WordPress is the undisputed king of Content Management Systems. It dominates the web and slaps down challengers with impunity. Yet heavy is the head that wears the web crown.

The boss on top is always subject to criticism from the masses below, and many of the most common critiques are grounded firmly in truth.

The fact is WP isn’t always the ideal solution. Often it can actually be an unwieldy, insecure, and under-performant source of frustration to developers and site owners everywhere. That’s why there’s a growing contingent of users looking for premium Drupal, or MotoPress themes, in fact, most people still prefer Joomla among the ready-made solutions.

The complaints are well documented and numerous. So in the interest of fueling a little bit of public debate, compiled here for your pleasure, entertainment, and general information are the most commonly cited and demeritorious disadvantages of the WordPress CMS.

Complaint #1: WordPress Security is Subject to Vulnerabilities

Here’s one you’ve probably heard before. WordPress isn’t secure. Let’s harken back a moment to the king metaphor. When you’re the king of anything, you’ve got to keep a close eye on dissidents. In this case the rebel faction would be the malicious hackers constantly developing worms, viruses, and all manner of other malcontented malware to destroy your precious content. And they’ve been fairly successful in their assassination attempts.

WP’s reliance on plugins is a consistent backdoor entry to anybody with a devious mind and an educational background in PHP. The only way to safeguard against attack is constant vigilance. You’ve got to arm your site with/by…

• A security scanner
• A dedicated hosting service (to prevent infections stemming from other users on the same server)
• Frequently changed complex/unique passwords
• SFTP encryptions
• File permissions
• Consistent database checks
• Changing your WordPress keys in wp-config.php
• Changing your table prefix
• Preventing search spiders from indexing your Admin section
• Stopping users from browsing your directory
• Removing footprints
• Reading the code in every plugin you download
• Constant updates

Notice how that last one is in bold? There’s a reason for that. Unfortunately keeping your WordPress version current can cause problems of its own.

Complaint #2: Updates Ruin Everything…

…Except security, thereby making them a necessary evil. The worst kind of evil. The kind you have to tolerate.

The problem with updates is they don’t take into account any of your past customizations or plugins. That means if any of the aforementioned aren’t compatible with the latest WP rollout, you could end up shutting your entire website down. And it’s never ending with them.

Almost immediately after installation, you’re bombarded with updates, that aren’t exactly speedy when it comes to processing. There’s always a chance than any of the numerous updates you’re required to apply to your theme will corrupt the database, laying waste to all the content you’ve created, and unless you’re making backups all the time, it’s almost an inevitability that this will happen sooner or later.

Of course, one problem leads to another. So even if you safeguard your site by keeping up with all the latest updates, you’ve still got to worry about the exponential increase in your site’s weight…

Complaint #3: WordPress is Sloooooooooow

While performance isn’t always an issue for WP sites, it happens enough to where the detractors are furious. The page load speeds of WP sites are notorious for getting bogged down with extra processes running because of heavy plugins, crowded databases, and the highly unintuitive codebase.

A number of other factors contribute to WP sluggishness and they all have complicated workarounds. Unreliable hosting, gigantic images, multiple post revisions, lousy “custom” themes, improperly or poorly optimized homepages, no caching implemented, or the lack of a reliable CDN are all likely culprits.

But beyond all that, WP really requires a ton of baseline CPU power as well as data storage. So it will definitely take a lot of extra work on your part to make sure your WP site is running at optimum capacity.

Much of this effort could be eased if only you had a useful support community. But wait! WordPress has an enormous open-source community so that shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Sigh.

Complaint #4: The “Support” Leaves a Lot to Be Desired

The vaunted WP community isn’t exactly the end all be all of support structures. The problem is that there’s no actual “support” it’s all users who’ve taken what was essentially a blog engine created by a very bright teenager and just stacked new functions on top of it one after another. This being the case, the community often takes the path of least resistance.

Because WordPress is built for the non-technical masses, the most popular and prominent solutions within the support community are not always necessarily the best or most effective, but rather the quickest, easiest, and least expensive (free plugins).

Moreover, any problems you encounter don’t have easy step by step instructions, and if they do, you’ll have to dig through numerous forum threads to find them. And unfortunately, if you’re not already familiar with the more technical aspects of WordPress development, you’re likely to feel a bit lost when drudging through the jargon. Even more problematic, many of the posters on the support forums are simple enthusiasts with less dev. experience than you. Now there are plenty of intelligent and helpful posters out there, but they are only a vocal minority in comparison to an even more vocal mob.

Complaint #5: Getting kicked off your WP dashboard

This happens all the time for more reasons than you can count. There’s nothing more frustrating than bgeing unable to access your content, and it really is a frequent problem for many users with no immediate solutions. It’s just guess and check until you are no longer locked out. It can be anything from a hack to an ISP issue. Good luck.

Complaint #6: A Lot of the Plugins Kind of Suck

There are some major defects in the open-source model. One of them being that having anybody being able to contribute means that there’s no way to filter out the morons. For this reason, you have plenty of poorly built plugins saturating the free plugin section of WordPress.org.

Often these plugins are built for bloggers with little to no experience working with even a smidgeon of code. So despite being free, the plugins are usually crappy. Not only are that, but the few jewels out that are out there remain hidden within a sea of mediocrity. Even if you do find a plugin that meets your needs, you’re almost just as likely to find that it hasn’t been updated in a few years.

Complaint #7: Nobody Likes PHP

Finally we come to the crux of the issue. PHP is not what one would call a popular coding language. It’s awkward, inconsistent, and it’s filled with undefined behavior. It’s essentially a programming language that was developed for people who don’t know how to program. Thus it drives actual programmers bananas.

I don’t think I can say it any better than this:

That concludes our list. Have any further complaints you’d like to add? What are the WP disadvantages that drive you crazy? Let us hear them in the comments.