write as they want and negligently – as a result, there are many problems with security, compatibility and speed.
Routing. Certain problems with building URLs. Specialists in website promotion love this scary word. Its structure is important to them. It is possible to make an individual structure, but there are many limitations. When using frameworks (for example, Symfony or ASP.NET MVC), there are no such problems.
Image storage in WordPress. When an image is uploaded to the media library, WordPress cuts it into different sizes. 3 sizes are set by default. But if you want to set your standard, WordPress will create 6 files per 1 uploaded image even if you want to insert the original image on the page and you do not need the rest. If we upload another 300 images, there will be 1800 files. But what if we already have installed plugins, which also add their size? How many files will be created per 1 image then?
Conclusion
User-friendly website management interface, ease of installation and use, thousands of ready-made plugins and templates and the low barriers of programmers’ entry contribute to the high popularity of WordPress. These properties correspond to everything that is so crucial for a typical webmaster or a person, who needs a small website.
Summarizing, we can say that, in general, it makes sense to carry out the development of the website according to the principle from simple to complex. For a start, WordPress can be suitable for you, but as your project progresses, most likely, you will have to think about using frameworks.