Question

I’ve read a few comments of people on here alluding to specific performance/security issues with using performance. I’ve also read comments of people ‘having to’ switch to drupal or something else. I myself find it confusing to have a page that’s generated from the database. Just curious if people can share some of their specific problems.

Answer 1

No CMS is perfect.

Keeping your WordPress installation and all plugins up to date with the latest versions and going through all of the steps for “hardening” WordPress at http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress should make your website very secure.

In terms of performance, I think much of that comes from the web server itself. Setting up WordPress on the wrong shared-hosting platform can lead to some unwanted latency among other issues.

You can also try using some of the caching plugins such as WP Super Cache for a performance boost: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/. What plugins like WP Super Cache do is store your website in a bunch of static HTML files that are only re-cached every so often so that way you are not making repeated, unnecessary queries to your database. Personally, I don’t often use these plugins, but I do see the benefit of them.

Regarding people “having to” switch to Drupal, Joomla, etc… I believe that’s more of a personal choice. Every CMS has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are better suited for certain tasks than others. The best way to avoid that kind of situation is to thoroughly researching the capabilities and shortcomings of a variety of CMS’s before beginning a project and then chose the one that you feel would work best. (My heavily biased answer would be to simply choose WordPress, but that’s just me.)

Hope that helps some!