Why you should avoid WordPress for your recruitment website
5 minute read
By Alex Mcauley on
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that is often used for creating websites, including recruitment websites. However, there are several reasons why it may not be the best choice for a recruitment website, specifically in terms of security and performance. As a co-founder of Nodex I have been building websites for over 20 years. In my extensive career mostly spent in recruitment technology; Wordpress has never and will never be the right choice for a recruitment website, I go in to some of the reasoning behind this fact below.
One of the main issues with using Wordpress for a recruitment website is its general lack of security. Wordpress is an open-source platform, which means that its source code is freely available to anyone. This makes it easy for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit them. Additionally, many WordPress plugins and themes, which are used to add functionality and design to a website (especially recruitment website functionality), can also introduce security risks. These plugins and themes may not be regularly updated or may have vulnerabilities that are not known to the developer. Here is a link to a exploit database that lists common WordPress core, theme and plugin exploits that are currently available to any hacker. At the time of writing the number is a staggering 38,379 exploits.
Another security concern with Wordpress is that it is often targeted by hackers for brute force attacks, which involve repeatedly trying to guess a user's login credentials. This can be a particular problem for recruitment websites, as they often contain sensitive information about job applicants, such as resumes and personal data. If your website were to be compromised and the data leaked online or used for other nefarious purposes you could land your company with a large fine from the ICO.
In terms of performance, WordPress is also a poor choice for a recruitment website. WordPress websites can be slow to load and may not perform well under heavy traffic. This is a problem for websites and especially for recruitment websites, as they are often visited by many job applicants and recruiters. Additionally, WordPress websites can be prone to crashing or experiencing other technical issues when under heavy load. This can lead to a poor user experience for job applicants and recruiters, who generally become frustrated and leave the website.
Another performance concern with WordPress is that it can consume a lot of server resources, which can lead to high hosting costs. This can be a problem for recruitment websites, as they may need to handle large amounts of data, such as resumes and job listings. High scale recruitment websites also need to serve many concurrent users - something WordPress is not equipped to deal with.
In summary, while WordPress is a popular CMS that is often used for creating websites, it is not best choice for your recruitment website. Its lack of security and performance are major concerns, particularly when it comes to handling sensitive information about job applicants and dealing with heavy traffic. Compounding this the themes and plugins used by companies offering WordPress recruitment websites are often free or very cheap which generally means that the quality of code is lacking and insecure, not to mention that if the company is using a free or very cheap plugin they're effectivly just stealing your money!
There are alternative technologies that are more suitable for the needs of a recruitment website. These technologies offer better security, performance and scalability, and are often used by large enterprise companies. Therefore, it is important to consider all options before making a decision on which technology to use for a recruitment website. We always recommend that you should use a recruitment website software that has been built from the ground up for the sole purpose of recruitment and not a general throw some darts at a board and see which ones stick approach.
Of course there will always be Wordpress developers or Wordpress agencies that will tell you the opposite of this article and also tell you that company X or Y runs Wordpress so it must be okay. Remember that it's in their interest to tell you that because that's how they make thier money, or rather installing some free software and some free or incredibly cheap themes / plugins and charging you money to selotape it together!
Your staffing website is your shop window to your industry and the wider internet. If your shop windows were smashed on your offices you would get them fixed, not only for the security but for the aesthetics of how it's perceived by your customer base. Your website is no different, you can do irreparable damage to your brand and image should it get hacked, defaced or taken offline, not to mention the sensitive data you're inviting bad actors toward. Using WordPress as your recruitment website is an unnecessary risk to take and should be avoided at all costs and generally it's not 'if' you get hacked but 'when' you get hacked. In our experience, the companies that offer these services try to dazzle you with gimmiks and snake oil to paint over the poor performance and security of these types of website. If you're at all concerned you can do your due dilligance quite easily with a few free industry standard website audit tools that will audit the performance, load times, security, SEO and best practices of a website. There is even a tool to determine how much carbon a particular website uses based on its page size and used technologies, if you would like to know more about these tools or for your own free audit please get in touch using the telephone number at the top of the website or using the contact form in the footer.