Category: WordPress

Every once in a while, we hear a potential customer voice concern over our use of WordPress. We’re here to set the record straight on why WordPress is our CMS of choice for security, functionality, and ease-of-use.

Why CleverOgre Says “Yes” to WordPress!

When we build custom, responsive websites for our clients, we use WordPress. If this surprises you, chances are you have an inaccurate or outdated opinion of this wildly popular Content Management System, or CMS.

To be fair, in its fledgling days, WordPress was a little like the Wild West: Outlaw coders produced themes that were as likely as not to contain hidden malware, trojans, and viruses. Plugins of dubious character wandered the darker corners of the internet, waiting to cause havoc and bring e-commerce sites to their knees. Charlatans and quacks hawked templates that rarely did what they claimed, hiding their flaws behind snazzy yet useless animations that slowed browsers to a crawl.

The Golden Age of WordPress

Thankfully, that is no longer the case — at least not when WordPress is set up properly and maintained by a skilled team of coders and designers! Today, this venerable conglomeration of open source gold has evolved to become the most-used CMS in the world. As of 2025, more than 26% of the sites on the internet use WordPress. Yes, 26% of THE WHOLE ENTIRE INTERNET! That’s over a quarter of a BILLION sites! When you only include websites using a known CMS, that number jumps to 32%. And every indication shows that these numbers are going to keep on growing for the foreseeable future.

So, the big question is, “Why?” What has attracted so many website developers, a notoriously finicky bunch, to jump on the WP bandwagon? To put it simply, it’s what we call the WordPress Golden Triangle of Awesomeness*: It’s Open Source, Easy, and Widely Used.

WordPress is Open Source!

WordPress is arguably one of the most successful implementations of open source software in history. As the term “open source” implies, the source code at the core is not fiercely guarded by any single company, where incremental upgrades are doled out slowly to maximize profits. Instead, it is made available to anyone who wants to download the CMS and start banging out web pages.

This allows developers to keep timelines reasonable by eliminating the need to start from square one with every project. When using the solid, stable foundation of WordPress, designers and developers are free to put their talents into making great-looking sites that are effective and efficient.

WordPress is Easy!

From its inception, WordPress was designed to be easy for the end user to create and share content. Initially conceived as a bare-bones blogging platform, the dashboard and editing features are simple and intuitive. If you can use that ubiquitous word processing software found on most PCs, chances are you’ll quickly figure out what to do when you log in to a WordPress site.

Gutenberg, the new native WordPress block-based editing system, makes creating and editing engaging layouts a breeze. With a quick training session, most of our clients go on to update their own sites without difficulty. Of course, if they DO run into trouble, the CleverOgre team is here to help.

WordPress is Widely Used!

Thanks to the worldwide community of developers and software engineers who are constantly creating, testing, and sharing their individual tweaks, changes, and upgrades, WordPress is constantly at the top of the CMS game. When an especially useful feature is identified, it becomes part of the core software that is then shared with everybody who installs the latest update.

Likewise, there are many thousands of individuals who are constantly poking and prodding the CMS to identify vulnerabilities. Flaws are uncovered and fixes are created at an amazing speed, often before the website-using world at large is even aware of the issue. This leads to an incredibly robust and resilient piece of evolving software, beholden only to a communal desire to improve. Unlike proprietary software that may sit for years without being analyzed or tested for issues until it is hacked to pieces, WordPress is ruthlessly subjected to the attention of white-hat hackers and security professionals on a daily basis.

So, Why Do I Hear So Many Bad Things About WordPress?

Despite all the things we love about WordPress, there are caveats. Most of the bad publicity around this great CMS has its roots in the following causes:

Wide-Spread use of Templates

There are plenty of web companies that simply grab a cheap template from the marketplace and start plopping in their customers’ content. This is not to say that all templates are bad; in fact, we’ve seen a very select few that were pretty darned great. However, if you are looking for an original-looking site that sets you apart from the competition, templates are not the way to go. We come across many sites where the (cough, cough) “developers” didn’t even bother to change the default colors, text or other settings (ever seen a “Hello World!” blog post?).

Bad Plugins Are Everywhere

WordPress allows developers to quickly add functionality by using plugins. As you might expect, there are plugins of high quality and plugins of low quality. When a site is built with untested, outdated, or abandoned plugins (see the next section for more on updating), chances are you’re going to have a bad time. Similarly, we see a lot of very slow websites that are jam-packed with duplicative plugins and visual builders that add a lot of bloat with little benefit to the end user.

