Having a website is an absolute must if you want your business to succeed nowadays, but a good website isn’t that easy to build. Most of the time, people hire a web developer/designer to make them a website that is functional enough for the needs of their business, and this can be rather costly if you want a really good site. An alternative is to learn how to use and build out your website using WordPress, which is the single most popular web content management system available today. Here are just some of the reasons why you should consider this:
The basic version of WordPress is completely free of charge and it will most likely stay that way forever. It can be used to create any type of website and is open source, allowing its users to modify and edit its source code to gain more freedom and variety. While this offers enough for most people looking for a CMS, it does not cover the aspect of making your own domain, data storage or avail features so for advanced users a priced package with a yearly fee might be needed.
The figures of about 75 million online websites which are depending on WordPress can speak for themselves, especially considering that half of these, around 37 million, use the free version. The popularity of WordPress lies in the fact that it is incredibly user-friendly, as you need no prior knowledge of software or coding to build your own website.
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that there’s a team constantly working to fix any flaws and improve WordPress as much as possible, so you’ll always be up to date with the latest in website-building technology if you stick to it.
The most important reason why you should keep up with updates consistently is the security of your website, as most updates are released precisely because of security patches (not just with WordPress, but with any online platform). Apart from security, WordPress updates provide you with superior functionality, a faster response time for your website, and much more. It’s by far the most maintained CMS today because of the large number of developers working on it, so updates are frequent and very stable.
If you want to get the name of your business out there, it’s imperative that you use social media to market yourself. WordPress makes this process a lot easier by integrating with various social media platforms. For example, a lot of social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer pieces of code analogous to their page elements that you can copy directly into WordPress, and then have that page element (let’s say, a comment box) appear right on your page. This is called “embedding”, and is something that you should get the habit of doing if you want to grow your social media presence.
If you want to get any visitors at all to your website, you probably already how important SEO is. The thing about WordPress is that it is inherently SEO friendly. According to Google itself, just using WordPress automatically solves a lot of SEO issues that you might run into when building a website from scratch. If that wasn’t enough, WordPress actually allows you to install third-party SEO plugins into the platform such as Moz, to help you with optimizing your website for availability on the various search engines that we depend upon so much these days.
This can be a real time saver, and time as we all know is one of our most valuable resources when it comes to business. The installation itself takes about 10 minutes and after about an hour of following simple instructions, you could have your website up and running. And such popularity has its perks – among its users there are many volunteers which make new templates and plugins and constantly improve the software.
Mobile devices are becoming more and more popular, so one of the main challenges that web developers are faced with these days is making their website functional and looking good from any device. This requires quite a bit of cunning code to keep everything running smoothly, but if you use WordPress you don’t even have to think about this – your website will automatically be mobile friendly. This not only means that your readers will be able to read your blog from the comfort of their smartphones, but it also means that you yourself will be able to maintain it via a mobile device, which is a huge advantage if you tend to travel a lot, for example.
One of the biggest strengths of WordPress is its customizability. As was already mentioned, the platform itself is open source, which means that anyone can modify the source code and make changes at the core level of the software. However, for those that are not programmers, there is an alternative to how you can customize WordPress to fit your own needs – with the help of various plugins and addons that are released daily for this platform.
Addons are diverse in their functionality – some enhance your security, others help with search engine optimization, but the one thing that they nearly all have in common is that they’re seamlessly coded and most of them work very, very well. This is a great way to improve your website-building experience, and make it easier and more efficient.
We mentioned the contributing volunteers earlier, but there is no reason anyone should refrain from customizing their own website since you are able to browse from a wide variety of themes or use any design with the help of some basic CSS. Nothing limits your creativity here as both the free and paid themes can be downloaded to your computer and modified to make the perfect fit for your website, and the way you want it to look.
One might be worried that WordPress is too narrowly specialized in written text only, but this is far from what the creators had in their minds. WordPress supports all popular file formats such as images, audio as well as video, and it can be used to manage websites and documents. If you need to use social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Twitter, there is no CMS more versatile and easier to use than WordPress.
While investing time and energy into building one’s idea of a perfect website, the last thing a user needs is any concern regarding malicious software, viruses or hacking. Luckily, the creators of WordPress are putting an ongoing effort to make it a safe and secure environment, and as with other features they have not taken this task lightly.
No matter what your personal or business CMS needs are, these 6 reasons confirm why WordPress is such a massive online presence and how it could be utilized to fit everyone’s needs. Hope this helped you make up your mind and we wish you good luck in your future blogging endeavors.
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