WP vs Regular Site

[MMM]

So far i've been using WP for all my sites but now contemplating if to build a site without. From what i noticed is that pretty much every customization can be done in WP so they question is what are the advantages (and disadvantages) of building without.

Consider that i am not a programmer so will take a programmer to build it.

Thank you,

[AussieDave]

If your not a coder, then as you say, you'll need to hire a web developer. Personally, even though I can code, and that's exactly what did before I commence using WP back in 2009, using WP just makes things a lot easier.

Where WP seems to become an issue for most, they're using a heap of plugins, use themes which have a huge number of DOM (Document Object Model) calls, and are using cheap hosting, to name a few bottleneck speed issues.

You can by all means have a bespoke php CMS designed for you, but that could be expensive. When, and if you used WP wisely, you'd be getting a far better, and a more flexible product IMHO.

[ddm]

use a barebones theme [using WP just as a CMS] + build everything else yourself IMO..
you have like control over 99% of everything at the code level, headers, footers, page templates, scripts, everything.

goods > the bads.

[MMM]

use a barebones theme [using WP just as a CMS] + build everything else yourself IMO..
you have like control over 99% of everything at the code level, headers, footers, page templates, scripts, everything.

goods > the bads.

yes that's another option considering with WP as CMS.

Same question? what are the pros? i think that i can get most of customization i need with WP as well so what are the advantages of non wp front?

[ddm]

advantages of non wp front?

1. "not getting hacked via wp exploits."
2. no dependencies on plugins / 3rd party code that may or may not get updated and break your setup, or which might get discontinued


other considerations: flexibility, appearance/UX , code-reuse,
https://wpengine.com/resources/cms-vs-php-framework/

[casinobonusguy]

My top money maker is plain old HTML ,it takes more time adding and editing content but with some php coding easy to change tables.I have not made a new site like that in ten years though.

[allfreechips]

If you like speed dump WP... its just soooooooo much overhead to produce somthing, and when you have 20K + posts with lots of meta values its a pig.

queries taking .5 seconds 3X on a page is terrible.

[iso2009]

So far, I am using WP as a CMS for a pretty big project and it's moving well enough, although I don't have plugins, except one for geolocation.

Unless your project will be a huge one with tons of data and other stuff, I see no reason to give up on WP (which is a professional solution out of the box).

Keep the plugins to a minimum (and also use good and safe plugins) and use fast-loading themes. You can do a lot with WP and stay safe at the same time.

[Michael Martinez]

Content Management Systems like WordPress have worked out a lot of the details that anyone building a site from the ground up must figure out.

We operate sites we've built both ways. WordPress makes it easier to publish content and change how the site looks when we feel it needs to be updated.

Although adding plugins does increase the amount of RAM and CPU time a WordPress site needs to deliver a single URL, that's usually not a bad thing. In terms of site performance you take a bigger hit from the total number of separate resources (images, Javascript and CSS files, videos, embedded social media shares, iframes, etc.) included in the page. Any non-WP site can have just as many extra resources as a WordPress site.

Hiring someone to develop a site for you from scratch means you're more dependent on one person for the long-term success and survival of your site. There are many good, dependable developers out there but it does create a dependency that limits your freedom of decision-making.

Using a free CMS like WordPress ensures you'll have plenty of support but you're dependent upon where that development community decides to go. They may evolve in directions you didn't expect.

Either way you give up some control and responsibility for how your site functions and how well it adapts to future needs. Neither path is innately better than the other. Both offer you individual advantages and weaknesses.

But one area where WordPress is hard to beat is that it provides an immense number of free resources that allow you to be experimental at extremely low cost. If you think you'd like to try out different site features, then WordPress will probably be the less expensive way to go.

If all you care about is site speed there are things you can do beyond deciding how the site is built. The hosting you use is very important. Many people who complain about slow sites are using very inexpensive hosting accounts, which are rate-limited (the performance is intentionally throttled by the hosting company). Merely upgrading to more expensive hosting often solves some issues.

But NOT using a PHP/SQL-based CMS like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress can improve a site's speed, too. A hand-coded static HTML page can be superfast compared to a CMS-published page because you don't have to wait for all those lookups and your server doesn't have to interpret all the PHP code.

It really comes down to deciding how much responsibility you want to take for your site and how much you can afford to pay someone else (and are willing to pay) to take on some of that responsibility for you.

[allfreechips]

WP suffers when meta-values get large. The queries to join mata to post when you exceed 100K entries gets terrible. I moved a site to siteground to use memcached and their 2 other caching systems, cloudflare frontend with CDN, I have 3 list post queries taking over half a second, overal query monitor at average 8 seconds..

Working on elimination the queries with my shortcodes but indexing on meta is screwed by design. My sites with same amount of data with a simple cms i made are lighning, allfreechips shortcode system i made (runs on top of vbulletin) I can complete a full page with multiuple queries in under .02 seconds

[MMM]

Thanks a lot for all the inputs. Really great.

I kind of a speed freak so that's why i was tending towards non -WP.

Currently leaning towards WP as CMS only and html front end. Just trying to understand what am i missing in terms of issues it might create and such. And whether the benefits are worth it if it's not fully custom site.