Updates Not Installed

As we mentioned earlier, the WordPress community is fantastic about rooting out issues and identifying vulnerabilities. Fixes and patches for these problems are included in frequent updates to plugins as well as the WordPress core. However, these updates need to actually be installed to take effect. When sites sit for months or even years without getting updated, they slowly break down and eventually become sitting ducks for hackers.

WordPress + CleverOgre = Great Sites

That’s where we come in: CleverOgre uses WordPress responsibly. We provide managed hosting and keep all of our WordPress sites and plugins updated, protecting our clients quickly and quietly behind the scenes. Rather than using templates, we develop all our own themes in-house, each one custom-designed for our individual clients.

We include only the options, features, and plugins that are necessary to keep our sites lightweight and nimble. Speaking of plugins, we pay for high-end licenses for top-quality plugins that are stable and enjoy cross-browser support. In the rare occasions when the plugins we use become outdated or are abandoned by their creators, we find new ones and make sure they work properly for our clients’ sites.

We also include additional security measures on our sites, such as non-standard admin login pages and hiding file information. Our websites prevent known hacker IPs from accessing the domain, add CAPTCHA to contact forms, block suspicious logins, and enforce rate limiting to keep the security risk to our clients’ sites to a minimum.

We Love WordPress, and You Will, Too.

So that’s the scoop! We love WordPress, and our clients do, too. Give us a call and see how the winning combination of WordPress + CleverOgre can work for your business!

*Patent Pending But Probably Not Happening.

In the mid-1400s, Johaness Gutenberg changed the world in a profound way with his printing press.

Rather than the laborious practice of writing by hand, his movable type and mechanical reproduction allowed for the quick printing and widespread distribution of written materials for the first time in the Western world. The latest built-in editor for WordPress is named after this man and his invention, and after using it for a few years now, it’s easy to see why.

Classic WordPress vs. Gutenberg

In the classic WordPress editor, you’d typically see what looked like a page in a word processor like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. At the top of the editing page, you’d find controls for adding elements like headings, images, bulleted lists, and links, as well as simple options to style body copy like alignment, font size, colors, and bold or italics.

Adding more advanced elements to a webpage like videos, maps, and complicated layouts often required installing one or more specialized individual plugins, writing custom code, or using a website-building plugin like Elementor, WP Bakery, or Beaver Builder.

Similar to how many of those website-building plugins work, Gutenberg uses a collection of blocks to hold, style and display different types of content on a website. The number of included blocks is huge (not to mention third-party custom block libraries and the ability to create new blocks), and there are options for saving, duplicating, and reusing blocks and block patterns across pages.

Gutenberg vs. Website-Building Plugins

Gutenberg’s big advantage over website-building plugins, however, is that it is part of WordPress, not a plugin that you have to download so it can overwrite WordPress with an entirely new set of controls. This means a WordPress website built with Gutenberg has a smaller footprint so it’s faster to load, while also making it easier to edit and less prone to compatibility issues. There’s also the benefit of not needing a paid plugin to get a huge range of functions!

Learning Gutenberg: Easier Than You Might Think

If you’ve never edited a website before, the good news is Gutenberg is really user-friendly. In general, if you can see writing on your website, you can just click on the words in the editor and start typing away to make changes. Block-specific settings appear when you need them, and the editor offers multiple pathways to perform the same tasks so you can work the way you prefer. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!

On the other hand, if you’re used to the classic WordPress editor, switching to Gutenberg might at first feel like a real challenge. Change can be difficult for most people, especially when it comes to how we work with technology. But don’t be discouraged! Gutenberg is a well-organized and powerful system and, at its core, this new editor upholds the longstanding WordPress mission of making websites easy for everybody. Once you get used to where controls are located see how easy it is to add, edit or otherwise change content on your website, we’re pretty darn sure you’ll love Gutenberg as much as we do.

Take the New Editor for a Test Drive

If you’re ready to see Gutenberg for yourself, WordPress has a nifty little webpage where you can give the controls a whirl at wordpress.org/gutenberg. If you’d like a little handholding, in our next installment of this series we’ll go over the basic Gutenberg blocks and controls, and future posts will include specifics on combining blocks and some of the more advanced options.

Gutenberg + CleverOgre = Great Websites!

If you’re ready to get your own Gutenberg website filled with all the extras and custom features CleverOgre is known for, drop us a line! We’ll listen to your needs, discuss your goals, and provide you with a plan to get a brand-spanking-new website you can be proud of showing off.