WordPress is a powerful and widely used platform that, with the proper configuration and hosting, is well-suited for a wide variety of web applications, including small brochure sites, e-commerce, membership, education, and enterprise websites.
However, the truth is that WordPress may not be the best fit for every business website. This blog post will cover where WordPress excels in 2025 and where it might come up short.
The Strengths of WordPress in 2025
Our agency has designed, developed, managed, and hosted WordPress websites for over ten years.
We have built everything from brochure-style websites for small businesses to enterprise-grade websites for global corporations with advanced parametric search and e-commerce features. In each case, the results made our clients happy and our team proud.
WordPress is a robust and flexible CMS that offers compelling benefits, including:
1. Large Community & Ongoing Development
WordPress, first released in 2003, has been around for over 20 years and powers over 40% of websites globally. It has a vast user base, an active development community, and continuous updates, ensuring long-term viability and ongoing improvements.
2. Extensive Plugin & Theme Ecosystem
Most businesses will eventually need additional website features—whether an order form, an interactive photo carousel, popup messages, or something similar. Meeting this kind of need is where the WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem shines.
WordPress has tens of thousands of free and premium plugins and themes, enabling businesses to customize their websites with minimal development effort. Plugins make it easy to integrate features like SEO optimization, e-commerce, forms, security enhancements, and more.
3. Flexibility for Any Type of Website
WordPress is not just for blogging—it supports e-commerce, membership sites, online learning, and even enterprise applications. With the correct setup and appropriate hosting, it can handle everything from small websites to high-traffic platforms.
4. Wide Availability of Developers & Resources
WordPress has a large pool of experienced developers. Whether you need help with custom development, troubleshooting, or performance optimization, it is easy to find resources.
Business owners can be confident they will have no trouble finding people to develop or administer their WordPress website.
5. Ownership & Control
A self-hosted WordPress site—unlike closed, proprietary platforms—gives you complete control over your data, hosting environment, and website structure. Businesses can choose their own hosting providers and customize their sites without platform restrictions.
Critically, all your website data remains under your control, and you can export or migrate it as needed.
6. Seamless Integrations
WordPress integrates with just about every tool you would need, including marketing, CRM, and e-commerce platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Shopify, and WooCommerce. These integrations make it easy to connect with business tools without extensive development work.
7. Built-in Full-Site Editor
Before 2018, WordPress featured basic editing capabilities. Modifying sidebar widgets, navigation menus, and the header and footer involved coding or navigating complex admin panels.
WordPress 5.x introduced the block editor (formerly Gutenberg), and the current version 6.x has continued to extend this visual editing functionality. The team behind WordPress has embraced a “full site editing” philosophy, empowering users to access and edit major site components with visual tools.
While controversial among some developers, the block editor has largely eliminated the need to install third-party page builder tools like Beaver Builder, Elementor, or Divi by giving users extensive tools to customize their website without touching code.
8. Extensibility
WordPress uses themes to control the appearance and style of a website while the content resides in a database. This separation means that redesigning the look and feel of your website does not necessarily require starting from scratch. You can install a new theme, and all your data is still there. You can also build a new theme and then import your data.
Why Consider Alternatives to WordPress?
With all the strengths listed in the previous section, why wouldn’t you use WordPress for your business website in 2025?
WordPress, despite its positive qualities, does have a few notable drawbacks. In fact, some of the pros of WordPress can actually be cons for specific use cases.
Here are a few issues to consider when evaluating WordPress for your business website:
1. WordPress’s Flexibility Can Be Overwhelming
WordPress’s flexibility allows for many different ways to build a website—using pre-built themes, page builders, or full custom development. However, this can be overwhelming for newcomers who may struggle to understand where to start, how to select plugins, or what should be custom-coded.
Without proper guidance, businesses can end up with bloated, inefficient websites that are difficult to maintain. Vetting developers and following best practices can help ensure a well-structured site that will be sustainable long term, but not every business owner has the time or expertise to do this.
