It's no secret that WordPress has a corner on the blogging market. Despite its widespread popularity, however, it presents several problems that are difficult or sometimes impossible to fix. While it's hard to pinpoint all potential problems due to the variability of versions, themes, and plugins, here are nine of the most annoying.

Plugins Are Weighty and Difficult to Use

Although they serve a variety of purposes, plugins aren't necessarily reliable or 'lightweight', despite their many promises to the contrary. In reality, many plugins are bloated monsters waiting to drag your site down and break its functionality. However, it's hard to avoid plugins when trying to design a versatile and unique WordPress website. Plugins are also based on whichever version of WordPress was current during their creation, and leading developers often avoid updates for fear of breaking their sites.

Themes Aren't Always Vetted

WordPress themes offer users untold variety in look and feel. But it's important to keep in mind that they are created by individual developers with little or no oversight, and then served up to users in whatever condition they are in. While some are great, others are buggy and hard to use. When problems arise, reaching the developer who made them can be difficult, especially when the theme was free.

WordPress Isn't Equally Supported in All Browsers

Although most browsers now support WordPress in roughly the same way, there's no guarantee that your site will look the same in one web browser as it does in another. No one likes to spend hours coding their site only to realize when they switch from Firefox to Safari that a number of problems remain, or are even worse than before.

Recovering Lost Passwords Can Be Difficult

After you've tried 10 different passwords and still can't log into your WordPress dashboard, it's a terrible feeling to realize that the 'recover password" emails aren't even going through. What's a poor WordPress user to do? Complicated actions like logging into your cPanel or using an FTP client are annoying to those capable of performing them. To those who aren't, they might as well be Swahili.

Admin Errors Abound

The whole appeal of WordPress is its ease of use. When you can easily log in, view your dashboard, make changes and easily create posts and pages, WordPress is great. However, it can quickly become a nightmare if your dashboard disappears, or it loses the styling, or you experience weird login issues, or you may even – gasp – see the dreaded white screen of death. At times like these, WordPress can feel like an unbelievable burden.

Most Themes Aren't Automatically Responsive

In this age of mobile design, a non-responsive theme is, well, non-helpful. WordPress themes that require a plugin for a mobile version or simply make users scroll left and right across an endless expanse of screen are outdated and unprofessional.

The Search Bar Stinks

WordPress' search bar is some weird amalgam of Google functionality and uselessness, and generally just serves to highlight how much can't be found on any given site. It searches by date instead of by relevance, completely ignoring indicators of popularity like comments or views. While better searches exist via plugin (which have their own aforementioned problems) or hand-coding, both routes are more time-consuming and complicated.

Update Errors Can Be Hard to Fix

Especially if you aren't a developer, seeing confusing errors such as 'Missing required field 'updated'" when you use Google's Webmaster Tools can be frightening. Although the problem itself isn't that huge of a deal (though it does impact SEO), this can be hard to fix and requires considerable coding knowledge to do so.

Constant Updates, Warnings and Hints are Annoying

An average day spent in the WordPress back end can subject users to dozens of warnings, updates, notes, hints, errors, song snippets and pieces of advice. Just wading through all the little messages takes more time than actually making the change you went in there for.

While any one issue can be overcome, taken in combination, these problems can make WordPress intractable, frustrating and sometimes downright impossible to use. If you're looking for a customized site and ant easy experience, contact Doc4 in Northwest Arkansas at 479 202 8634 to talk about what a completely customized website can do for your organization.