What can you NOT do with WordPress? Limitations, bugs, bandwidth, integrations, etc…

I saw a post on this about 8 years back, but I wanted to get something updated for 2023. This post is a two for one. First, what can WordPress not do, or what does WordPress not do well? If there is something that WordPress doesn’t do well, who does it better.

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Second, should I use WordPress? I work for a very large, multi-billion dollar, International company. As you can assume, the function of our website for the company is a big deal. What that also means is this:

* Money is not an issue for this project
* Time is crucial. We need to be able to develop the website quickly
* The website MUST meet certain technical functionality requirements

What I am most concerned about is the technical functionality side of this. It is an e-commerce site that has several thousands of people going to the site every day. All purchases made on the site need to update the company’s back-end database. We need to be able to integrate cookie management.

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Here is the current situation:

* We are currently using a vendor that is based in India who has built their own “proprietary” system.
* We found out a few weeks ago that it is built on Angular 1.7. You read that right.
* Needless to say, we have been running into problems, including the following:
* loading speeds upwards of 30 seconds
* GTM taking 7 seconds, on average, to load
* Both UA and GA4 treating our 6,000+ page website as a single page website. I gives the credit of all action to the page the user landed on. Very serious problem.
* There is not a proper 404 utility page set up. If you type in a URL that doesn’t exist, it redirects you to a static page that is treated as a 404 page. This has led to tools like SEMrush to viewing those URLs as duplicate content instead of broken internal links and broken backlinks.
* On PageSpeed Insights, our website has scored a 0 before. Our top score is a 7.
* All of the HTML in the body section is populated by JS. That’s right, you cannot view the content on the page without loading JS. This also means that most web crawlers don’t work. No web crawlers work without JS rendering.
* Unauthorized updates are constantly being made to URLs without setting up redirects.
* In the past, I believe the company has used LightHouse. However, I am not 100% sure.
* The CMS we are currently using for our blog is called Tiny.

These are just a few of the problems we are facing. As you can see, there is a lot that needs fixing, and we are very unhappy with our current vendor. Hope that clarifies the situation a bit.

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Something we are considering is this: we think it might be worth it using a builder like WordPress, and then building a backend program that can be accessed by a JS interface on the frontend.

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I have very little experience with WordPress, I just have influence in the decision of this. Any help would be appreciated!!

7 Comments
  1. Nothing is bug-free and perfect. Sooner or later you’ll find bottlenecks in almost all CMS/Solutions. The problems and solutions grow as you grow. If you’re specially asking about scalability. Yes wordpress is very much scalable.

    Which ecommerce platform are you using currently?

  2. You can essentially do anything with WordPress. It runs over 40% of the top 10 million websites. WooCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce packages on the internet and is used by many large site/stores. WP can do what you want.

    Now, does that mean WordPress is the best choice for every project? Probably not. As you note, there are various limitations for specific sites and companies that might make something else a better choice.

    I suspect, to really get an answer on scope/time/cost, you are going to need to spell out more of the project details than you’d like to here on Reddit. Your best bet is to talk to a high end WordPress dev for some advice (even worth paying a consulting fee) if it is going to be built in house. Or reach out for bids to a couple major WordPress site building companies if it is going to be outsourced.

  3. If you need to launch the site quickly, WordPress is a good option. As for drawbacks, it really depends on technical requirements and how they are implemented.

    For example, WooCommerce by default uses the same tables as regular products (posts and postmeta) to handle orders. It might cause issues if you have more than 100-200K of orders. But now they are working on HPOS to separate orders and related data.

    The most important part here is to find a good developer or an agency.

  4. While yes, WP can do it. That’s not always the best answer and there are not enough details to really make that call. If your goal is an e-commerce solution, there are content management systems tailored for that which may give you a better end product. An agency I worked with wanted to use WP and WooCommerce for a site with over 300K products each having its own hundreds of variations. It was not a good experience.

  5. >I work for a very large, multi-billion dollar, International company.

    i work for one too. we manage 200+ sites on wordpress multisite at scale.
    may be too heavy for a SPA. may be a bad choice for a dashboard site. but for general website with managed content? its fine.

    only caveats would be if your dev team isn’s comfortable with php, it may be better to find a cms written for their current stack.

  6. If your focus is e-commerce, use Shopify.

    WordPress w/ Woocommerce can do everything you need, but it’s a pain to maintain and to customize. You’ll need extra plugins for every little thing. It’s also initially confusing to get your head around.

    Most of my serious e-commerce clients move on from WooCommerce after they teach a certain size. It just doesn’t feel like a stable all-in-one package.

 

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