Useful to know about WordPress FAQs

Here are a collection of commonly asked Questions and Answers on WordPress including questions on plugins and themes, SEO, eCommerce and hosting. These might help you decide if you want a WordPress website.

Is WordPress easy to use?

WordPress is generally seen as one of the easiest CMS platforms for non-technical users to manage their website content. Setting up a new site in WordPress can be beyond many people but editing your content afterwards is probably within most peoples’ ability with some training and guidance.

How good is WordPress compared to other CMS software?

WordPress is by far the most popular web publishing software in use throughout the world on sites large and small. All other CMS systems have nothing like the popularity and support that WordPress has.

It is a very flexible platform that can be used to build all sorts of websites for bloggers, self-employed, small companies, clubs, charities and huge corporations.

As WordPress is so popular most relevant business tools and software will integrate with it.

WordPress meets most people’s website needs. It can be easy and simple, or as complicated and sophisticated as you need it to be.

Are there 2 versions of WordPress?

Yes. There is WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

WordPress.com is the place to go if you just want a blog. This is an online service with some advertising unless you pay.

But if you want a website then WordPress.org is a much better choice. WordPress is available for Free but needs a domain and hosting to work. This is the version web designers use because it is much more flexible. It is not limited in any way and there are thousands of extensions (plugins) available to add functionality.

What are plugins?

Plugins are extensions to WordPress that add extra functionality. Core WordPress is sufficient to build simple websites but WordPress was created to be extendable and that is the key to its tremendous success. There is a whole community of WordPress fans who build plugins to add extra features. Consequently, there are plugins for almost everything you can think of but they can vary in terms of quality and support.

What are themes?

Themes are used to provide the design that you see when you view a WordPress website or blog. There has to be a theme for the site to work and WordPress comes with a few basic blog themes.

There are thousands and thousands to choose from, which can be a brick wall because you can be overwhelmed with choice, then disappointed when you try some out.

What are page builders?

Page builders are specialist plugins or themes that are designed to replace the normal WordPress content editor. They served a very useful function years back when the WordPress content editor was very basic. The page builders were the only way of creating more complicated content layouts. But WordPress now has its own well-established and very flexible built-in system called the Blocks Editor (or originally Gutenberg) that allows different complex page layouts on each page (or section of a page), therefore making add-on page builders redundant.

Add-on page builders still exist; some are thriving with a loyal following of designers or website owners who have invested a lot of effort in using them, and there are some new ones. You may come across WPBakery (found in many themes from ThemeForest), Divi or Elementor. The problems with these add-on page builders are that they replace standard WordPress functions so they give a different editing experience; they add an unnecessary layer of complexity on top of standard WordPress and they do not play nicely if you want to stop using them and convert your content back to standard WordPress.

Is WordPress Free? What about plugins and themes?

The core WordPress software is free (it’s open-source). Many plugins and themes are free to use. Some plugins and themes have free versions that give you some functions and “pro” versions that add more for a fee. Fees are usually quite modest (often between $20 and $100 per annum) but can add up if you want lots of premium functions.

In my experience, most people do not need any premium plugins for a standard website. If you wanted a membership site, a directory site or an eCommerce site that may require some premium plugins.

Where do you get plugins and themes?

Many are on the official WordPress Repository and are available to download directly from within WordPress in their free form.

It is worth noting that there is a measure of quality control on everything in the WordPress repository. Plugins and themes must be free, they have to have reasonable functionality and give free updates. They are rated by the users, you can see how popular they are by the number of active downloads, you can see when they were last updated and you can see the support requests. Using the official repository means you get quite a lot of peace of mind and they are less troublesome.

There are other plugin and theme repositories that you can’t try without buying and you only get updates and support for a short limited period. You will need to download the software package and upload it into WordPress – this is not difficult but is not automatic as it is with the official repository. Then you have to pay for renewal. Or take a chance on out of date software that may be a security risk or otherwise problematic as other software moves forward. Updates can also be more fiddly.

I would always give preference to plugins and themes in the official WordPress Repository as these are likely to be less hassle than ones bought elsewhere.

And a final word of warning – only keep the plugins and the theme you need. Do not clutter up your WordPress site with stuff you are not using. It slows your site down and adds to the security risk of out of date software hanging around.

