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Charles Miller
Charles Miller

Posted on • Originally published at Medium on

WordPress.com vs. Code for a Frontend Dev (IMO)

let me start by saying this is all in my opinion and completely welcome any and all discussion related to this topic. We all have different preferences and I want to hear yours!

My likes:

  • Ease of plugins
  • Templates
  • How simple it makes SEO (search engine optimization)

My dislikes:

  • Elementor editor requires Pro subscription to add custom CSS
  • Limited on feature “blocks”

I’ll elaborate…

I can see where WordPress comes in handy for someone not familiar with code (no offense!) and I understand that with time navigating menus to find what I want to do would become easier, but code is so much faster to me.

12 years ago when I began coding, WordPress would have helped me understand certain properties I’m sure (I know it was around but I was still playing on MySpace😆), however, I can also see where you have to have some knowledge of terminology to work efficiently with the editor. It’s nice to see that it gives red warnings when making validation mistakes like using multiple H1 elements as this can save quite some time and frustration for those not familiar with semantic HTML, but they still would need to know the difference between inline and block styling or even what an anchor tag is.

Plugins! They simplify so many things that would usually require an HTTPRequest (or are we just using CORS now?). However , with the development of Node Package Manager and Yarn, plugins on WordPress don’t necessarily offer much these days.

Lastly…I’ve seen several WordPress ads on streaming services recently, and I have to say that they make it look so simple to drag and drop your website to perfection while in reality there’s going to be a lot of frustrated people rapidly clicking the mouse because the editor didn’t add a second column and they can’t find the “+” for the right section.

To sum it all up…

I can keep WordPress on my resume, I can assist others with their WordPress site, and if a project requires WordPress I can do it….but I won’t choose it on my own.

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