How great are all the options you have every time you go online? You can choose the social networks you want to hang out with, the media websites that shape your ideas, the streaming platforms that host your content. And if you want to add to the plethora of all things digital that is the internet at any point, you will have to make another choice – which platform should I use for my website?
With all the cloud builders that help you make a website in an instant, you will definitely have a lot of options. But these platforms are not actually leading the market. WordPress does. Vital and viable as ever and reasons to use it for your website are:
WordPress is BIG
While you can’t tell by the size of the core files, WordPress is very important. The amount of impact these few dozen megabytes have on the internet as a whole makes WordPress a giant among content management systems with a viable market position.
If we were to use numbers to describe WordPress’ impact on the industry, we would say:
WordPress’ user base is still expanding, which should be proof that it’s a good system with a lot to offer. But as you will see from this list, The size of the community around WordPress had a tremendous impact on the versatility and customizability of WordPress.. CMS has the power to attract talented individuals and organizations. They, in turn, contribute to making WordPress even better and increase attractiveness.
You Can Make Any Kind Of Website With It
WordPress was originally a blogging platform. Whether you really need it or not, you can still see it in some features like the ability to add a title to each page. WordPress is still very friendly to bloggers and we are happy to use it to build your blog.. You’ll have access to all the features and tools you need to build and grow.
However, you could easily take the last few sentences and replace “bloggers” and “blog” with “ecommerce businesses” and “online store”. Or replace them with “online communities” and “forums”. Or maybe “businesses” and “landing page”. Or “experts” and “portfolio”.
You can use WordPress to create any of these websites.. Keep in mind, though, that although WordPress does most of it on its own, at a certain point it will need third-party help to meet your needs. But as it is such a widely used content management system, there are always plenty of willing helping hands.. Which brings us to one of the best things about WordPress.
It Lets You Expand What It Does With Plugins…
The importance of the large user base and a host of utilities caught in WordPress’ gravity becomes clear when you start researching plugins. WordPress owes its versatility to plugins. There would be significantly less use for WordPress without plugins to extend core functionality.
You can go to WordPress.org and see for yourself how many different things you can do with over fifty-five thousand plugins available for download from the website.. Some will offer great new features and allow you to improve your website and analyze its performance. Others will do little more than make you smile, for example by showing you random parts of “Hello Dolly” lyrics.
With so many great things you can do with plugins in WordPress, you can easily get carried away and install loads of plugins. Having too many plugins can strain your resource pool and slow down your website performance.. Plugins are routinely among the biggest space busters in WordPress installations. Use them freely but also wisely.
…And How It Looks With Themes
When it comes to creating a specific look and feel for a website, plugins don’t cut it. WordPress is also great in this section because it gives you different ways to tailor the look of your website to your purpose and vision. WordPress themes can be the most affordable way to give your website a professional shine.
A WordPress theme will include design elements and website functions that match the purpose of your website.. If you look at WordPress themes for listings and directories, you’ll notice that they have different elements, features, and layouts than, for example, WordPress real estate themes.
Premium themes usually come with specific plugins that match the functionality of the website.. WordPress online store themes usually come with the WooCommerce plugin. Charity WordPress themes will come with donation plugins. You don’t have to stop there either. Just as you can customize how a theme looks, you can also decide to use additional plugins with it.. You can use a theme as a starting point for customizing your website or use it as a ready-to-use solution.
Search Engines Like It Too
If you’re making a website, you can do everything you can to make it as discoverable as possible. In most cases, your website content will be aimed at an external audience, i.e. people who can find it through search engines. If the success of your content and website depends on search engines, it’s best to learn to play well with them.. WordPress can help.
When it comes to being search engine friendly, WordPress takes the cake by letting you do something incredible to optimize your website for maximum visibility.. Whether or not including meta descriptions or by creating search engine friendly permalinks, WordPress will let you do that.
But it’s important to make a distinction here between being search engine friendly and being search engine optimized. WordPress is kind of friendly because it makes it so easy to optimize a website. In fact, if you want the best possible optimization, you need to know a thing or two about WordPress plugin installation and which plugin to get (hint: easy and Yoast). You’d better look for optimized themes as well.
WordPress Takes Security Seriously (and You Should Too!)
WordPress does its fair share of making the internet a safer place. It should be – the internet can be absolutely dangerous with all sorts of nefarious characters hanging around and trying to bring bad intentions to life. One of the ways to do this is to hack websites. In fact, they do this so often that the InternetLiveStats website has a special monitoring page for hacked websites.
The fact that WordPress is such a popular CMS with a large user base makes it a natural target. But the size also provides some protection. You can expect security patches to be deployed as soon as the community notices a potential issue.. This is why you won’t hear too many zero-day exploits occurring in WordPress core files.
If you need an extra layer of security, you can always choose one of the best WordPress security plugins and install it on your website. But it’s important to remember that while WordPress can help keep your website secure by issuing security patches, you’re usually the one who should install them. So you can say WordPress is as secure as you are ready to do it..
Will Welcome You Inside
If it hasn’t impressed you so far, WordPress is a very friendly and welcoming CMS. For starters, you don’t have to pay a penny to use it — the core file is available for free for anyone to download. It is also open source software. You can tamper with it as much as you want or just take advantage of other people’s tampering.
Everything about WordPress screams user friendliness. Need to find website hosting that supports WordPress? Most do self-respecting hosts, and some even offer one-click WordPress installation. Need to install WordPress manually? You can do it with the famous 5-minute WordPress installation. Need to install a WordPress theme? It’s as easy as doing anything else in WordPress. Do you need to enlarge or shrink? WordPress is flexible enough to follow your lead.
Don’t get us wrong – there are a lot of things about WordPress that you can take a deep dive into and get a more technical look at. You can also use it if you know coding, and you can customize it as much as you want using CSS. But for the most part, it’s a content management system whose defining feature is that it can be set up in minutes and can be used by anyone who is computer literate.. That’s the promise of WordPress, and CMS has never been able to achieve that.
Let’s wrap it up!
Choosing content management systems is one of the things that can determine the future of your website early on. Choosing a popular CMS will give you access to endless ways to customize your website and a vibrant community to provide help when you need it. These two alone would be all the reasons why you might even need to use WordPress for your website.
But the list doesn’t end there – WordPress is as widespread and spreading fast as it is because people are finding new reasons to use it every day. The only real question you have to ask yourself is when to join their ranks and start exploring WordPress for yourself.
