Reasons Why You Should Use WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System), used with over 73 million websites. WordPress is also flexible, easy to use, free to install, deploy, and upgrade. The platform also has thousands of templates and plugins that provide a simple interface, thereby reducing cost and deployment time.

Due to its robust features, WordPress powers over 22.5 % of all the websites on the internet, and 50% of content management websites. Some of the popular websites powered by WordPress include Facebook, LinkedIn, Sony, Google, Disney, CNN, Time Magazine, eBay, The New York Times, and more. If you are still not convinced, here are more reasons why you should use WordPress.

WordPress is Easy to Learn, Setup, Manage and Update

To use WordPress, you don’t need to be an HTML coder or Internet expert. All you need is a stable internet connection, and a good web browser to create a website. If you think you have everything you need to get started, just go to WordPress.com and create your free account. In about two minutes, you can have a website online. You can even opt to pay an extra fee to get your domain name hosted there.

Millions of people use WordPress, and new people are joining the community almost every day by creating their WordPress powered websites. One of the main reasons why WordPress is so popular is because it’s relatively easy to use. Moreover, there are many websites and resources solely dedicated to providing tips, support, and tutorials on how to use WordPress.

Open-Source with Expansion Capabilities

As a free software, WordPress is free to download, install, and modify. With it, you can create any type of website, with over 2,600 themes and 31,000 plugins available for free to choose from. As mentioned earlier, WordPress can be self-hosted, and there are therefore no costs associated with installing and modifying it. you can also get free support from WordPress community members, download free themes, and plugins, and you can even contribute back to the community once you have a little experience.

All these aspects make WordPress a great starting point for small businesses. When you are familiar with the platform and you’re ready to customize your website further, you can migrate the website to a web hosting account. SiteGround, WPEngine and BlueHost are highly recommendable since at times they offer such things as 50% off the hosting prices and possibly a free domain.

High Customizability and Flexibility

Another major reason why WordPress is popular lies in the fact that it can meet the demands of all types of users due to its flexible framework that lets designers and developers create or modify various elements and applications. Along with other user-generated extensions, you aren’t limited to the extensions created by enterprises.

Keep in mind that there’s just about a WordPress theme for any kind of website. Whether you are looking for a magazine theme, photography theme, e-commerce theme, or a portfolio theme, you can easily find a perfect theme for your case. These themes are also easy to customize since most of them have their own control panel allowing you to change colors, backgrounds, upload custom logos, plus other cool things without having to write any code.

WordPress is also very flexible, which is enhanced by the use of plugins. Like themes, thousands of free and premium plugins are available for use. The plugins can effectively add extra functionality to WordPress, or even add a whole new platform to your website.

SEO Friendly

WordPress is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-friendly out of the box. It’s written with the standard compliance code, which produces semantic markup, making your website very attractive to Search Engines.

While WordPress is very SEO friendly by design, you can enhance this friendliness by various WordPress SEO plugins and a set of advanced SEO tools. For instance, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin on your website, which is perhaps the best SEO tool that exists.

Security

One of the worst things that can happen to your website is getting hacked. Fortunately, the WordPress platform is very secure and is considered one of the safest platforms to run a website. Since the internet is generally insecure and an uncertain place, any instances of hacks on WordPress are followed by timely updates.

Of course, security has more to do with whether you are following the best practices, such as using a secure password and changing the username from the default name: Admin. There are also many security plugins available for WordPress websites, like Sucuri, and Limit Login attempts, which help to defend against attacks.

Ready for the Mobile Web

Today, it can be quite detrimental to think that your customers only visit your website from PCs and desktop computers. Mobile website usage is exploding, and Google formally announced that searches on mobile devices surpassed searches on PCs. As such, your customers are more likely to find you via their mobile devices, and if your website is not responsive, they will just skip yours and look somewhere else.

Most of the WordPress themes are designed to be responsive, such that they work well and look great on PCs, Laptops, Smartphones, and Tablets. This means that your customers won’t have any problems accessing your website via any of their devices. The WordPress dashboard has been designed to work on both full sized PCs and smartphones, meaning you can manage your website from just about anywhere.

Different Media Compatibility

With WordPress, you are not limited to writing text only. The software comes with an inbuilt support for handling audio, images, and video content. You can even use it for file and document management. WordPress also supports embed-enabled websites, which allows users to embed Instagram photos, YouTube videos, Soundcloud audio, Tweets, etc. by just pasting the URL in the post. There’s also an option to allow visitors to embed media content in comments.

WordPress is a great choice, considering it gives you a complete control over your website. This may be the ultimate reason for a business owner to choose WordPress, along with the fact that it incurs less setup and maintenance cost in comparison to other Open Source CMS like Joomla and Drupal. Give it a try, and let us know how you find it in the comment section below!

You can also watch this video that guides you through the process of setting up your own WordPress site: