WordPress to this day is thriving in an environment filled with open source CMS’s and blogging systems which can be seen as a great feat for a web software that is built on PHP.
WordPress is almost 17 years old (created 27th May 2003) and has come a long way from its early basic blog publishing system days, this expenditure has made WordPress what it is today.
Back in 2012 WordPress was used on 1 in 6 websites which was nearly 60 million websites in total, 8 years on and that number has to be higher. WordPress is claiming 35% of websites are using WordPress today. Unknown to most is the amount of very big named brands using WordPress to publish content.
The allrounder
WordPress is much more than just a blogging system, perhaps this is obvious to the masses however on a personal level I will only use it as that. WordPress can be used for static websites, forums, CMS and even image galleries it is such a feature-rich tool.
Putting together webpages with WordPress is easily done with no coding, its template and paging system make duplications and extending easy.
Plugins like Divi, Elementor and Beaver Builder are incredibly advanced page builders that make it simple to build and scale-up static websites quick. These of course are never fully 100% customizable but for the most part can achieve what you envision.
These page builders give those that don’t know or have the time to learn/use HTML and CSS the ability to build webpages. The downside is cookie-cutter websites that lack difference or originality.
With a decent amount of web design skill applying a framework such as Bootstrap and building a website around this with pure HTML could be just as quick when compared to installing and setting up WordPress to click and drag build a website.
Caching plugins to truly serve static pages and the ever-important SEO helpers can round out a decent solution to deploying a website
Issues
WordPress has had a sizeable amount of security issues in its history, Of note is that many of these vulnerabilities came from user-made plugins which are out of WordPress’s control for the most part. Back doors are always a threat as is the common SQL and XSS injections.
A massive history list of WordPress vulnerabilities.
The WordPress source code has been seen as messy and a nightmare to work with, it is not fully 100% OOP design with some sore of mixed, watered-down hybrid being used.
This is non-issue from me, as ‘don’t fix something that isn’t broke’ and re-writing WordPress would just be more hassle than its worth just to have clean looking code.
As of now, WordPress has seemingly bridged a gap in getting everyday people “building” and “designing” websites without needing HTML/CSS/PHP knowledge. It works and despite past issues, modern PHP (7.3+) has made WordPress still a very popular choice for blogging/CMS/static websites.