Why should I use WordPress for my website?
Perhaps your website’s due an update and your current website is running on a different platform, or you’re just starting out and you’ve heard that WordPress is the way to go. Whatever your reason for wanting to find out more about WordPress, here we’ll challenge the most common misconceptions and give you a better idea of the benefits of using WordPress for your website.
1. WordPress is a dynamic Content Management System
WordPress started as just a blogging platform, but has since evolved into a full content management system and more than that through thousands of themes and plugins. A lot of confusion comes from understanding the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
WordPress.com is a hosted blogging platform similar to Blogger and Tumblr, where as WordPress.org is a standalone program that can be downloaded and installed using a hosting provider, which gives you a website you have complete control over.
There are many different types of websites you can create with WordPress:
- Blog
- Personal Website
- Business Website
- eCommerce
- Job Board
- Business Directory
- Q&A Website
- Not for Profit
- Religious
- Portfolio
- Online Communities
- Coupon Website
- Auction Website
- Multilingual Website
- Knowledge-base website
- Podcasting Website
- Affiliate Website
- Photography Website
- School/College Website
- Private Blog
- Family Blog
You can even create mobile applications with WordPress. So as you can see, WordPress is far from being just a blogging platform.
2. WordPress is free
One of the main benefits of WordPress is that it costs nothing, but that can make people think theres a catch. If WordPress is so good why is it being given away for free? Well WordPress is free because it isn’t owned by any one person or company. Being an open-source project means that it’s maintained by a group of volunteers from around the world who are constantly making it better. Therefore it is free to use, to build as many websites as you want with it.
In addition to the core project and updates as and when they’re available, there are also thousands of free themes and plugins you can bolt on to your website, to extend the look and functionality of your WordPress website. This actually saves you money as it enables developers to not have to start from scratch each time they need to build a new piece of functionality.
WordPress is free and there are no hidden charges, not now, or any time in the future.
3. WordPress is easy to use
When your website is built and handed over for you to use, you want to be able to edit any component of the website with ease. With WordPress you can have complete control over your website, without the need to consult a web developer every time you want to make a change.
WordPress is very beginner friendly and has enabled millions of non-technical enthusiasts to successfully start their very own websites. Once you know how to login you can quickly find your way around and start editing your content. Once you’re editing a post or page it’s as easy as using a word processor.
WordPress has multimedia capabilities that allows you to upload and manipulate images, videos, audio files and pdfs (you can even change the max upload size). You can also auto-embed content from external services such as Youtube without having to create or copy any complicated code.
The features within WordPress empower you to take control of your website, without having to add, or edit any code. You can also easily extend the platform, by adding plugins with a simple click. Overall WordPress is easy to use and there are WordPress Video Tutorials for those that learn by watching, rather than doing.
4. WordPress is reliable
WordPress, being built and maintained by a group of volunteers may make you think about the quality, however this worry is unwarranted as the community is built up of thousands of professional developers who code and test updates on a regular basis.
Many who contribute to the development of WordPress depend on the platform themselves for their business. They have a high investment in WordPress and their dedication towards making it better is considerably high.
The fact that WordPress has been tested on millions of websites for more than a decade now has allowed it to be refined into what it is today.
WordPress works in all of the major web browsers so you should have no problem getting it up and running. If anything ever goes wrong with your WordPress installation, you can always reach out to the WordPress community, who are more than happy to help.
5. You can scale WordPress
Large organisations can have a hard time believing that WordPress will fit their needs, and that they need to invest in something more “professional”. One of the main reasons that WordPress is so good is that it can grow alongside your business, from a startup to a large network of websites that use WordPress Multisite.
Did you know that WordPress.com itself, serves more than 24 billion page views per month across millions of websites?
At the timing of writing, WordPress has been the fastest growing Content Management System for over 6 years, it powers 26.5% of the internet, and of all the websites that have a Content Management System; 59.6% of them are WordPress.
Some of the well known brands that use WordPress include:
There are many news outlets, magazines, online publications, celebrities, popular brands, companies and famous websites that use WordPress.
