Fed up with WordPress? -

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), powering over 25% of the world’s ten million largest websites and almost 60% of all websites using a CMS – but that doesn’t mean it is the best. We’ve had a few people come in with concerns over WordPress’ security and reliability – so in this post we’ll discuss some of the common problems with WordPress and show your our solution – Coaster.

If you’re already using WordPress to manage your site, you’ve probably noticed it isn’t perfectly suited to your needs. WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform – not to manage the main content on websites. This means many of its features aren’t really suited, and the platform usually requires a selection of third-party plugins to make it behave like a normal CMS.

Plugin Problems

The primary issue with WordPress is its over-dependence on plugins. As plugins are required for even some of the basic features (you’ll struggle to run WordPress without installing at least five plugins), your site can quickly become overloaded and bloated with plugins, which can have a negative impact on your site’s performance and security. The more plugins you install, the more your website performance and security suffers.

Almost all plugins are created by third-party developers and not reviewed or maintained by WordPress, which can lead to serious problems. There is a huge number of old and out of date plugins still available to download from the plugin repository, and any can be installed into your CMS without any warning about the possible consequences. Old plugins could have serious vulnerabilities which put your site at risk if installed. Inexperienced WordPress users may not be aware of this, and could easily install a range of dangerous plugins.

70% of WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacker attacks

With multiple plugins installed, you are no longer just relying on WordPress to keep your site secure – you’re also relying on the developers of each plugin. If any of the third-party developers fail to patch security issues in their plugins, your site immediately has vulnerabilities which hackers could exploit. They could hijack your content, steal your data, or even take your whole site offline – all of which will severely damage your reputation and cost a lot of time and money to repair.

A recent survey found that 73.2% of the most popular WordPress sites have vulnerabilities that can be detected using free automated tools – showing how big of a problem this is and how easily sites can be targetted.

Unfriendly Updates

Updates can often cause headaches for WordPress users, especially if you use a lot of plugins. While keeping your WordPress installation and all of your plugins up to date sounds like a good idea, it can quickly cause further problems. Even a single plugin update has the potential to bring your site down, leaving you scrambling to find a developer to find out what happened. There’s no quick and easy way to find out if an update will cause problems before you install it – which is a particularly big problem for inexperienced WordPress users, who install updates without thinking twice.

The risk of damaging a site makes some users reluctant to apply updates, which means they miss out on the latest features and could create serious security vulnerabilities.

Trouble building complex, easy to manage themes

The nature of WordPress makes it quite difficult to build themes which have a complex layout and features but are still easy for users to manage. Of course, there are some plugins that make this easier, but that brings us back to the issues above – more plugins means more security issues, problems when updating WordPress, and a slower site. Furthermore, these plugins can still be awkward to manage, especially if you need blocks of  repeating content (such as people’s faces on a meet-the-team page).

Meet the solution – Coaster CMS

For three years we’ve been using our wealth of CMS experience to create Coaster, our own content management system that’s free from the problems associated with WordPress.

Coaster is built on the latest technology to ensure speed, stability, and reliability – and does not get overloaded by plugins. It’s designed to be extremely friendly to users and developers and has key features like a contact form and SEO tools built in (no extra plugins required).

Maintained and supported by the same developers who built it, Coaster is very secure and simple to update. Any new features are always carefully tested to ensure they won’t create further problems when installed.

Our content management system also includes a block-based template system, making it very easy to add content and maintain design consistency. Coaster’s unique “repeater” blocks allow developers and users to easily create hugely flexible websites that can display a wide range of content.

Coaster is also Bluetooth Beacon compatible, so you can interact with the physical web and start using proximity marketing – and our time-specific version control makes it easy to display different content at the time of your choice.

If you’re fed up with your WordPress site or worried about the security risks, contact us to discuss managing your site with Coaster – or find out more at coastercms.org.