2. Ongoing Maintenance & Security
WordPress requires regular updates for the core software, themes, and plugins to maintain security. Website owners who neglect these updates can find their sites vulnerable to hacks and malware or with broken features. Even with proper maintenance, updates can sometimes break functionality, requiring manual fixes.
3. Performance Issues from Plugins
One of WordPress’s strengths—its plugin ecosystem—can also be a weakness. Relying on too many plugins can make a website slow, introduce conflicts, and create security risks if they’re not properly maintained. Performance optimization often requires technical expertise.
4. Quality Hosting is Critical
Cheap WordPress hosting is widely available, but not all hosting is created equal. Performance, security, and reliability depend heavily on hosting quality. Budget hosting may be adequate for small websites, but business-critical websites require optimized, secure hosting solutions.
Businesses considering WordPress must factor in the infrastructure they will use to support it, whether that is a managed hosting provider, dedicated hosting, or virtual private (VPS) server.
As an aside, the poor hosting options available for our clients became enough of a problem that we implemented a custom hosting service focused on performance and security. Our hosting service was initially only available to clients on our web care plans, but we now offer WordPress hosting to any business seeking a cost-effective managed hosting provider for their WordPress site. Contact us for more information.
5. Cost of Premium Features
While WordPress itself is free, premium themes, plugins, and high-performance hosting can quickly add up. Businesses requiring advanced customization or integrations may need to hire developers, increasing the total cost of ownership.
6. Suitability for Specific Business Needs
In the pros section above, I stressed that WordPress could power virtually any type of website. The versatility of WordPress is a compelling selling point.
However, not every business needs WordPress’s flexibility. Some business owners might benefit more from a lighter or specialized CMS platform tailored to their needs or one that is easier to use.
7. Maintaining Consistency Can Be Challenging
Here is another pro that can be a con for some users. The power of the block editor means that while it offers broad flexibility, it can also introduce challenges for businesses that wish to maintain brand consistency.
The block editor allows users to make nearly any change they want, which can lead to inconsistencies in formatting, layout, and design across a site. The power of the block editor also means that there is a learning curve for using it effectively. While developers can implement guardrails to restrict specific options and enforce consistency or add patterns to make changes simpler, this requires a proactive approach and that the business has hired a quality developer who understands their needs.
8. Community & Ecosystem Challenges
Recent disputes within the WordPress ecosystem—such as the conflict between Automatic (the company behind WordPress) and WP Engine—have raised concerns about governance and platform stability. While these issues may not affect most users directly, they highlight the risks of relying on an open-source platform where business interests and community values don’t always align.
Should You Build Your Site with WordPress in 2025?
TL;DR: WordPress remains the leading web CMS for a good reason. It is open-source, flexible, extensible, and supported by a vast developer community with an extensive ecosystem of themes, plugins, and integrations. WordPress is like a Swiss army knife—it can do almost anything you need a website to do. However, that versatility also means it may not always be the best tool for every job.
Many of WordPress’s tradeoffs—performance, security, maintenance—can be mitigated with the right developer, optimized hosting, and ongoing management. But that level of oversight isn’t practical for every business.
Thus, whether WordPress is right for your business website depends on your requirements, budget, and technical resources. As with many tools, each business owner will need to evaluate the pros and cons of WordPress in 2025. If WordPress isn’t the right fit, there are plenty of alternatives to consider.
Speaking for ourselves as an agency, we will continue to build, manage, and host WordPress sites, but we also first help clients evaluate whether WordPress is the right platform for their needs. Some businesses will benefit from WordPress’s adaptability, while a more specialized CMS may better serve others.
In our follow-up posts, we’ll explore some of the best CMS alternatives to WordPress.
Need Help Selecting a Website for Your Business?
Digital Agility Media has been designing, developing, supporting, and hosting websites for over 10 years. We strive to serve our clients by fully understanding their requirements and delivering web and digital solutions based on high-quality code, best practices, and usability.
If you need expert guidance in choosing the right web CMS platform for your business, reach out for a free consultation today.
