Why use WordPress?
WordPress now (May 2021) powers up 41.4% of all websites on the internet. So we’re going to explore why you should be using WordPress.
What is WordPress and what is a Content Management System (CMS)?
WordPress is an open-source platform. And the major benefit of this is that it remains free to use, keeping build costs down and is constantly updated and supported by some of the best coders from around the globe.
WordPress began life as a blogging tool back in 2003 where it was estimated it was used on around 2000 blogs as of May that year. Estimates in May 2021 put its use at 41.4% of the top 10 million global websites. And in that time, not only has the number of users grown dramatically but so has its potential.
WordPress has evolved and is still constantly evolving. No longer just a blogging tool, WordPress is now a fully fledged Content Management System, more commonly referred to as CMS. A CMS does exactly what it says on the tin, it enables you to manage the content on your website, without having to know any complex coding.
Once you login to your Website, you are able to upload images, documents, audio files and video simply by dragging and dropping the document into the system. You can edit posts and pages, and publish new articles as required, as well as altering your navigation structure. If you were so inclined, you can change your theme completely. So without further ado, we are going to explore the reasons you should be using WordPress to power your website.
9 Reasons to Use WordPress
1. WordPress is free
As an open-source platform, WordPress is free to download and (with a hosting package) use as a fully structured CMS system on which to build your website.
2. Easy to use
At first glance, the WordPress admin panel can appear pretty daunting but that’s only because WordPress offers so many different customisable areas. However, the main areas you will need to master in WordPress are posts, pages and media, and these are very easy to get to grips with. If you have ever used a computer and formatted text in an email or word-processing programme, such as Microsoft Word, then you will feel at home very swiftly. And with drag and drop functionality within the media library, you can be very proficient very quickly.
3. SEO friendly
Straight out of the box WordPress is an extremely SEO friendly platform, generating SEO friendly permalinks, optimising imagery and generating crawler-friendly content. Add to this many specially-developed SEO-friendly themes and specialised plugins like Yoast, and you have a great start to a well-indexed website.
4. Easy to customise
Once you have installed WordPress on your hosting package, it is fully customisable. The simplest and most effective way of making sweeping changes to your website is by applying a new theme. There are many free to use themes out there that can be explored from the WordPress admin panel. A note of caution here though. If you have a well-established website, changing a theme could result in loss of data so make sure you have made a full back-up of your site and database before switching themes.
5. Advanced Functionality
Although expensive, having a website coded from the ground up using bespoke code written purely for your website’s brief, is great, and fully justified in many websites. However, most websites evolve from your original brief. Adding extra functionality to a bespoke system can be difficult, and often very costly. WordPress’ plugin system makes this far simpler, allowing much more expansion, and adding versatility and lifespan to your website.
There are thousands of free plugins that can be added to your WordPress site at any point in its lifetime. These can add huge amounts of extra functionality to your website, from shopping carts to events calendars, secure download areas to live chat facilities. Pushing this further, there is also a large number of professional plugins, that although require a fee, can expand your website with almost limitless extra functionality.
6. Adapts and evolves
WordPress constantly evolves and this means that you have a platform that can grow organically as your business grows. It reacts to the requirements of the community so, as the market shifted from desktop browsing to mobile browsing, the platform evolved, introducing responsive designs to its operating system.
Currently the figures (correct to July 2021) set that split at, mobiles 55.77%, desktop 41.5% and tablets 2.73% – a big shift from 2012 (when records begin on mobiles/tablets). Then the split was desktop 85.69, mobile 11.44% and tablet 3.01%. Interestingly, tablets do not seem to have increased their share of the market, whereas mobiles are now the dominant device.
7. Supports numerous file types
By default WordPress supports mulltiple file types (correct when published):
Images – .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .webp
Documents – .pdf, .doc, .odt, .xls, .key, .ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx
Audio – .mp3, .m4a, .ogg, .wav
Video – .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .avi, .mpg, .ogv, .3gp, .3g2
And with the addition of plugins, many further files such as .svg, .pages, .css, .flv can also easily be supported.
8. Safe and Secure
No website is entirely safe. The very fact that it is in the public domain connected to the internet makes it vulnerable. But the WordPress infrastructure is one of the most secure CMS systems around. With a strong hosting package and a multitude of additional security plugins available, there is no reason why security should be a major concern. Obviously as with all systems, WordPress has vulnerabilities but if plugins, themes and WordPress itself is kept up-to-date, if your hosting is secure and strong passwords are used, you should be able to sleep soundly.
9. Full ownership of a website
If you create a website using WordPress, you own it. You can host it wherever you want and move it freely. It is 100% yours. If we at Identity Studio created a website for you, once paid for, it becomes is 100% yours. You can move it to any server and edit it as you see fit.
In Conclusion
So it is free, 100% yours, it is easy to use, safe, secure, supports many common file types and is flexible and powerful enough to adapt to your business or personal needs.
Finally, one of the major benefits is that WordPress is so commonly known and widely used, if needed, there is plenty of support available. You will never struggle to find someone who can help take your website to the next level. So the question maybe isn’t why use WordPress but why not?
