As with every framework, WordPress has its limitations in developing web applications. Developers need to understand the limitations before deciding to choose the framework for application development.
In this section, we will learn the limitations while building simple guidelines for choosing WordPress for web development. Let's get started!
- Lack of support for MVC: We talked about the architecture of WordPress and its support for MVC in one of the earlier sections. As a developer, you need to figure out ways to work with WordPress in order to suit web applications. If you are someone who cannot work without MVC, WordPress may not be the best solution for your application.
- Database migration: If you are well experienced in web development, you will have a pretty good idea about the importance of choosing databases considering the possibilities of migrating to another one in later stages. This can be a limitation in WordPress as it's built to work with MySQL databases. Using it with another database will be quite difficult, if not impossible. So, if you need the database to be migrated to some other database, WordPress will not be the best solution.
- Security: This is one of the most important aspects of application development. WordPress is open source and many sites uses free plugins without proper security and code checks. Therefore, when proper security measures are not implemented, potential hackers and programs can identify the vulnerabilities and generate security threats. Many people tend to think WordPress is insecure due to such reasons.
- Performance: The performance of your application is something we get to experience in the later stages of the project when we go into a live environment. It's important to plan ahead on performance considerations as they can come through internal and external reasons. WordPress has a built-in database structure and we will use it in most of the projects. It's designed to suit CMS functionality, and sticking with the same tables for different types of projects will not provide the optimized table structure. Therefore, performance might be a limitation for critical applications interacting with millions of records each day, unless you optimize your caching, indexing, and other database optimization strategies.
- Architecture: WordPress runs on an event-driven architecture, packed with features. Often developers misuse the hooks without proper planning, affecting the performance of the application. So, you have to be responsible in planning the database and necessary hooks in order to avoid performance overheads.
- Regular Updates: WordPress has a very active community involving its development for new features and fixing the issues in existing features. Once a new version of the core is released, plugin developers will also update their plugins to be compatible with the latest version. Hence, you need to perform additional tasks to update the core, themes, and plugins, which can be a limitation when you don't have a proper maintenance team.
- Object Oriented Development: Experienced web developers will always look for object-oriented frameworks for development. WordPress started its coding with procedural architecture and is now moving rapidly toward object-oriented architecture. So, there will be a mix of both procedural and object-oriented code. WordPress also uses a hook-based architecture to provide functionality for both procedural and object-oriented codes. Developers who are familiar with other PHP frameworks might find it difficult to come to terms with the mix of procedural and object-oriented code as well as the hook-based architecture. So, you have to decide whether you are comfortable with its existing coding styles.
If you are a developer or designer who thinks these limitations could cause major concerns for your projects, WordPress may not be the right solution for you.