I have a theme but it is not quite right, can you help?

Yes, but I would probably throw away your theme and use one that does what you want. It is likely to be easier that way.

Depending on how much the theme is doing beyond just branding (fonts, colours etc) will affect how much work there is to untangle your content.

How easy is it to switch themes?

Very easy, but it can be dangerous so do not do this on your live site. If you switch between themes that are not compatible (ie not built to do the same thing in the same way) it may make a mess of some of your site pages. There may be some rebuilding to do (although much of your raw content should still be available).

Do themes vary much?

Yes. Themes vary so much in what they actually do and the way they are built. Some are very customisable while others are very restrictive.

Some are simple and just deal with colours and fonts plus header and footer layout. Others then provide lots of page layouts – so you are fitting your content into the boxes provided by the theme. Others come with page builder software so you can build your own layouts. (Although page builders are no longer necessary for most sites as WordPress Blocks provide all the layout options most people need.)

Some then add extra functions (which is ill-advised, this is what plugins are for). Changing such themes is likely to lose you everything associated with the extra functions.

My experience is that themes are very much a lucky dip and can be very misleading. They look great in the sample/demo but it is then a challenge to get your content into place to make your site look as good. And if you happen to want something slightly different to the way the theme does it – tough.

Can you recommend good themes?

If I had to pick one theme for general use it would be Blocksy and it is free from the WordPress repository. Blocksy is a very impressive, very fast loading, very flexible theme designed with WordPress Blocks in mind. It has a surprisingly full feature set for a free version including a header and footer building system. Blocksy has a premium version with some useful extras.

Other free themes available in the WordPress repository worth considering are:

GeneratePress – I like this one because it is designed to be very fast loading, it is reasonably customizable in its free format (there is a premium version with lots more options) and there is a Blocks plugin (GenerateBlocks) designed to go with it (free format gives you the basics and premium version for much more).
Astra – The most popular theme in the WordPress repository so is definitely worth a look. It is highly customizable. There is a premium version as well if you need extra options.

Does WordPress have ecommerce options?

Yes, the Woocommerce plugin is the leading plugin that adds full standard online shop functionality to WordPress. Woocommerce is one of the leading eCommerce platforms used by 30% of online stores. It is owned by the same company that owns WordPress – Automattic. There are lots of extensions (plugins) that add extra functionality to Woocommerce in its own extensions repository that has free and premium plugins. There is also a purpose-built free theme by the Woocommerce people called Storefront which itself has various extensions (some come at a cost). Many other themes also work with woocommerce.

Is WordPress search engine friendly?

Yes, it has been designed to aid SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). That is not to say all the SEO is done for you automatically as this can never be the case. Much of SEO is concerned with choosing the right keywords and placing them in the right places. WordPress provides the framework to allow you to do that effectively.

I would normally recommend adding either the Yoast SEO plugin or the MathRank SEO plugin as these both add significant extra SEO functionality, guide you and makes some SEO tasks easier. MathRank gives you more for free.

Is WordPress suitable for large websites?

Yes. WordPress is equally comfortable running small and very large websites. However larger websites will require more powerful hosting (as is the case with any sort of website). There also is no issue starting small and scaling up – the same WordPress software would be used throughout.

Do I need specialist hosting for WordPress?

No, most hosting companies support WordPress but I would recommend you do have hosting that is optimised for WordPress. This means it comes with added security, a variety of WordPress specific tools to aid management of the site and high speed caching facilities to make the site run significantly faster. There isn’t much difference in the cost of decent generic hosting and specialist WordPress optimised hosting.

Is WordPress secure?

WordPress is one of the most secure platforms. WordPress is a popular piece of software and it is targeted by hackers. There are sometimes security vulnerabilities but these are usually dealt with quickly. But it is important to keep all the WordPress software up to date and this can often be done automatically.

The most vulnerable sites are the neglected ones that are not kept up to date or use plugins and themes that are no longer supported.

I would recommend adding the WordFence plugin which adds a Firewall, does regular scans and various additional protections against hackers.

Can WordPress be added to an existing site?

Generally speaking no. Rather than integrate a content management system (CMS) into an existing website it is easier to start again with a new web page template but it is normally possible to reuse the content.