WordPress started out as a simple blogging platform and has become the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world today. Generating more interest than any other platform, WordPress has nearly 60% of the market share and is continuing to grow. Simply put, WordPress is the go-to option for building websites. Here are just some of the reasons as to why WordPress has become the number one CMS available today.
WordPress is Open-source:
WordPress is an open-source CMS, and open to the online community. This means that it is free to use, edit and redistribute; it gives the user complete ownership over the website content. Anyone and everyone in the online community can customize the theme themselves if they want to add their personal touches. Plus, add-ons can be easily installed and there are plugins which are basically included in the themes.
The community:
The growth of WordPress can be partially attributed to the strong community behind the CMS. Various people contribute to the CMS:
- Freelancers
- Professional
- Amateurs & Hobbyists
All of these people contribute to the WordPress community and make it richer. There are also many areas for contributions with:
- Theme designs
- Website design
- Building plugins
- Content management
Multitude of plugins and Themes:
WordPress lets you extend what it can do through the use of plugins. There are both free and paid plugins out there that can do virtually anything you might want to without the need to write code from scratch. Right now, there are over 45,000 free plugins in the official WordPress directory. That doesn’t include all the premium plugins that can add even more functionality to your sites. Plus, if you know PHP (the language WordPress is built on) you can further customize any plugin you want to do exactly what you need it to do.
From lightweight frameworks to elegant powerhouses, free and paid themes abound, created by casual coders and professional designers alike. Whether you need a theme geared toward load time, appearance, or features, then WordPress has it.
In short, WordPress is a user-shaped content management system with immense creative and practical potential. A reasonably skilled user can build a site with social sharing, SEO, e-commerce, maps, new post types, and custom site structures in just a few hours.
Easy to Manage:
WordPress sites are easy to manage, both in terms of maintenance and from a client’s perspective of managing the content on the site. As WordPress has been around for so long (it was first released in 2003), there is a huge community online and extensive documentation is available. Pretty much any question or issue you may have run into has probably been experienced (and hopefully solved) by someone else already.
In addition to all of the free support from the community, there’s also premium support available from a variety of developers, so if you run into an issue you really can’t figure out on your own, you can always hire someone to help.
Multisite Option:
One huge benefit is the ability to host multiple sites on the same installation. This feature allows you to create a site for each of your sales agents or representatives, or keep various client sites together without purchasing extra websites or hosting packages.
For more information, learn about What Ecommerce is, Ecommerce Best Practices, Mobile Website Optimization, or find out if it’s Time to Update your Website.
Or, check out the following blogs focused on websites:
Responsive Web Design in 2018 – Think Mobile First
Website Concepts – Where to Begin
How Your Domain and URLs Affect SEO on Your Site