WORDPRESS
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows users to easily create, manage, and modify website content using admin area specifically designed to be user-friendly. It doesn’t require users to understand coding to start using it.
More than 30% of all websites on the internet use WordPress, thus, it makes WordPress the most well-known CMS on the market. It is used by massive media companies, such as The New York Times, MTV News and many others.
Keep in mind that there are two different WordPress platforms, namely WordPress.org and WordPress.com. It is important not to confuse both of them.
WordPress.org is an open-source CMS. It is here where you can download the software and find plenty of free plugins and themes. It is also the one that you should choose if you want to create a website and have the ability to freely choose your own domain and sign up for a web hosting service.
Meanwhile, WordPress.com is a self-hosted version of WordPress. While it is easier to use, there are some limitations of how freely you can manage your content.
Let’s have a look at some pros and cons that WordPress has:
pro
- WordPress is easy to begin working with as you don’t need any technical skills to know how to use it. This allows you to almost completely eliminate the need to know how to code. When performing your website’s daily management tasks the platform is specifically designed to be very beginner-friendly. It is famous for its 5-minute installation.
Instead of coding, most of the actions can be performed through its user interface. It allows you to:- Create or update content and pages.
- Customize your site’s functionality and appearance.
- Improve and manage SEO.
- WordPress is highly customizable. You can easily upgrade your site with plugins and use various pre-made themes. Keep in mind that, the platform has a robust number of plugins in the official plugin directory and thousands more if you give a theme directory further look. There are also many online shops that offer WordPress plugins and themes at an affordable price like My Theme Shop. Plugins act as code extensions to further increase your site’s functionality and power. Meanwhile, themes are used to customize how you want your website to look.
- WordPress is always developing, as it is open-source. Anyone can contribute to WordPress – helping in fixing issues and bugs, etc.; they can also create and develop their own WordPress themes and plugins. This helps the rapid development of WordPress as the platform always gets better whenever there is a new release or an update.
cons
- WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry as you can use WordPress without any knowledge of PHP and MySQL. However, to make more advanced customizations that are not offered by plugins or themes, you need to know some scripting languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which might take time to learn.
- You are required to manage and take care of your website periodically and you have to make sure there aren’t any compatibility issues. So, you will be required to keep your WordPress site and its aspects – such as plugins and themes – always up to date. If your time to maintain your WordPress site is scarce, you can simply use a hosting service that provides daily backups and updates for your site, helping keep your WordPress site secure.
HTML
HTML or Hyper-Text Markup Language is a markup language containing tags that are used to classify elements on a website page.
HTML is used together with CSS and JavaScript for building websites. It provides the sites’ basic structure, which is later enhanced by CSS and JavaScript.
CSS helps visually style the basic structure classified by HTML and it controls how the content’s layout is formatted and presented to the users.
JavaScript is used to make the website interactive and it controls the behavior of different content elements in response to user action.
Technically, HTML and CSS are not programming languages – it is page content structure and style information. While JavaScript is a logic-based programming language.
Let’s take a look at HTML’s pros and cons to differentiate it better.
Pro
- Less need for backups and since static HTML sites are not constantly updated, you only need to create a backup every time you make a change, which realistically is not very frequent. Same goes for updates. As scripting language updates are few and far between, you’ll need to worry about it far less than with WordPress.
- When using HTML for your website, you get to control nearly everything on your website. Because you build your website from the core using a markup language, accessing and modifying the code is easier than with WordPress. This makes it much more flexible when integrating certain additional features. For example, while WordPress uses schema plugins, you can easily employ schema markup on a static HTML website via code.
- HTML websites use fewer resources. It can run on a cheaper server with fewer resources because, unlike WordPress, it doesn’t need PHP or MySQL servers.
Cons
- HTML is definitely not beginner-friendly. Static HTML is good for building a basic website. However, you need to do a little coding if you want to update your content, and you need to rewrite your CSS if you want to change your site’s appearance.
- A high maintenance cost is inevitable if you want to build your website using HTML. If you don’t have any coding ability, you will have to pay a developer to make those changes or perform updates. In WordPress, you can simply do that without any help. Considering this, an HTML website could cost much more than a WordPress website.
Which One Should You Pick?
So, after learning both the pros and cons of WordPress and HTML, have you got a clearer idea of which one is better for your website?