About five years ago I tried using WordPress for my mom's e-commerce website.
At first I created her site, which sells T-shirts and magnets for sports players, from scratch. Quickly I realized that I was recreating the wheel, when I really didn't have the time to do so.
I convinced her to switch over to WordPress. Within a few hours I had the same basic layout and design for her. Unfortunately, she never had a sale, but I am not surprised since many people do not buy refrigerator magnets for their cars these days when their cars are mostly made of plastic.
Her site still goes on and is updated automatically, still with no sales (besides the point).
Twice now in the past ten years, I have tried using WordPress after finding what I thought was the perfect looking WP demo plugin for my purposes.
Both times after installing the numerous required or recommended plugins, my entire server became virus ridden and I ultimately had to revert to a backup before ever installing WP.
You'd think I'd have learned after the first time, but I guess being lazy I assumed they fixed the issues since years had passed and was using a completely different plugin, but I was wrong and had to revert every website on my server after trying to simply remove the impacted files didn't work.
The result was about a months time of me trying to remove the viruses and continue but every day or so I'd check and my site was again broken due to viruses.
I had to ultimately revert every website and start from a fresh server, and after basically being down for a month off and on and then reverting to a month or so earlier, my traffic 100% stopped. I only had a trickle of traffic beforehand, so afterwards, they are all still dead and I'm not sure why I'm really still paying for my server for one person to login every few days.
I know that I'm not the only one who had these issues, so why are people still using WordPress?
I would assume because it is for people who may not have the knowledge to code a website from scratch?
I myself have limited self taught knowledge from more than two decades ago when we all started with basic HTML. At what point did we wind up giving up our server security and allow anyone to do whatever to our servers, as long as we agreed to install these recommended plugins? Why are these plugins not deemed unsafe or removed from population?
Ive never had virus issues in 15+ years using WordPress.
If you installed plugins and got a “virus” you’re installing low quality garbage plugins.
Vet plugins thoroughly before installing them. Install a plugin only if you absolutely 100% need it. Review all installed plugins thoroughly at least once every six months. Keep the entire software stack updated.
I have used WP since 2009 and never had my sites or server hacked. Many have used it longer than I have, and on much bigger sites without any issues.
Yea man, just because you don’t know what you’re going doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t. Even whitehouse.gov is on wordpress.