WordPress is a free open-source Content Management System (CMS) that is known for being the ‘brochure-style’ website go-to. In our latest YouTube Video, our Director Will Williamson speaks about the limitations of using WordPress and the need for businesses to move away from the outdated CMS.
In previous years, WordPress established its strong reputation and popularity through its ease of accessibility, as it is free and accessible to anyone and everyone. Not only is the CMS reachable by the public, it also has a number of pre-built themes and templates which give you a ‘shortcut’ into putting a website together. Although WordPress is the world's biggest CMS system, and it has been popular amongst businesses, in recent years, there has slowly been an increase in the number of issues with WordPress, especially following the worldwide WordPress hack, in September 2020.
In this blog article, we will remind ourselves of the key issues with using WordPress, that Will outlined during the video, and discuss the advantages of the newer CMS, HubSpot. Therefore, we will also discuss JDR’s move from using WordPress to HubSpot CMS and how this has already optimised website visibility, improved website performance and opened up opportunities for content.
How Does WordPress’ Outdated Structure Increase Threats?
Unfortunately, WordPress’ outdated architecture is a major issue that casts doubts on its future successes. Having an outdated CMS structure makes it incredibly difficult to enhance the security of your website as this eliminates protection from vulnerabilities that can lead to significant cyber hacks. For example, in September 2020, there was a worldwide hack which affected more than a million websites due to a vulnerability in a particular plugin called ‘File Manager’.
As the digital landscape has evolved significantly since the first-ever launch of WordPress, and cyber crimes are becoming more sophisticated and harder to discover, it is important for the CMS to stay up to date with modern demands. This is more important now than ever before and failure to do so can result in WordPress being at the risk of abandonment and getting swapped for alternative website hosting platforms.
Although the CMS platform is very popular amongst clients at JDR, we have taken the decision to stop developing new websites in WordPress because of its increasing problems and the high chances of prolonged exposure to potential cyber-attacks and hackers.
So, what makes WordPress outdated?
Third-party plugins
Third-party plugins are separate pieces of software that plug into your WordPress website. The functions of these plugins are to allow you to build upon the pre-built themes and customise your website features or pages to suit your brand/business. The simplicity of website plugins means you can add new features to your site, allowing you to store different types of content on your website.
However, in our Youtube video, we explore how due to the increasingly digital era that we are currently living in, having several plugins on your website may not be the safest route for your business. Along with increasing the chances of cyber hackers accessing your website through multiple third-party plugins, plugins also make your page load speed a lot slower, resulting in lower Google ranks. The alternative route to using plugins would be to build your own website on WordPress instead of using a combination of plugins and pre-made website themes. However, this raises the limitations of large time consumption and performing very technical tasks without a support service at hand.
Page speed
According to IMPACT, many businesses that use WordPress face the common issue of having a slow page speed. The speed at which your website is loading can be very detrimental to your Google ranking, especially after Google’s 2021 algorithm update. Within this update, Google decided that page experience and core web vitals matter more than ever before, page speed included. Therefore, if your website speed is not performing, this can result in a poor customer experience, loss of some rankings in Google, and fewer customers visiting your site.
Updates
WordPress’ frequent website updates occur on a regular basis, which typically would be great for when businesses are trying to keep everything up to date and improve site performance. Having said that, as WordPress websites include multiple plugins and pre-built themes, this means that these features also need to be updated.
This can cause issues where plugins or pre-built themes on WordPress are no longer available or do not function correctly on the newly updated website. Consequently, this process can leave businesses in a number of tricky situations such as their website is unable to fully convert to the newer version, IT support may be needed to fix bugs on the website from the update or the previous version of the site before the update is now lost with half of the plugin features missing.
The Benefits of Moving Your Website from WordPress to HubSpot CMS
At the start of 20201, following the worldwide WordPress hack, we made a collective decision to adopt the HubSpot platform as our new CMS. Quickly after adopting HubSpot we saw incredible benefits to the JDR website, so we decided to also move a number of our clients from WordPress to HubSpot.
Below shows a list of a few of the many benefits that HubSpot has had on both our site and our client’s websites since moving to HubSpot early this year.
- Loading speed has improved significantly.
- Security on HubSpot is much higher.
- Improved Google rankings, as a result of better website user experience.
- Any changes to website content can be made much easier.
- HubSpot has knowledge of code CSS, making edits to website pages, layout, and design much easier and quickly doable without technical support.
- HubSpot has detailed analytics tools that develop detailed reports, allowing you to gain reliable insights into website conversion rates.
- As HubSpot is on a subscription as opposed to being free, this shows you are paying for a higher quality CMS.
What Can Your Business Take From This?
It is important to note that WordPress is a very established website platform and it has carried many websites to success since its launch. However, the digital world is moving quickly, and it is so important for CMS to be kept up to date and stay ‘on the ball’, to eliminate chances of security threats, a decline in Google rankings, and damages to website conversion rates.
JDR Group provide web design services and as a Diamond HubSpot Partner we specialise in HubSpot CMS website development. Get in touch today by phone on 01332 343281, or by email at info@jdrgroup.co.uk.
