Many are wondering, is Wordpress still a good choice in 2024? We have been blessed with plethora of new CMSes and SaaS platforms that users can start their own website easily without using Wordpress.
In fact, Wordpress is being choosed for landing page for White House and NASA over Nextjs, Vuejs or Astro website speaks a lot about the validity of Wordpress these days.
Advantages of Wordpress
From my personal experience, Wordpress provides simplicity to end users on content creation. They have not to worry about writing a single code in order to make their content ready for the Internet.
For me, what make Wordpress stand out from it competitors is the avaliable plugins to choose from. The marketplace is pretty alive, thanks to easy to use plugin manager. You can easily find your plugins from the main repository, Codecanyon or third party plugin provider website.
Backwards compability is not an issue for most of the plugins, since Wordpress main contributor, Automattic, emphasizes on backward compability so that your Wordpress website will not break after updating a plugin.
Wordpress themes also helps most of the end users to get their website ready in shorter timeframe. There are many themes you can choose from the main theme repository, ThemeForest or third party theme provider. They are easy to install, and most of the time won’t break your website.
Downside of Wordpress
While for end users Wordpress is being such a god send tools, it is a different story for Wordpress developer. Or, technically, PHP guy who works on Wordpress codes.
The IDE is not ready, after Wordpress 15+ years of existence, to make developer’s experience better while debugging the codes. As a developer who stuck on maintaining Wordpress plugin or theme, you are stuck on the monolithic approach of Wordpress. You can’t use the hot reload feature on Wordpress site, while this feature has been avaliable for Nextjs or Vuejs developers since long time ago.
Debugging problematic codes also a nightmare. You will have to go through the codes, guessing it why it returs error only running it from active websites. Sometimes your code works on another installation, while it breaks on other websites that has different plugins installed.
What should I choose for my website in 2024?
The answer, as always, is: It depends.
In short, if you are end user on tight budget, Wordpress is really a good choice for you. Shared hosting, and micro VPSes are cheap these days. So you can just launch your personal blog or portfolio website with relatively small cost.
For users with advanced needs, see if Wordpress plugins can help you. If you need to have custom function for your website, most of the time custom development is the recomended way as modern technologies can reduce the development turn around time. You new website will have a magnitude of performance gain compared with heavy custom logic written for Wordpress.
If you want to have the best experience of fast website and ease of use of Wordpress, you can use Wordpress as headless CMS and use any of Nextjs, Vuejs or Astro as your front end website.