10 Challenges Working With WordPress As A Content material Administration Platform in 2023

I’ve been working and growing with WordPress since its inception. The content material administration system’s simplicity is phenomenal, and its mass adoption has no shock. There are haters on the market, however I usually remind those who the problems with WordPress are normally centered across the themes and plugins carried out, not the core platform.

The analogy I usually use with folks is aftermarket automotive components… some are unbelievable, and a few can destroy your automotive. WordPress is not any totally different. A living proof that I want to share is that this website, Martech Zone. A number of years in the past, I discovered a implausible theme with all of the options and performance I needed to share my content material in a usable, lovely, and chic consumer interface. Over time, I continued to boost a toddler theme that I constructed and was blissful the builders of the unique mother or father theme continued to help every model of WordPress.

Till not too long ago.

A number of weeks in the past, I used to be having a difficulty on the positioning and couldn’t discover how the code was developed so I went over to the developer’s discussion board… and their website was down. So, I went over to Themeforest the place I bought the theme… and it was gone. I then seemed for the builders of the theme… they usually have been gone.

I used to be by myself!

Many years in the past, whenever you purchased a product you anticipated to make use of it for all times. In immediately’s fast-paced, low-cost expertise world, we’ve grown accustomed to tossing our expertise when it breaks or turns into out of date. That’s effective… I don’t thoughts shopping for a brand new toaster. However when it’s the software program working your web site, it’s fairly the headache. To return to my analogy, it’s much less like an aftermarket set of rims and extra like your transmission breaking. It’s a major expense, and an enormous problem within the WordPress ecosystem.

WordPress Is Nonetheless Nice

My objective with this text isn’t to complain about WordPress, it’s a versatile platform that may be up to date, transitioned, or personalized with little or no effort. As nicely, the ecosystem of builders, themes, and plugins is past the creativeness. I’ve helped firms do some extremely modern integrations and automation with the WordPress API, and I proceed to be optimistic about its future.

My objective with this text is to share, what I consider, are some vital shortcomings of the platform in order that persons are conscious of a number of the core platform’s inherent challenges. Discover I stated core… I notice that there are themes, plugins, and headless architectures that may overcome these. I’d similar to to see WordPress architects innovate on a few of these shortcomings.

Particular to Martech Zone

I don’t have time to develop for a month, so I needed to transition the positioning to a brand new theme after which iron out the problems.

• Creator Archive – One situation that I’ve proper now’s that I’ve a whole lot of authors so constructing an writer web page requires fairly a little bit of growth so I can restrict the record to anybody who has shared an article within the final month. That’s not too tough… I can develop a customized template, question the newest posts, pull the distinctive authors, then construct an array of them, organize them alphabetically, and show their profile data.
• Customized Publish Kind – I constructed a group of acronyms for the positioning that was actually doing fairly nicely. On every of the acronym pages, I even included the newest posts utilizing the acronym. And… it labored nicely, folks actually favored transferring from the definition to some articles in regards to the subject. Nevertheless, I needed to construct a customized archive, taxonomy archive, and single put up template for the customized put up sort to show it correctly. Now, with a brand new theme, I’ve to redevelop these.

For each, I’ve the core code. I simply need to construct out the templates in my new baby theme to get them operational. It’s not tough however it’s time-consuming. WordPress has the options to develop these but it surely’s not that simple. Should you’re a enterprise – that is fairly an expense. Evidently there’s a possibility for WordPress to construct accompanying (core) consumer interface choices to customized put up varieties for customizing how they’re queried and displayed. Once more, I do know there are plugins that assist… I simply suppose this is a chance for the core platform.

The brand new theme I bought and the kid theme I’ve has this limitation as nicely. All customized put up sort archives, taxonomy pages, and single customized sort posts use the default theme choices. Once more, I do know that may very well be a pleasant function within the theme… however I actually want this was core function. I’d love to have the ability to click on on a customized put up sort setting, choose how its queried, and choose a structure possibility… slightly than coding all of it.