You can feel safe knowing that you are in good company, and that WordPress can scale alongside your business as it grows.
6. WordPress is safe to use
Nobody wants to expose themselves, or their website visitors to security risks, especially if being trusted with sensitive data, such as personal identifiable information.
WordPress being such a popular system has experienced a number of security issues in the past, as have many other Content Management Systems. The hard truth is that no Content Management System can ever be 100% safe, and if you’re operating online you’re exposing yourself to hackers who want to gain access to your resources for their own purposes.
As WordPress is popular and is becoming even more so, hackers will more often target it. However the makers of WordPress are well aware of hackers and the types of things they try to do, so they team up with security researchers and hosting companies to work towards making WordPress as safe as possible. When exploits are found security updates are released for download and since WordPress 3.7, such updates are automatically rolled out across WordPress websites that haven’t switched off this auto update feature.
The majority of WordPress websites that get hacked are a result of personal negligence such as:
- Setting a weak password
- Installing Plugins/Themes from untrusted sources
- Not keeping WordPress and it’s plugins/themes up to date
- Using an unreliable hosting provider
So by applying some common sense, managing WordPress updates and choosing the right web host, any WordPress website owner will be safeguarded by the most common WordPress hack attempts.
Then theres additional things you can do to safeguard yourself against some of the less common attacks such as backing up your website, monitoring for security issues, and putting a firewall between your website and it’s traffic to filter out the traffic that’s unwanted.
By combining these security measures you’ll have a website that’s less likely to be hacked, and one that has a backup plan for when things go wrong, which will make your website as safe as anything online can be.
7. WordPress is good for search engine ranking
Google loves WordPress as it takes care of 80-90% of the search engine optimisation mechanics to ensure that your website gets crawled, which gives you a head start when it comes to ranking above your competitors. WordPress also has some fantastic plugins to make your website even more search engine friendly.
While search engine rankings depend on more than the platform itself, WordPress gives you a solid foundation to start from.
8. WordPress is mobile friendly
As mobile traffic continues to overtake desktop traffic, it is necessary to think about how your visitors will be viewing and interacting with your website. Did you know that Google bans websites from it’s mobile search results if they’re not usable on mobile devices? WordPress is prepared to survive in this new world of responsive design as standard.
WordPress is built on the technology that modern mobile devices require and it’s theme repository has hundreds of free WordPress themes that are fully responsive and ready to go, so when visitors come to your website using a smartphone or tablet your website will automatically scale to suit the visitors device.
Not to worry if you’ve already chosen, or have had a theme developed and it isn’t responsive, as it can be adapted to suit.
Want to update your websites content on the go? You can rest assured that the WordPress back-end now comes fully responsive allowing you to easily edit your website via a web browser on your mobile device.
9. WordPress supports teams
In order to keep your website up to date, you may need different team members to work on the website at any one time. There are a number of user roles within WordPress that have defined capabilities which enable you to control the level of access you want your members to have.
If none of the default roles give you the level of control you require, you can create additional user roles.
You can also get plugins that enhance your teams content workflow, such as a checklist of tasks to be completed before you hit the publish button, an editorial calendar to schedule posting, and so much more.
10. WordPress will be around for a long time
When you make an investment, you want to know that it will be a good one far into the future. Knowing if your chosen Content Management will stand the test of time is important when it comes to you and your business.
Matt Mullenwegg, one of the founders of WordPress has stated that the next goal is to have the majority of websites using WordPress. Millions of sites, big and small are continuing to adopt WordPress, and if you look at any of the current statistics for WordPress you’ll see that they keep going up. Any fears you have of investing in a dying technology is completely unwarranted.
To WordPress, or not to WordPress?
For anyone that’s not familiar with WordPress, it can look like any other Content Management System. However, the information above will help you to make an informed decision on why you should use WordPress for your next website.
Has this helped you decide if WordPress is the way to go? Has it raised any further questions? Please tell us in the comments section!