You want your business website to be the best-in-class and perform optimally in your industry. To ensure this, you often explore umpteen ways to develop a highly interactive, feature-rich, and scalable website that can generate satisfactory user experiences. Often, such a search ends at WordPress.
The WordPress CMS offers immense capabilities to your business website, which we will discuss in this post. Additionally, we will also discuss major WordPress development issues so that you can eliminate them to get a full-fledged and robust business website.
A brief about WordPress
WordPress is an open-source CMS and a comprehensive tool to manage and control crucial aspects of a website, like content, architecture, and its template system. You can easily create a highly customized website using WordPress without having much technical know-how in website development.
# The global market share of WordPress CMS is 64.3%. (Source)
# If we take into account the top 1000 sites in the world, WordPress’s share is 51.8%.
# WordPress powers more than 43% of global websites and is one of the fastest growing CMS in the world.
# WordPress Plugin directory features more than 58000 plugins (Source)
# Brands like Microsoft, Sony, Target, UPS, Walt Disney, and Xerox are some of the most popular Fortune 500 companies that use WordPress for their websites.
Common WordPress Vulnerabilities
Despite its numerous advantages, WordPress has its fair share of issues. However, the CMS giant doesn’t generally throw any error without reason. Getting acquainted with these can help you ensure robust and unmatched website performance.
1. The Syntax Issue
WordPress developers often encounter this issue when they see a “Parse error/syntax error” on a WordPress site. It simply reflects a problem in the codes. You need to access the specified file shown in the error message using SFTP credentials provided by your web host, go to the functions.php file, and select view/edit. The error message will highlight the line where the error exists, which needs to be fixed by you immediately.
2. The White Screen of Death
This is one of the most annoying WordPress issues- A white blank screen with no message. This can happen due to various reasons, but in the majority of cases, it happens when your website tries to execute an action that exceeds its processing limit.
This can also happen due to a faulty plugin or a theme. Hence, you need to check with each plugin and theme. If the problem persists, expand your WordPress site’s processing capability
3. Internal Server Error
Whenever you have such an error on your WordPress site, there can be a problem with its htaccess file, or again, your website’s memory has reached its limit. As the problem is linked with the server, the htaccess file is responsible for communication between your site and the server. You need to rename your htaccess file and check whether the issue is resolved or not.
4. 404 error Page Not Found
This WordPress issue arises on the server’s end when it’s unable to find your webpage. It can be a broken link or a changed URL. In this case, you must regenerate a new htaccess file or even re-upload it if the former doesn’t work.
5. Connection Timed-Out Error
This is a very common error that generally occurs when a site takes too long to load. There are multiple reasons behind this error, but the most common one is the lack of website resources to perform optimally. To get rid of this issue, you either need to optimize your website’s speed or upgrade to a higher-tier web hosting plan.
6. Having Trouble Uploading Images
Sometimes, WordPress developers face trouble uploading images on WordPress sites. Or, the images don’t reflect the right quality. You can fix this issue by using SFTP and finding the uploads folder located in the WP-content directory. Go to file permissions and set the numeric value to 744 in the “change file attributes” section. Doing so makes all files and folders easily readable for all users, groups, and processes.
7. Auto upgrade Not Working
Switching to an automatic WordPress upgrade is a proven way to ensure that your site runs on the latest technology. If you notice that your automatic upgrade is not working properly, the best thing to do is to update your site manually.
Top reasons Why WordPress Remains Relevant in Present-day CMS Landscape
Now, we will discuss some critical advantages of using WordPress as a CMS for your business website and how you can make the most out of it.
1. An array of professional themes & plugins
You can explore thousands of themes and plugins in WordPress. Thanks to its huge and worldwide community that constantly keeps updating some trendy and professional themes using which, you can easily work on highlighting your website’s appearance. WordPress gives you complete freedom to choose your desired theme, among which some are free while some start as low as $19.
On the other hand, you can also explore ample plugins to add to your website’s functionality. WordPress has a plugin for almost every feature that you want to offer to your users. It also supports creating stunning websites with added customized features that cater to your audience’s preferences.
2. Its mobile-friendliness enhances your business reach
Having a mobile-friendly website will certainly enhance the chances of greater reachability & profitability. Mobile devices generated 59% of global web traffic worldwide in 2022(Source). This figure will continue to grow with the increasing importance of smartphones in the coming years. Most WordPress themes and designs are mobile responsive, giving you an extra edge to lead the industry by capturing a maximum audience and offering them a user-friendly & mobile -friendly website.
3. Exceptional support for social media integration
There’s a great demand for relevant content shared across different social platforms. There are ample social media plugins like Spotlight, Access Press, and Novashare available on WordPress to easily integrate your social media accounts with your WordPress site. That will help attract a huge audience to your site and turn them into valuable customers. This also facilitates formulating a robust marketing strategy for your business if you learn to make optimum use of different APIs used around your website. This is the reason millions of business owners choose WordPress for their business websites.
4. WordPress is a performance-oriented CMS
Ensuring the optimum performance of a business website is an irrefutable truth to succeed. WordPress remains the king in the world of CMS, especially when it comes to performance. Whether it’s your website’s designs, content, layout, speed, or custom features, WordPress has successfully covered all aspects.
Another major advantage of using WordPress for your site is its ease of use. Its user-friendliness allows you to manage your website content most simply besides easily updating your site whenever you want. You can download it for free, set it up easily and start developing your website without any deep knowledge of programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
5. WordPress is highly scalable
For any growing business, scalability remains a critical aspect of its website to manage and control huge traffic and serve users with what they expect out of it. WordPress can serve thousands of logged-in users at a time and process their requests with lightning speed.
Most WordPress themes and plugins perform optimally under moderate traffic, but if there’s a sudden upsurge in daily visitors, you can use some high-performance plugins which are coupled with elastic architecture, contributing to unparalleled scalability. Just ensure that you have a good caching system that will ensure better performance of your site when scalability is required.
6. Seo-friendly CMS
SEO is a critical aspect for businesses having an online presence as they have to survive among myriads and appear on the top in SERPs. WordPress offers some exclusive plugins like Yoast SEO, SEOPress, W3 Total Cache, and many more, which make your WordPress development SEO-friendly. Additionally, it also allows you to write favorable codes for Google indexing with customizable SEO components for web pages.
Content remains a critical component in gaining a good ranking on the internet, and WordPress allows you to manage aspects like creating new posts and keywords and sharing content on different social media sites. It also offers some smart options to structure your URLs and enable SEO-friendly permalinks for your website.
7. WordPress still has a long way to go
WordPress is making constant improvements in its features and functionalities. It’s also working towards removing its common vulnerabilities to ensure maximum satisfaction for users. The future of WordPress themes will be something to behold. The designing experience will become automated and much easier, while the CMS will certainly extend beyond its capabilities and will evolve as a robust framework to run all kinds of apps.
Endnote
Choosing WordPress for website development or migrating to it will prove to be a smart business decision. But, while almost everyone is very hopeful about the prospects of WordPress, it remains to be seen how this CMS will combat the new-age challenges from automated systems. There is a 17% increase in WordPress membership each year, and the WordPress CMS turns out to be the first choice for website developers because of its distinctive advantages. However, you must dig a little deeper and gain insights into what WordPress users say about its performance and their experience with WordPress sites.