Ten Further WordPress Challenges

Listed below are another points that I’ve run into that proceed to problem and value time and sources with my purchasers:

1. Search Engine Optimization – Should you’re publishing content material for acquisition efforts on your model, product, or service, natural search optimization isn’t an possibility – it’s a should. The capabilities of WordPress are woefully insufficient right here… even for those who’re paying for Jetpack on your website. Tag optimization, wealthy snippets, sitemaps, and different options are vital to optimizing your website for search engine customers. It’s why we received’t implement a website with out Rankmath.
2. AMP – Whereas it’s not WordPress’ fault, AMP help is horrible. Jetpack has AMP capabilities however, inexplicably, they disable shortcodes help out of your mother or father them to your AMP show. Simply as a toddler theme assumes options and performance from a mother or father theme, it appears that evidently AMP ought to be a child-type theme. One of many causes that I chosen the brand new theme I did was inherent AMP help.
3. Efficiency – WordPress remains to be a canine in relation to velocity as you proceed to customise it with further plugins and theme options. Once we work on our purchasers’ websites, probably the most complicated points we deal with are website velocity. If we do a deep dive, we frequently discover a whole lot of queries and requests made for even a single web page to be displayed. I’m not an skilled on this space, however I’m stunned there should not inherent database question caches and native caching on the core platform at this level. I’ve labored with different platforms that revealed pages by bodily creating cached recordsdata slightly than dynamically producing them with each request.
4. WooCommerce – WooCommerce was initially developed to make the most of the WordPress API, so it makes use of the core posts desk to retailer product data and treats the merchandise and classes like a customized put up sort. Merchandise aren’t posts or pages, although. Merchandise are a group of options, pricing, and variations. Should you’re popping out with a brand new model of a product and also you’re going to launch it on a sure day, it’s fairly tough to draft and publish the brand new model launch. The workaround is to create a brand new product, unpublish the outdated product, replace the brand new product’s permalink, and many others… after which, in fact, you’ve got a special product ID between the 2.
5. Types and Information – It actually takes a kind plugin or built-in third-party platform to handle types and information in your website. I’m stunned that WordPress hasn’t included types and information as a core function – particularly since WooCommerce mainly makes use of each as nicely. Elementor, as an example, does a tremendous job and even has webhook capabilities that make it easy to combine.
6. Spam – I used to be paying for Akismet but it surely was ineffective towards kind spam and doesn’t appear to have developed at everywhere in the years. I nonetheless acquired a ton of spam, particularly via types on my website. The WordPress staff ought to simply kill it and purchase and combine CleanTalk which is a much better resolution with native kind plugin integrations.
7. Staging – Just about each managed WordPress internet hosting now has staging versus manufacturing environments the place you possibly can develop and take a look at, then push your modifications to manufacturing. We use Flywheel for this and completely like it. However staging to manufacturing has terrible limitations due to the structure of WordPress. As we develop on staging, our purchasers are sometimes nonetheless producing content material in manufacturing. Theme growth usually leads to database edits. In consequence, we are able to’t simply push staging to manufacturing… now we have to manually push modifications to manufacturing. If WordPress did a greater job of discreetly separating ALL content material from Themes & Plugins, it may very well be doable to easily have the flexibility to push one or the opposite slightly than simply choosing theme vs. database.
8. Workflows – The vast majority of firms require the flexibility to have content material workflows with individuals who write, edit, then approve content material earlier than it’s scheduled to go reside. Whereas WordPress has nice roles built-in, there’s no workflow administration to assign and notify these roles. In consequence, firms look externally to develop, edit, and approve the content material after which solely use WordPress to publish it.
9. Content material Journeys – Newer content material expertise platforms aren’t organized by the kind of content material, they’re organized by the kind of consumer. These methods have dynamic capabilities with rules-based or intelligence-based flows that stroll a customer via an expertise. That’s a dramatic change and one thing that WordPress might by no means be capable of accommodate.
10. WordPress Widgets – I’m a fan of the Gutenberg editor and actually recognize the flexibleness it supplies whereas supporting earlier content material architectures. Nevertheless, when WordPress determined to attempt to adapt the consumer interface for widgets to look and act like Gutenberg, it was a catastrophe. The consumer interface is terrible… and in case you have a ton of widgets, it’s slowww. One of many options of my new theme was an choice to disable this interface and I used to be ecstatic.

I do know I’m going to get a ton of pushback on third-party functions, integrations, plugins, and themes. We proceed to take care of and promote our personal record of really useful plugins for WordPress. Once more, my level is that the options above have gotten core to a content material technique, not a function or performance outdoors of them.

Disclosure: Martech Zone is utilizing affiliate hyperlinks all through this text.