WordPress websites are the current kings of the web. They dominate the web, so for companies with a limited budget for digital marketing, utilizing a cutting-edge Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress would benefit them.
In these changing and challenging times, businesses in the new normal need to utilize WordPress to develop a full-fledged website. As a result, you can advertise and promote products and services and fulfill the company’s web-based business aims. Having a limited budget for your marketing needs, employing WordPress is a great choice to achieve your specific objectives and thrive in this.
You can build an interactive website, effectively market products and services online, and have a thriving online business website. One of the many advantages of using the WordPress CMS is that it is entirely free and comes loaded with plenty of themes and plugins.
The growing popularity of the WordPress content management system is because it is simple to use, with no learning curve, and a strong WordPress community to support those in need.
Additionally, WordPress has some shortcomings. Amid the downsides, it also has benefits as well. The great majority of WordPress website owners will face several challenges while using WordPress. Some issues would need to be addressed by WordPress developers.
So, let’s talk about some issues and possible solutions.
Challenges that WordPress Developers Face in 2023
When It Comes to Website Security, WordPress Websites Are Targets for Exploitation
With the growing popularity of WordPress websites over the years, threats have emerged. With each passing day, hazards around WordPress are on the rise. It’s absolutely true. Hackers and cybercriminals spend significant time and effort attempting to hijack WordPress websites and damage businesses, generating web-based revenue.
Many cybercriminals work hard to break into WordPress websites and destroy the businesses that run on WordPress-hosted websites. If your website gets hacked, you incur a significant loss: both in terms of your company’s financials and new customer trust and rankings in search engine results.
This analysis of WordPress security is focused on the entire system. As the name suggests, WordPress is a very safe system, yet it’s not without some data breaches. As mentioned above, it is the most popular and most commonly used CMS and hence also the most vulnerable to hacking.
In fact, WordPress comprised 90% of all cleanup requests to Sucuri in 2018.
Malicious backdoors, drive-by downloads, pharma hacks, malicious redirects, and stolen passwords are the most commonly seen WordPress malware infestations.
Various sources are quoted as saying:
- In 41% of WordPress attacks, the hosting platform is at fault.
- The fact that about 52% of WordPress vulnerabilities stem from plugins illustrates the need to keep plugins up to date.
- Cross-site scripting (XSS) is responsible for almost 80% of all security vulnerabilities on the internet.
- Cross-site scripting (XSS) causes 39% of WordPress vulnerabilities, whereas exploitations of the WordPress core create 37% of vulnerabilities. Finally, just 11% of vulnerabilities can be attributed to WordPress themes.
- Widgets in outdated WordPress sites accounted for 44% of hacking incidents.
- Back in 2011, 18 million WordPress users were affected when a cyberattack exposed 18 million records.
The Panama Papers Leak, which occurred in 2016, affected around 2.6 terabytes of data, 11.5 million documents, and 4.8 million emails. The cause was websites having the older version of the Slider Revolution plugin, which meant it wasn’t correctly updating with the current changes.
Minimizing the occurrence of a data breach requires updating all three of these essential components—the WordPress core, plugins, and themes.
Solution:
You should take the following precautions to safeguard your website from security vulnerabilities:
- Plugins and themes from third-party sites cannot be trusted on your WordPress website.
- The login data should be changed from time to time, and two-factor authentication (or something similar) should be used for user identity verification.
- Install an antivirus on your computer and a firewall on your network to defend against any suspicious activity targeting your website.
- Deny IP addresses of nations sending SPAM and bad traffic to your website
- To help ensure the security of your WordPress site, use an SSL certificate.
Problems With Data in WordPress Website Creation
Having no connectivity to the database in WordPress is a development problem that WordPress developers may quickly identify. It’s a common occurrence WordPress developers or users have encountered.
You want to make a new blog entry. Suddenly, the system generates an error message stating that it was unable to connect to the database. Several factors can cause this sort of failure. You may either fix them yourself or get someone to do it for you.
Solution:
- Wrong Connection Data: First, ensure that the correct username, password, hostname, and database name are given in the wp-config.php file. Perhaps someone altered these without informing you. Locate the file and double-check the data. If it is wrong, then edit. If it is right, then continue to look for the source of the problem.
- Server Or Hosting Provider: Your hosting provider might also be to blame. You may have stored more data in your database than the provider permits. Get in touch with them and find out what’s going on. Furthermore, the server itself may be down at the time. Then it’s time to heal.
