PROS:
Easy Content Updates: Possibly the number one reason to use WordPress as a CMS. WordPress is a simple system to operate and simple enough to install. Basic sites can be set up with easy access to manage all the page text and images. With a little upfront of technical work, there are many ways to set up custom modules and text areas, that once implemented, can easily be accessed and edited by anyone with basic computer skills. Simplicity and its fast construction are two of the main advantages of the system.
SEO Integration: The system is not particular SEO friendly, but a number of plugins can be installed to make up for it. These plugins allow for basic SEO additions to each page, including Meta Title, Meta Description and H1 tags, used by search engines to determine search results listings. Some of these plugins can even give you an estimate on how well your site is optimised for SEO.
E-Commerce: WordPress does have a variety of e-commerce plugins available to work within the existing themes to allow for cart processing, ordering, and even shipping. Many of these basic plugins are free.
Optimised for Tablet/Mobile/PC: Properly setting up a responsive theme for your site is extremely important for your business. It insures that your content and branding is consistent and usable on all devices, giving a positive experience to any potential customer or client visiting your site. WordPress offers simple starter themes but in the hands of a skilled developer, there is an opportunity to create complex custom themes with this same functionality.
Built for Blogging: WordPress started as a blog engine and blogging is still at the platform’s core. If you want to keep fresh content on your site all the time, setting up and maintaining a basic blog in WordPress is simple and easy.
Large Developer Community: The WordPress developer community is the largest of its kind. Users are constantly improving the site software. WordPress is widely used by skilled developers and hobbyist alike. Anyone can contribute to the source code that makes the platform better, so there is a huge community of support.
CONS:
Custom Layouts and Templates can be tricky: As we mentioned, WordPress offers plenty of basic templates and layouts to choose from. Unfortunately, these templates are not designed to further your particular brand and there is the possibility you may not want your site to look like everybody else’s site! If you choose a template with too many functions that you are not using, you could end up with a disastrously slow website. Having a properly customised website, requires experienced responsive website designers and developers, that will make sure your site fits all of your business needs. Of course you can customise your pages, spend a decent amount of time updating style sheets, editing content, etc. but let’s be honest, it is not as easy to customise for non developers or for those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders.
Functionality: Remember WordPress started as Blog Engine and is built for blogging? Well, all the functionality that makes it easy to constantly change content can be overkill for a site that requires infrequent updates. All the themes functionality, plugins, database queries, can lead to slower load and response times, so a straight forward responsive HTML site with CSS and JavaScript might be better for your needs.
Also WordPress can be pretty finicky on how it interprets content you add. If you paste content from Word, for example, it could introduce lots of garbage code. If you work in the text/source mode, you will end up getting annoyed with the way WordPress cleans up your code. And if you accidentally mess something up, you will properly end up deleting everything and start again.
Software needs Frequent Upgrades: With WordPress, various updates to the main system and plug-ins get released several times a year. This is to combat pirates and hackers, as well as to provide improvements to code and templates. Updates are great, but sometimes with WordPress, when your themes, templates or your plugins get updated, it breaks something else. You want to make sure you have the proper skills to make these updates yourself or that you work with a web developer, to ensure your site software is always up to date. An upgrade can easily turn into a downgrade if things don’t work well together.
SEO: WordPress search is limited. Results are sorted by date, not relevance and there are no advanced searching options. Because WordPress doesn’t automatically do some of the more technical SEO tasks, you can still add a few plugins to truly optimise your site for search. But, with WordPress, while you can install plugins that helps the SEO, due to the lack of flexibility in the system, it cannot reach the level of performance of SEO that can be reached with a specifically characterised website.
Security Flaws: Since WordPress usage is so large, this makes it very attractive to potential hackers. As such, it’s extremely important to keep your WordPress site up to date with the latest patches. Early in 2017, nearly 2 million WordPress sites were attacked and defaced after a serious vulnerability in the content management system was found.
Optimised for Tablet/Mobile/PC: To be honest, basic and free themes look like they were created a decade ago. You need to purchase themes that are more responsive, but even those can have issues on mobile devices with breakpoints that don’t seem to correspond to common mobile screen sizes.
You are not different: WordPress sites tend to look similar to each other, even after theme and colour adjustments. The question is whether a company that invests a large amount of time and effort in PR wants its website to look like many others?
Overall, WordPress is certainly great CMS option for many people, creating a website is straight forward and simple. However, if you want to customise the look and functionality of your template, you will have to posses robust web development skills, or hire a developer. Surely, you do not want to look at a one platform fits all solution.
If you are looking for a straight forward easy to use CMS, with highly customised page layouts, great functionality, intuitive visitor experience as well as being responsive to all device sizes, you would probably be better off investing in a bespoke website that is built to match your every requirement.