3 Reasons why Wordpress is not a good choice for your web platform

There are about 70 million WordPress websites on the Internet – spawning 47 million new content pages each month. And, there are hundreds of thousands of developers and web development companies offering WordPress only services. The WordPress eco system is so massive and wide spread that it is considered a web development platform in itself. But, is WordPress truly capable of powering a full-fledged web portal?

If you ask this to a WordPress developer, he’ll have you believe that WordPress is like potter’s clay which can be shaped into any imaginable object. And sure enough, people have built business websites, community websites, online stores and more on WordPress.

From ground up, WordPress was designed for blogging. So on a basic installation of WordPress, all you can do is add posts, create static pages and activate built-in widgets for social media feeds. The native functionality of WordPress is good enough for publishing blogs and business websites. But, if you are looking at a robust content intensive website with portal like functionality, then native functionality will only take you so far.

For heavy duty applications, developers integrate custom built or third party plug-ins which enhance the functionality of WordPress. And, notable online publishers have spent thousands and millions of dollars on customizing WordPress. Now, this is comparable to hitching a trailer to a small car, when a small truck can serve the purpose more effectively. Any WordPress developer will tell you that WordPress offers great performance no matter what you use it for, but here are 3 points which prove that WordPress is incapable of powering web portals.

1. Plug-ins work but they don’t collaborate with each other

Most WordPress projects utilize a mix of third party plug-ins, which may have been developed by different vendors. You can imbibe the desired functionality by getting the right plug-in, but how do you make them collaborate? For instance, if you have installed events plug-in and an ad manager plug-in, how do you create ad zones on the events section of your website? The problem with plug-ins is that they integrate well with native functionalities of WordPress, but if you want your third party plug-ins to collaborate with each other then it calls for expensive customizations.

2. Unfriendly back-end for managing add-on content

WordPress offers a friendly backend UI for managing native functionalities such as the blog. However, third party plug-ins gets limited backend real estate for housing the controls, so usability is often compromised. This results in tedious workflow for people who add content and manage the website.

Web portals thrive on user generated content, and most web portals allow end-users to contribute articles, event listings, products etc. So, it makes sense to have a centralized user management system, and an end-user dashboard through which end-users can manage their contributions. With third party plug-ins sourced from different vendors, you can’t have a unified end-user dashboard for managing content contributions across different modules. THus, content management becomes a tedious chore for site administrators.

5. Insecure and vulnerable to hacking

WordPress is by far the most widely used CMS, which makes it an easy target to hacking attacks. In December 2012, over 600,000 WordPress users reported blocked log-in attempts, and by the end of the first quarter of 2013, 3 million plus blocked log-in attempts were reported. It has also been reported that an unknown group of people is attempting to create a botnet of infected servers by creating a vast network of infected WordPress installations.

For web portals, security is of paramount importance, because service failure can affect thousands of users. Considering the security issues, running a web portal on WordPress is a high risk proposal, because it will have a negative impact on credibility of the web portal.