WordPress vs custom website – 8 reasons why you should not use WordPress

If you are browsing our website, you have certainly heard about WordPress.

It’s the most popular CMS (content management system) in today’s Internet – as stated in the w3techs.com survey, the percentage of WordPress websites using any CMS is over 64.5% (over 450 million!). This is about 40% of all Internet websites with more than 58000 plugins, 8000 themes and countless companies that use WordPress on their website or develop websites just in WordPress CMS.

On the other hand, if you take a look at the most popular websites on the whole Internet, the percentage of WordPress market share rapidly decreases. This is a sign that the biggest companies in the world are turning away from this so-great solution. According to StackOverflow’s 2020 survey, WordPress was the most dreaded platform of all surveyed developers and there might be a reason for it.

8 reasons why you should not use WordPress

For anyone who’s wondering whether to stick to wordpress or custom website, here, we present 8 arguments why you should stay away from WordPress and why a custom website is best:

1. Customization options

At a first glance, WordPress websites can be fully customized and there are lots and lots of themes that you can use. But, if you would like to change the appearance of any component of your website or even add a new feature, it becomes a living horror. If you would like to set up a website for your business using WP, you will quickly find that it’s not as easy as the Internet promised. If you need some fancy animations, custom elements, or anything else to stand out from the crowd, WordPress is not a place for you. Your business website is your business card – it should be beautiful, distinguishable and a pleasure to look at – and this will require a lot of hard work with WP.

2. "Free"website making tool

WordPress is not completely free – and you should know that before you install it on your hosting. Many of these 8000 themes we’ve mentioned before are pricey, they are not completely bug-free, require further customization and at this point, you still do not have a website. Add a “freemium” plugin for every feature you would like to have – like multilanguage versions of your website, automatic backups, advanced contact forms or website analytics – and then you will find out that your website is starting to cost a lot.

3. Ease of use

WordPress is hard to use! Customizing a WP theme requires at least some knowledge of CSS, HTML and PHP to obtain the results you really want. Furthermore, many features that you would like to change or add are often not a “15-minute jobs” and will require you to spend several hours Googling a solution to your problem just to find out that it won’t work with your current theme. There is a reason that WordPress is the most dreaded platform for several years. Suddenly, you will find out that to change a date separator on your Blog page, you need to meddle with classes, because the separator is hardcoded in your theme. Install some of these great, free plugins and, suddenly, they will come back to you with a 500 error because nobody has ever told you that they cannot be used simultaneously. Speaking of plugins…

According to StackOverflow, WordPress is the most hated platform according to 67% of developers.

4. Plugins - a great way to ruin your precious site

There are lots of great WP plugins that you can use to quickly implement features you like – like calendars, contact forms, Elementor or other. Although it might be tempting to use them all on your site, the sad truth is that they will slow down your site significantly. Installing too many plugins might yield a page that loads for over 10 seconds – and nobody likes that. Furthermore, plugins can collide with themselves resulting in a spontaneous crash of your site in the worst possible moment. Even if two plugins are working correctly, for now, you can’t know if an update will not change the state of things.

5. Search Engine Optimization

By default, WordPress allows only for default search engine optimization. Fully optimizing your website is a tough task that will often need help from professionals. Even if you properly optimize your WP website, it will be slower than a custom-made website in almost any case. Nowadays, high rankings in search engines are crucial for your online business – and you should take every step that you can to improve your Page Rank.

6. Security

It’s great that WordPress is used by almost everybody, right?

Not really.

The fact that WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Internet makes it a perfect target for hackers and spambots. Imagine that somebody discovers a vulnerability that allows deleting all your precious pages or blog posts in a matter of seconds, or even worse, infect your clients’ computers through your business website. Even if WordPress CMS is constantly developed and all security bugs are getting fixed, you can’t say that about plugins that are rarely updated and are authored by the external development team you don’t know and cannot contact in case of any problems.

7. Slow performance

Even if you tried your best to optimize your website, WordPress websites often use a lot of unnecessary files, resource-heavy plugins and databases that will slow down your site significantly. Page speed is a crucial factor in SEO that should always be as optimized as it could be – and there’s a limit to which you can optimize a WordPress site. You should consider Single Page Applications (SPAs) instead of WordPress if you don’t really need to update your content or change it frequently. The problem becomes worse when your business grows – and there are more users on your page. Scaling a large WordPress site can be a nightmare – and will cost you a huge amount of money.

8. Needs continuous supervision

If you really want your site to be secure, robust and fast, stay away from WordPress. Your plugins and WordPress will need several updates in a year that might make your website go down without any notice. If you want a solution that will not require you to constantly check if your website is online, you should not use WordPress by any means and move to a custom website.

Do professionals use WordPress all the time?

Maybe not all of them, but yes, many of them still do. And here are some of the reasons WordPress has become the ultimate choice for professionals.

Flexibility

One of the most common reasons why web developers choose WordPress is because of its flexibility. It offers a vast range of themes and plugin options. That means users can create custom WordPress websites by changing the color, theme, appearance, layout, and more based on their preferences.

Beginner-Friendly

Whether a professional developer or a beginner, WordPress is regarded as one of the most beginner-friendly CMSs because it doesn’t require any coding.

Most people believe anyone can create custom WordPress websites just by watching YouTube tutorial videos, though I believe it is not “that easy”.

Cost-Effectiveness

WordPress is an open-source platform, and the core software is pretty free. However, even if you have to pay an amount to access certain themes and plugins, they are usually comparatively cheap.

Time-Saving

Rather than starting everything from scratch, developers often prefer WordPress because it makes the task quick and time-saving.

How Many Websites Use WordPress?

Despite all the debates and misconceptions, WordPress is still one of the most commonly used CMSs in the world by developers. As of 2024, WordPress holds about 63.1% of the global CMS market size, which is 10x more than its closest competitor.

While there are more than 1.98 billion websites worldwide, more than 818 million of them are built using WordPress. That is around 43.1% of the total websites.

On top of that, the number keeps increasing, adding around 500 WordPress websites every day.

Here are some more statistics on WordPress:

• The percentage of the use of WordPress among the Top 1M Websites in the world is 28.7%.

• The percentage of the use of WordPress among the Top 100K Websites in the world is 29.65%.

• The percentage of the use of WordPress among the Top 10K Websites in the world is 29.41%.

To summarize, WordPress might be a good solution if you need to quickly create a simple website without any sophisticated features. If you think that you might need to customize your website in the near future, you should consider scalable, custom-made solutions that will cost you less money in the result.