WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg just shared the good news: One out of every four websites on the web is officially powered by WordPress now. (The stats include the top 10 million websites of Alexa.) Twenty-five percent–this is huge.
But just because something or someone is very popular doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best thing ever. (I mean, you know the joke that ends with “millions of flies can’t be wrong”, right?) However, in WordPress’ case, we can’t really say that it’s bad–it has a very long way to be perfect, but it’s not bad software at all.
Yet, ignorance can lead people to thinking that WordPress falls short on important issues like security or performance. In this article, I’m going to debunk some myths about WordPress.
Is WordPress Secure?
Before answering this question, let me ask you some other questions: Do you think the locks on your front door are secure? Do you think Pentagon is secure? Do you think you can trust cats (that constantly plot to kill people)?
Kidding aside, here’s my point: Nothing is 100% secure. Scientists are about to hack our brains–they’ve already discovered ways to read thoughts. Quantum computers are a new hope on securing data, but I’m pretty sure we’ll find a way to hack them as well in less than a century.
How about WordPress? First off, open source software (OSS) are always open to security threats, beucase hackers don’t even have to crack the code–the code is right there on GitHub. But if you have a developer community that’s big enough to found a separate country like WordPress, patching found (and unfound) bugs and security holes isn’t really a big deal.
Having said that, the community isn’t all made up of security mega-experts. From time to time, we encounter security flaws especially in plugins (and themes). The community makes mistakes, and the community fixes those mistakes.
Plus, there’s a whole security team dedicated to keeping WordPress core safe. Check out the Security page on WordPress.org here.
Can You Make WordPress Work On High-Profile Websites?
Short answer: Absolutely.
Long answer: It all boils down to optimizing the resources and using the right setup on your server(s). I personally managed to stand more than 300,000 page views in my personal blog hosted in a shared server. Of course, I had to take some drastic measures but there are websites that take on millions of page views every day, that run on WordPress. (Here’s ten of them, in case you want to see examples.) All you need is some kick-ass hardware, a great server software configuration and a decent setup on WordPress performance optimization.
Conclusion
Granted, these were all some of the shortcomings of WordPress…like, four years ago. But of course, bad names usually stick to brands, even if they fix the issues. Good news is, if someone wants to learn about WordPress today, there are tens, maybe hundreds of articles that argue the aspects of performance, security and other things about WordPress. And unbiased opinions usually give WordPress its due.
What do you think about the (age old) shortcomings of WordPress? Tell us in the Comments section below. And thanks for reading!