Sudden WordPress Updates Can Occur Without Warning and May Drastically Affect Your Business
WordPress routinely releases new updates. WordPress is made of millions of individual customizations; even minor tweaks to code significantly impact the WordPress CMS, themes, and plugins.
Using the current software, themes, and plugins, helps WordPress site owners to keep their sites running smoothly. For the most part, the upgrades are to eliminate prior versions’ errors.
Users benefit from using the latest software, themes, and plugins, which allows them to run their WordPress site smoothly.
However, with certain WordPress themes, plugins, or even entire websites, updates for WordPress are not taken into consideration, and WordPress has to work to maintain compatibility.
There are instances where particular factors fail to recognize updates and instead are prone to causing issues. In the event that the situation is not resolved immediately, you may suffer a substantial financial loss.
Solution:
- Whenever you receive notifications from WordPress about software upgrades, such as a new theme or plugin, check to see if your website needs those updates before implementing them. If that is the case, then make the necessary changes to your website. Plugins, themes, and software updates are handled similarly.
When something in your website behaves oddly after the update, you have a few options: You can delete the defective plugin, theme, or software, or you can ask WordPress developers to take care of the problem.
WordPress Websites End Up Being Slow Over Time
Since everyone knows that websites that load quickly are much appreciated, as a general rule, people like to visit and browse through websites with pages that load rapidly since this enables them to find the necessary items quickly and effortlessly.
People nowadays have a short tolerance for waiting for a site to load and will go to another website if a site loads slowly. These fast-loading websites appeal not only to the public but also to search engines.
To make online users happy, Google places websites with faster load times on the search engine results page (SERP). Google and other search engines want to provide users with a pleasant experience.
A slow-loading website might be caused by having published an excessive amount of content over a short period of time, mainly if you publish content every day on your WordPress site. The buildup of loads of content will eventually cause your website to slow down. If your website does not load fast, it will be harshly criticized by the audience it’s aiming to reach.
The majority of slow websites have a low ranking in Google, have a high bounce rate, and have fewer visitors.
Solution:
- If feasible, run your website on a dedicated hosting server. You will receive extra bandwidth, allowing your website to load quicker on all devices.
- After a set amount of time, perform website debugging and limit the use of WordPress plugins.
- Delete some of your website’s outdated material.
- Use a CDN and put website caching in place.
All of these actions will restore the speed of your WordPress website.
There Can Be a Lot of Extraneous Data
This problem has something to do with databases and the accumulation of data over time. This major issue is connected to WordPress website development, and the database might become clogged with unnecessary data.
However, when you first install WordPress, your database is clean and well-organized.
But when you start adding posts, comments, and so forth, the problem begins. Along with a primary database, the system produces a metadata table. You may end up with a comments table and an associated metadata table, for example.
As time passes and new data enters your database, your database structure may go out of control due to the additional tables. In addition, due to a large number of interrelationships, querying the data with SQL becomes exceedingly complex.
To achieve a more basic table structure, you may use the built-in WordPress techniques. However, if the quantity of data is large, the site may crawl at a snail’s pace.
Solution:
Unfortunately, you cannot alter the way the system operates. In this scenario, hiring WordPress development specialists would be the ideal option. They will extensively examine your database organization and recommend the best strategies to maintain it clean.
Over-Dependence on WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins are the primary reason that people are so enthusiastic about this CMS platform. There are now 58,000 plugins available for WordPress as of June 2021.
These plugins allow WordPress users to add extra features and functions to their websites without modifying a single line of code. They also boost website owners’ overall productivity and performance.
Many non-technical people rely significantly on plugins to run WordPress websites since they lack the knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS to run WordPress websites independently. Using too many WordPress plugins might cause your website to slow down and dramatically reduce your business volume.
The same is true for WordPress developers. Even though you have the technical and coding skills, you may have developed an over-dependence on plugins. Plugins provide a big help to WordPress developers due to their ease of use and availability.
But as mentioned before, there are security concerns that develop over time regarding WordPress plugins.
Solution:
- To operate WordPress websites simply and efficiently, be careful and learn PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS. Limit your use of WordPress plugins as much as possible.
Your Website’s Home Page or Another Page Is Blank
Because WordPress is one of the oldest CMS on the market, it has the largest community. As a result, there are a plethora of WordPress plugins available on the Internet. It is a good thing, especially if you are in a situation where you may need help to solve it.
For example, you open up your WordPress website, which has a significant number of plugins and discover a completely blank page. It is called WordPress White Screen of Death.
