WordPress is best known as a blogging platform, but it can be much more than that. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system, and while it is designed to fulfil the role of a blogging platform out of the box, it can be modified, extended and changed to serve many other roles, including supporting online magazines, member sites and shopping carts.
Customisation Options.WordPress can be customised through plug-ins, widgets and themes. Plug-ins extend the functionality of the site in numerous ways, allowing everything from podcasting to photo-gallery hosting. Widgets are small extensions that can be dropped on to an existing site to add extra content — for example adding a Facebook or Twitter feed. Themes change the look of the website.
Because WordPress is open source, it is easy for web developers and designers to make their own changes to the platform. Many large, high-traffic websites are based on WordPress, but the version that they are running has been changed significantly compared to the core WordPress code that is available to download from WordPress.org.
It's this freedom and customisability that makes WordPress so powerful and so popular. Many developers, however, fail to take advantage of the customisation options that are available to them. More than 20% of the websites online today are powered by WordPress, but the most successful are the ones that have been customised extensively. If you fail to customise the theme and functionality of your website before you launch it, then your visitors will think of the site as 'just another WordPress blog', and this is not the kind of image you want to put forward for your brand.
Security and Functionality.WordPress itself is quite easy to use. Auto-installers such as Fantastico make it easy for non-technical end users to install and manage the CMS without having to worry about back-end management, FTP and MySQL. Once the system is up and running, the admin panel makes searching for and installing plug-ins and themes easy. In addition, images, videos and audio files can be embedded into posts using the WYSIWYG editor. Users do not need to understand any HTML or CSS to make attractive, professional-looking sites.
One of the main drawbacks of WordPress for enterprise level solutions, is that due to its popularity it is a primary target for hackers. According to The Register, at least 15,769 WordPress sites were compromised in 2016. The code base also needs plug-ins to help with core essentials like SEO and can be slow and inefficient on sites with a larger number of pages.
The real world security issues and vulnerabilities that arise when using a WordPress platform must be properly weighed up by any serious business who does not want their security to be compromised.
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