WordPress has been the biggest platform for content creation since the past few years. With heavy popularity comes heavy misconceptions about it. Worry not since we are here to debunk some popular misconceptions about WordPress and impart some knowledge regarding WordPress as a whole.
WordPress is Easy
It is absolutely true that WordPress has been made in such a way that everyone can easily understand the software and use it to make different types of websites and customize it the way we want but that doesn’t mean you download the WordPress software and then just sit back and watch your website being made magically. You have some major work to do too. WordPress can offer you guidelines and the community can provide you with solutions that can help solve your queries and problems but it is you who is going to make things happen and take the upper hand over managing your website so that it can actually function and work better.
Being proactive is the first thing you could do and be aware of everything that’s happening with WordPress, their latest updates, changes and new versions. The WordPress community is very huge with a lot of helping users who actually care about WordPress. You will have enough courses, tutorials, blogs, articles and information regarding even the slightest of problems that you come across on WordPress. So WordPress isn’t a piece of cake but if you are passionate enough, you will never get stuck.
Only Blogs are made using WordPress
WordPress was previously started to make blogging websites and this was more than a decade ago when Matt Mullenweg started WordPress as a personal blogging and content publishing platform. However with advancing years, eventually WordPress evolved to an advanced platform which offers services to create wide ranges of websites.
Today, gyms, hotels, celebrities, movies, artists, industries, businesses, fashion magazines, design studios, portfolios, online stores and almost everyone own a website out of which most of them are made using WordPress. Moreover, there are thousands of themes which are specific for each user and their purpose.
Update WordPress In Just a Click
Updating WordPress has never been that easy and it surely isn’t going to take a single click to update the entire WordPress dashboard. Going through the changelog should be the first thing you should do before updating WordPress. You can always skip the update if you don’t want that feature from the update.
If you want to have more control over what is changing in your WordPress update, you should make some changes to the wp-config.php file or add filters to the functions.php files of the themes and plugins. You can also enable or disable automatic updates individually.
WordPress is not secure
WordPress being not secure can be stated as a huge rumor. WordPress is not comparatively more or less prone to security threats as compared to any other CMS. We all know that no software is completely safe from security issues. Infact WordPress ranks higher among the other CMS when it comes to security.
This is logically because of the increasing use of WordPress, it can be an easy target of choice for the hackers to hack into. WordPress is an open source software which has a huge community of active users who report bugs continuously and more frequently than other CMS when security is involved.
WordPress.com is same as WordPress.org
The ones which have just started with the WordPress will definitely fall for this misconception. The thing is that out of the WordPress community no one knows that WordPress.org exists. WordPress.org organization offers open source software with which you can download and install and use it to build your website.
On the other hand WordPress.com offers you services and packs along with its hosting service and server space for your blogs or other types of website. With WordPress.org you won’t have to pay much for the features you don’t want. You will have a lot of freedom to customize anything on your website if you make it. But you will have a little control over what you do using wordpress.com.
WordPress Is Not For Smaller Devices
The mobile phone traffic actually overtook the traffic from traditional desktops last year. Majority of traffic actually comes from mobile phones nowadays and this misconception needs to vanish instantly. The consumption of mobile phones have led to a drastic increase in the usage of WordPress on mobile phones.
Along with that, WordPress is pretty mobile friendly and all the features can be easily used in a mobile environment. The WordPress themes have started to evolve and adapt to any screen size perfectly. One such example is our Total drag & drop WordPress Theme which features a fluid responsive design that is very common to most well coded themes today.
More Plugins Better Website
This is one of the biggest misconceptions among the users in the WordPress community. People have been recklessly downloading all the highly rated and best plugins after visiting the WordPress blogs regarding the top lists of must have plugins and think that this will directly make their website better in terms of everything but little do they know that these plugins can drastically affect your website creating numerous problems and flaws. These problems can lead to a leggy and slow website which can drive off the website traffic.
That doesn’t mean you should stop using plugins. Use only the essential plugins which have a well written code and are compatible with all the major themes, builders and other plugins. The plugins which lead to too many HTTP requests, increasing database queries and which consumes too much processing power should be avoided. You should know that one bad plugin with bad code can bring down the entire site.
Plugins can also be a potential entry point for many malicious software. It should be very important to screen plugins for quality before installing them to your WordPress dashboard and activating them on your live website.
Final Thoughts
There are many other misconceptions that the users and non users have been having for ages and its high time that everyone should be aware of them all and start using WordPress for all of your website needs.
