Are you struggling to decide whether you should use WordPress or custom codding to design your website? You are in right place.
This is a question that gets a lot of searches on google “Why Is WordPress Better Than Custom Coding?”. Should I learn WordPress to build websites or should I code them myself with HTML CSS and JavaScript? A lot of articles about this topic don’t really understand what WordPress is.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about WordPress.
What is WordPress?
There are a lot of misconceptions about WordPress. People think that it is a page builder which is only used to build simple websites and blogs whereas if you want a custom web application then you have to code it yourself. But the fact is that you can really develop any kind of custom web app with WordPress at any level of complexity.
I’m not sure many people know this, but WordPress is really just a CMS platform with a general web framework. It is similar to ReactJS or Django for Python. And I always recommend developers to at least try WordPress.
WordPress Features & Functionality
Different frameworks offer different levels of functionality. On the low end, you have React js, which only renders your data. Somewhere in the middle, you have Ruby on rails, which sets up a lot more of your app for you.
And then on the far side of the spectrum, we have WordPress, which offers a ton of functionality out of the box that will save us months if not years. And by learning WordPress, we really expand the opportunities we have. We expand the number of projects we can work on.
Here is a list of WordPress features and functions that if started creating with custom coding would literally take years to do it.
Unlimited Pages, Post, Products And More
For Example: Let’s say we want to add a new page to our website. So let’s say instead of using WordPress we are hand-coding our website, and to add a new page we need to create an HTML file, we need to write the HTML for our page, and we need to add some CSS If necessary.
The process in WordPress is that we log into an admin dashboard, and then inside the admin dashboard we type the content for the page, and it will create the page for us, without us having to modify or write any code.
WordPress Media Library
So another great feature that I want to show you is the media library in WordPress. So if you want to upload a photo or a picture to your blog, let’s say you have an image here and you want to upload it. And all you have to do is drag and drop in WordPress.
Web App & Design
So in the olden days, everyone used to think that WordPress is just for making blogs.
If you want to build a custom web app you will need to use HTML CSS and Javascript, and you will have to code it yourself from scratch. And this brings us to the second biggest misconception of WordPress, which is only used to build blogs and content websites.
You can develop any complex website on WordPress with plugins, below I have listed some important plugins that can transform a static website into a dynamic web app.
- Woocommerce – is the most popular plugin in WordPress, that transforms your website into a complete online store with a cart, checkout process and order history.
- MemberPress – Another plug-in came along, called MemberPress, which turned WordPress into a learning management system.
- Fusebox – which turned WordPress into a podcasting website.
Also, Read – E-commerce website development cost in India?
Final Words
However, WordPress is much better than custom coding at every point but, for career development, I don’t recommend getting a WordPress job. That is because the job market for WordPress is utter garbage. And the reason for this is because WordPress itself is sort of in a weird market position.
So if a company wants to create a complex web app, they could make it on WordPress, but these companies have enough money to hire a team of developers to develop the web app on some other modern technology.
