Why WordPress might not be the best option for you podcast website

So, do you need a website for your podcast? The short(sighted) answer is - no, you don't. And this is right, because there are other must have things for podcasting like good quality mic, reliable podcast hosting platform and the most important thing - valuable and interesting content. Almost every podcast hosting platform offers a basic website that lists all your episodes, so why should you take care about having a website? The thing is, that a website is not necessary for podcasting, but it's one of the most important components when we talk about growing your podcast audience. Let's assume that you already know the benefits a website could bring to you, you probably also know that one of the most popular choices is Wordpress platform. We love Wordpress - it's a really great platform, but probably not in case when we talk about podcasting. Let’s run through pros and cons.

So why is Wordpress so popular among podcasters? Because it's good price performance, flexible, having plenty of different templates and etc. So nice, why should you try to find any alternatives if everything is so great with a WordPress? But let's dig a bit deeper, is WordPress really an inexpensive choice for your podcast website? Is it so flexible and easy configured especially when we’re talking in a podcast context? To establish a good looking website for your podcast on Wordpress you need to purchase a template, it will cost you about $70 if you choose pre-made ready to use template. The problem with those templates is that there are few most popular options out there, and you don’t stand out from the crowd with such templates. The prices for custom designed templates start at $400 - usually it’s too expensive for podcasters.

What about the must have features for podcasters, like automated episode page generation, collecting emails, easy shareable cross-platform links? Usually those features don’t come out of the box with templates, so it appears that you need some plugin which costs additional money whatever is it one time fee or subscription.

Vulnerability - another very important point about Wordpress. Wordpress is an open-source platform, and as it was mentioned above it heavily relies on various themes and plugins. Those things come as third party components, developed by other people and agencies. Since there are no control of what could be installed on to your Wordpress page, those components could have various malicious, not safe and easy to hack holes. You as a regular user will never notice such drawbacks, but it could make really big troubles at some point of the time.

SEO. Yes we will not try to prove that Wordpress is not an SEO friendly platform, it definitely is. But there is a BUT. If you do not have enough experience with managing the Wordpress page content, it could be that you will misuse Wordpress tagging and categorizing systems. As a result the content of your podcast website could be marked as duplicated by Google crawlers and your page will get blacklisted. You definitely do not want this to happen, because there are no ways to recover your positions in the search results.

So at the end of the day you need to set up a Wordpress page, purchase and install the template, necessary plugins and everything should be configured properly. It takes much time, especially if you have no coding knowledge. It’s way better to choose some ready-to-go solution for your podcast website and dedicate more time for producing great content instead of spending hours fighting various technical issues with a website.