Top 5 Reasons WordPress is Not Easy

WordPress is sold as the “most user-friendly” platform to manage your website. In some ways this is true, but there are many things that make it hard for business owners to do simple things on their site. Don’t get discouraged when you try to make changes on your site and they become nightmares – WordPress is not as easy as it is made out to be.

Below are the 5 top reasons WordPress can be a pain  – and a few ways to make them better.

1. Trying to style content on a page can be impossible.
   Every theme has different ways of styling content on a page. It can be short codes, visual page editors or nothing at all. How do you know what to use? Stick with the visual editor and only use the built-in formatting tools such as B and i and the heading presets.
   
   Shortcodes are often temperamental and if you ever switch your theme in the future, they will no longer work (same goes for visual page editors).
2. Constant updates for plugins and themes are overwhelming.
   Everyday, a new update pops up telling you to update a plugin on your site. But how do you know whether you need that update, if it will break your site, or if it is a necessity because of a security risk? Most business owners do not hit that “update” button because they don’t know what will happen. The problem with never updating is that over time your plugins will become incompatible with WordPress and other plugins and they may have security holes that need to be patched. All of the malware infections I have seen were caused by an out of date plugin. The best advice for you is to run a backup of your site and then make the update. There are not many other options.
3. There are all of these options and I don’t know what they do.
   When you are writing a post or new page on your site, there are a multitude of custom theme options, excerpts, trackbacks, comments, oh my! Most of these options are unnecessary and are already set in your global site options. A trick to cut down on the clutter: go to “Screen Options” at the top right corner of the page. Then un-click all options that you do not use.
   
4. Any customization to the design of the site can seem like working in the Matrix.
   You want to add something to the header of your site, or a new section to your footer? Unfortunately, tasks like these do take coding knowledge to accomplish. Some themes will have more options built in, but if not, get ready to break out the code. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers for this one. You may need to hire someone to help with custom changes if you can’t do them yourself.
5. Security is a concern but I don’t know what to do.
   Security may be WordPress’s biggest achilles heel at the moment. Because it is so popular, WordPress is the target of most spamming and malware attacks. There are, however, a few things you can do to help. First, update your password to something strong. This is the easiest, most effective way to protect your site. Next, try keeping WordPress and your plugins up to date – this will close any vulnerabilities that have been fixed. Lastly, install a plugin such as WordFence, which help you scan your site for any issues.

WordPress is by far the best platform you can have for your website, even with these issues. Once you tame the issues, WordPress becomes an even more powerful tool, with less of the headaches.

What issues make WordPress hard for you?