If one name has risen to the top and needs little introduction in the web development field it is WordPress. What started out as an easy to use blogging platform, slowly grew into a popular open source CMS, and today runs all sorts of enterprise and non-enterprise projects all over the world.
It seems today, no matter what the app, WordPress at least comes up as an option to consider in development; and why wouldn’t it? It has everything going for it. For iPhone in 2010 there used to be a cliche “there’s an app for that!” For WordPress there truly, likely, is a plugin for ‘that’.
As a firm, we offer WordPress development for rapid and economical solutions. For projects that expect to scale quite significantly, we might advise against a WordPress platform app. However, there is no denying that involving WordPress saves significant development costs.
Let’s discuss some pros and cons of WordPress.
WordPress Strengths:
- Security: in web apps any point of input and output really has to be looked at carefully for security vulnerabilities.Unfortunately web apps are essentially all about inputs and outputs; so this becomes tedious. WordPress’ core has good security measures. So when you start out with WordPress as your building framework you know you are in good hands for much of your input and output.
- Rapid development: as already mentioned above; any app with many non-traditional CMS functions can still be built significantly quicker (and for cheaper) with WordPress as opposed to another framework due to the massive mount of features already available for free.
- Mature Admin Controls: WordPress has a good admin panel framework and as long as you develop your own features right, you can deliver a mature administration suite for any project. With a nifty trash bin, no one in the administration team can truly loose critical data accidentally with a wrong click.
- Versatility: this is the greatest achievement of WordPress in my opinion. Their hooking architecture truly has made almost no web app project impossible (or even difficult)! A true shining star for all to follow in the future!
My reservations with WordPress:
- With power comes great guzzling of resources. WordPress packs a punch in terms of what it offers to developers; unfortunately it also packs a punch when taking up server resources. A typical run of a basic WordPress page can take ~19MB in memory usage and ~0.5 seconds in completion time (with xDebug enabled on the server). That’s heavy.However, there are plenty of scalability solutions for WordPress readily available; from plugins to AWS server products so most projects can survive with such server demands.
- Caution with plugins: I always advise caution when employing third party plugins with your WordPress app. You always have to ensure they’re made to be secure and also scalable. Ideally, your team invests in making as many plugins in house as budget and time allows.
- Core and Plugin upgrades: there was one organizations I worked at for a a short while, where my daily chore in the morning was to check up on the latest release of security vulnerabilities for the plugins and core of WordPress we had running in our projects; and report to the team. Imagine!Everyday checking a security bulletin for 10-15 plugins! While this was a good office-procedure on my employer’s part, it opened my eyes to how difficult update management is with WordPress!
- A Hacker’s Fetish: There was a client I launched a WordPress corporate website for once; and they suffered from a DOS (denial of service) attack in their first month! Rumours were it was plotted by someone from their past; however the point remains, they were able to use WordPress’ well known architecture to their advantage when carrying out the DOS attack. It took us two days to combat it.
When advising clients we look at the client’s budget and project requirements before recommending a solution.
By: Mustafa Ghayyur
July 7th, 2018
