5 Pitfalls of WordPress Design That Everyone Should Avoid

As WordPress is powering millions of websites all over the world, it has become the leading CMS platform. While we all love WordPress for its rich feature set, flexibility, versatility and user-friendly attributes, the platform comes with a few common design pitfalls that web developers should be aware of.

Here are some of the hidden difficulties that developers and designers should consider when working with WordPress:

1. Free themes will always prove as insufficient

WordPress is particularly popular for many websites because of the wide array of available themes, which give users a personalized experience. There are thousands of free as well as premium themes to choose from, that create the desired user interface. The problem is that choosing the right theme is often challenging if you want something more than an appealing design. Furthermore, the vast majority of free themes are not well-equipped for high-performance websites, unless you customize them.

As you choose a particular theme and build your website with it, when you discover its defects, you’ll consider selecting another theme or purchasing a premium one. In any case, this switching between themes can affect your user experience and your brand.

Many free WordPress themes have an insufficient layout for accommodating widgets, sliders or visual content. Going into the customization of a free theme may require coding the entire PHP files and CSS, and such endeavor is both time-consuming and costly.

2. The absence of any official customer support

This is one of the most common complaints about WordPress websites. When building your site or when you are in the post-development stage, no official customer support team is there to assist you. All the ready to hand customer support is provided through the multiple forums populated with WordPress experts, which are willing to answer your queries.

While for most of your questions you can find answers that perfectly suit your needs, for certain queries you need some real-time explanation over the phone or via chat. But that is impossible, as WordPress doesn’t provide any official customer support service. The community support, which seems to be quite robust, is the only assistance method for WordPress users.

3. Multiple plugins pulling down performance

A plethora of plugins and extensions that continue to add new functionalities and features to a website makes WordPress so famous. But more than often, different plugins unnecessary overload the bandwidth and pull down the site’s performance. Some similar plugins that run simultaneously can stop working all at the same time, leaving the user clueless about the source of the problem.

To detect the plugin responsible for the performance issues, you often need to uninstall all the plugins and then install them once more, one by one, while checking the site’s performance after each installation. This time-consuming process continues to plague many WordPress users on a regular basis. Many plugins significantly decrease the website’s speed and performance. This is why WordPress users should always use a content delivery network (CDN), to ensure a positive impact on the loading time of a website.

4. The variable and inconsistent user experience

This is another common issue recognized by a vast majority of WordPress users. The user experience of a WordPress website remains variable and inconsistent depending on the choice of themes, plugins, and customizations. The WordPress platform offers too much flexibility as the user explores different looks, feels and features. But, at the same time, this makes the user experience inconsistent and dependable on various fluctuating factors.

If you have chosen to build an impressive website, with many interactive elements, you need to go for top-notch themes and great plugins, that guarantee a rich user interface and feature set. On the other hand, for blogs and content publications, you can opt for a more straightforward theme and a few effective and lightweight plugins. After making such choices, it’s essential to use the best WordPress development practices to ensure a glitch-free performance.

Creating your site seems to be an easy job as you have at your disposal so many ready-to-use elements; but to ensure an optimum performance, a WordPress website requires rigorous effort. Through trial and error everything will be accomplished as desired.

5. The lack of WordPress tutorials

WordPress, as versatile and customizable as it is, becomes one of the most popular foundations for the users that want to structure their web presence. WordPress is already the leading blogging platform, and hundreds of top businesses prefer it. However, newcomers or start-ups still trying to understand web interface, have to deal with a lot of challenges when building a website from scratch. This is when and where expert tutorials come in handy.

But WordPress doesn’t offer guidance when creating a website and doesn’t explain all features, themes and customization options. You can access third-party tutorials and online videos for your queries, but you may struggle with finding the appropriate solution for your problems. Often WordPress users have to wait for days after posting a question on an online forum, in order to get help from the community.

Conclusion

WordPress is undoubtedly a great CMS for building high-performance websites with an engaging interface. But for the power of this versatile platform to be utilized at its best, one needs professional help and guidance. A WordPress expert can help you build your site by using his knowledge of customization options and available plugins and themes.

Author bio

Keval Padia is a co-founder of Nimblechapps, a prominent iPhone application company based in India. As he follows different tech blogs, Keval Padia likes to remain up-to-date and to express his views and thoughts on specific topics.