There is nothing to inform you of what has occurred: no notices, no cautions, nothing. You shut off the browser. Then, re-open it. The page remains blank.
What can you do when you have no idea where to look?
Any WordPress website development specialist will notice the issue right away. It’s most likely due to one of the plugins. It might have been made by amateurs or poorly tested, for example. It might be out of date.
Solution:
In this case, WordPress development professionals recommend temporarily disabling all plugins to check whether one of them is to fault for the issue. What you should do is as follows:
- FTP to your website.
- Look for the plugins directory.
- Change the name of it.
- Now reopen the website. Is the content still available? If you’ve got it right, then the issue is with one of the add-ons. The following stages are as follows:
- Give the plugins directory a descriptive name.
- Remove all of the folders from the plugins directory and place them in a new folder.
- Keep your eyes on the website while you copy and paste each folder into the original plugins directory.
- Once you’ve determined which plugin is causing the problem, uninstall it or replace it with a new one.
- Please keep in mind that this problem might occur on any page of your website.
- Furthermore, because programmers utilize PHP for WordPress development, this issue might be caused by a shortage of PHP RAM.
Whether the problem is caused by a defective plugin or a lack of memory, you may also change the WB_DEBUG constant in wp-config.php to true. It will activate the debug mode, allowing you to identify the issue instantly.
Pages Begin To Take an Excruciatingly Long Time To Load
There is often nothing wrong with the plugins that you or WordPress site developers have installed. The issue might be that there are too many of them. We comprehend your situation. It’s tempting to utilize as many plugins as possible to satisfy all of your business’s requirements.
An overabundance of add-ons, on the other hand, might result in some highly unpleasant situations. Page loading times that are unusually long are one of these. If you’ve observed that your site is operating at an acceptable pace ten years ago but is now undesirable, look at the list of plugins on your site.
Solution:
- Make sure you don’t have any duplicate plugins. Leave one plugin for each purpose, such as SEO or data analytics.
- Of course, tailored WordPress development is the greatest method to ensure that your website runs smoothly and quickly. If speed is a top priority for you, as it should be, but you can’t get there on your own, consider hiring our professional WordPress back-end and front-end developers.
They are well-versed in crucial web technologies and can add the necessary functionality to your site. This way, you won’t have to rely entirely on third-party WordPress plugin developers.
A Hyperlink Leads to a Dead End
Have you ever clicked a link on a website only to be sent to a page with the number 404 prominently displayed along with a message indicating that the page does not exist? Isn’t it irritating?
You don’t have to be WordPress developers to allow your visitors to see the actual page rather than an error page, no matter how elegant it appears.
Solution:
- Simply navigate to the WordPress admin area and choose the Permalinks menu item. Check that the URL of the page to which the link refers is valid. If it isn’t, update it and save the changes. There are numerous reasons why a permalink leads to nowhere. For example, a post may have been removed.
- One thing to keep in mind is that, in some situations, you should preserve the permalink modifications even if the URL is right. Simply click the Save changes button.
- Another possibility is that something is amiss with the .htaccess file. In this scenario, consulting WordPress developers is the suggested solution. This file is too critical to change without the proper knowledge.
A Difficult Multisite Configuration Procedure
WordPress Multisite enables users to manage numerous websites from a single backend. However, the installation and activation procedures are extremely difficult and complex. Non-technical people cannot imagine managing a WordPress multisite. It may not be a good fit for a beginner.
Solution:
- For beginners, if you don’t know how to install and activate the multisite functionality on your WordPress website, seek the assistance of a WordPress CMS development firm.
- For WordPress developers, seek assistance from other fellow developers, especially in areas that would need a team to accomplish.
Conclusion
There is most likely no other content management system that is as adaptable and simple to use as WordPress. Every time a new version is released, the platform’s core improves and becomes more robust. It is not to claim that WordPress is totally without flaws, which WordPress developers or users can attest to.
We’ve just scraped the surface in this piece by discussing some often reported difficulties that emerge during WordPress website building. Other hazards may also await WordPress developers creators and consumers.
Some of these difficulties may be resolved by non-technical WordPress developers without the need for outside assistance. However, there will come a moment when an average user will be stumped as to how to cope with an issue they have encountered. It is where experienced WordPress developers may be quite useful.
While running WordPress websites and blogs, WordPress developers and users encounter specific issues. These are some main problems of the WordPress CMS with the best possible solutions. Simply study them, and you will have a stress-free WordPress blogging experience.
