Reasons to avoid Wordpress for your author website
Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked on virtually every website platform out there: Wordpress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Pattern, etc.
Wordpress, being one of the first and thus oldest website platforms on the market, has its moments. It’s still the go-to platform for businesses that have incredibly unique, heavily custom-coded requirements for their website’s design.
For example, a wholesale business that needs a shop hidden behind an approved customer log-in system, or a news website that relies heavily on custom-coded article layouts and blog post architecture within the design of their website.
However—for everyone else—Wordpress is clunky, old, and incredibly difficult for internet novices to use and navigate.
Here are a few reasons why you should avoid building your author website on Wordpress.
Wordpress is extremely hard for beginners
Launched 20 years ago, Wordpress is a very old platform in terms of internet years.
This means that the technology and architecture of the internet was a lot different than it is today. While most modern website platforms have advanced editors that allow you to easily drag-and-drop elements to create your page design, Wordpress relies heavily on custom coded elements, a very clunky DIY editor called Gutenberg, and templates.
Released in 2018 to replace Wordpress’s classic page editor, Gutenberg unfortunately still feels extremely outdated.
Even though nearly 60% of all internet traffic came from mobile devices in 2022-2023, Wordpress still doesn’t offer an easy way for customers to edit and rearrange content for the mobile view of their website in their own Gutenberg editor.
You’ll be required to learn their system of columns, groups and a bit of coding language and theory to be able to properly customize your website.
Wordpress ends up costing a lot more with paid plugins
One of the most confusing and frustrating parts of any Wordpress website is the required use of free and paid plugins for what many would assume were out of the box features.
For example, you can’t bulk upload a customer list to Wordpress—even after you subscribe to one of their paid business-level hosting plans. You also can’t bulk update product variants without downloading and paying for a plugin that allows you to do so.
Want to edit the text for a password reset email that you can send to customers in Wordpress? You have to pay for a plug-in to do this—or risk editing the site code yourself and screwing up the base code of your site.
No beginner wants this level of risk involved in making updates involving serious code. It’s intense enough for professionals!
Wordpress doesn’t have a free trial
Instead of offering a free trial to try out the platform and see if you like it—like the majority of modern web design platforms—Wordpress requires you to sign up for a paid subscription before you can even test drive their design platform.
Wordpress allows refunds, but only within the first 14 days of your subscription if you signed up for a one-year or two-year subscription. If you sign up for a monthly plan, then you only have 7 days to get a refund.
Since all of their competitors offer a free trial period—Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, Square, etc—it’s strange that Wordpress doesn’t. It makes you wonder if they know their platform is outdated and hard to use.
