The days when internet and website seem to be unessential are gone. Everyone needs a website now to convey what they are doing and who they are to the world. If you are looking for a website means, you must be a blogger or a business owner.
Your website is a place for personal growth and business development. It’s a way of showing your authentication to the people around the world. WordPress is a simple and easy to use platform with number of features and customization options.
You can use it to develop any type of website like blogging website or business website from small scale to large scale or E-Commerce website, etc. If you want online presence, here is a list of reasons to choose WordPress among all others.
Affordable Price
We consider a lot of features and advantages before buying a product or service. Apart from technical and logical reasons to choose any product/service, we consider it’s price as an important factor. Small business owners can’t spend much on building websites. They want to finish it within the budget. Because, they just want a web presence to promote their business, meanwhile they have to put much efforts and finance on developing their business.
And for bloggers, if they are starting for the very first time and blogging as a hobby, they want an aesthetic design with more space to write their blog posts. Everyone will have different purpose and needs from a website. People who can’t afford much for a website platform will obviously look for a free source with good features and support.
WordPress is an open source software which you can download, install and use and modify it according to your purpose by yourself. It’s not a surprising fact, WordPress 5.4 has been downloaded for 5 Million times.
All you need to build your website is a domain name and web hosting. Then you can install WordPress and start developing your website and publish it easily. Domain name is nothing but your website address on the internet. It is the name by which people search for you and your business online. For example, your company name followed by any of the extensions like .com (or) .in (or) .net, etc. There are plenty of domain name providers are there. Few examples for domain registrars are GoDaddy, Namecheap, Domain.com, Hover, etc. You can find them online and buy a unique and custom domain name for your personal blog or business.
Web hosting is the place where you store all your website files. You are going to rent a storage from a server for your website data and files. For web hosting, you can avail from Hostinger, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc. Since, wordpress is a free software, the overall running cost of wordpress powered website is very less compared to other CMS platforms.
Used by 35% of All Websites
According to a recent survey published by NetCraft, wordpress has powered 35% of the internet. It’s growth is tremendous in numbers and It has increased 2% when compared to 2019.
WordPress is ever growing and it’s growth never seem to be declining over years. If you think of it in a more practical way apart from statistics, WordPress has a very large community on internet, you can get their support so easily and people love to enjoy it’s updated features.
63.6% Market Share on Content Management System
WordPress is the top content management system. According to W3Tech, WordPress accounts for 63.6 % of content market share. Comparing to other CMS systems, it’s a very huge amount.
For your reference, Shopify accumulates 4.3%, Joomla accumulates 4.0% and Drupal accumulates only 2.7% of CMS market share.
23% of Top 10K Sites Use WordPress
This fact is an interesting one. While WordPress having a dominant overall market share, it is used by top sites as well. Around 23% of the top 10K most trafficked websites in the world works on WordPress. Around 75 million websites across the world use WordPress as their website platform.
Around 14.7% of the top 100 most trafficked websites in the world are built on WordPress. It is a very huge factor when compared to other content management systems. No other CMS systems can beat WordPress.
Around 500 new sites are created daily using WordPress and 17 new blog posts are published every second.
These statistics are enough for us to choose WordPress other than any other platforms for our website.
Easy to Manage
WordPress is an easy to manage platform. It comes with a built-in update management system. You can update your themes and plugins from your dashboard itself.
It will also notify you when there is a new update for WordPress available. You can update it there itself with just a single click. You don’t have to go to their website and request for update and wait. It’s as simple as a mouse click.
You can perform various website management tasks like backups, security check, comments check, actions on themes and plugins, monitoring, blogging new posts periodically, optimizing your images, user management, contact page configuration, SEO and analytics on WordPress site.
Safe and Secure
WordPress is considered to be very safe and secure platform to run your website. Since it has vast community of users, developers and contributors across world, WordPress offers all possible solutions to keep your website safe. If you want to protect your website on your own risk, you can follow the following easy techniques. You can install a backup solution, best security plugin, enable web application firewall or simply get SSL/Https certificate.
Some of the WordPress security plugins for your reference
Easy to Customize with Themes and Plugins
WordPress is easy to customize with plenty of themes and plugins available for free and premium. Pre-Designed themes are surely breathtaking and allow advanced customization options to make it look even more better. You can get the best theme suited for your type of website for free from WordPress. Whether it’s a blog or business website or an E-Commerce site, you can select from multiple themes.
Plugins are the features available on WordPress to add custom functionality to your WordPress website. There are thousands of free and premium plugins are available for you to use to add advanced features to your website.
Without knowing any code, you can simply install a plugin to add functionality to your website. WordPress has more than 56000 plugins.
Few must have plugins for your WordPress site
- Elementor – It’s a page builder with pre-made templates and easy to customize your website elements. You can easily create complex website designs with this drag and drop editor. It’s the great option for people who want to develop a website on their own since you have all support learning platforms online.
- Akismet Anti Spam – It reviews and filters all comments shared on your website to protect your website from spam. It keeps a thorough check on unwanted spam messages on your WordPress site.
- WPForms – It is helpful for creating attractive contact forms. It is used by most of the WordPress users since it is an easy drag and drop form builder. You can create any type of forms like contact form, subscription form or payment form.
- W3 Total Cache – Caching is nothing but storing the data as you enter it to provide the data faster when asked next time. W3 Total Cache also reduces your website loading time.
- Yoast SEO – It helps you to improve your site’s SEO and analyze your content’s readability. It’s easy to change the title and meta descriptions of your page/post, add your target keywords and track their performances.
- UpdraftPlus – It helps you to create automatic and manual backups for your website. You can also transfer your backups to remote locations and restore sites from backups.
- Wordfence Security – You are putting your content on internet. So it is important to secure your website from hackers. Wordfence plugin helps you to protect your website through firewall and scan it for malware, viruses and other intruders.
- Smush – It compresses and optimizes your images to optimize your website for fast loading. It is easy to use and you can optimize your images without losing it’s quality with this plugin while you are uploading to your WordPress website itself.
- Live Chat – Live Chat options are intended to help your website visitors instantly talk to your sales people and support staffs. It helps you to add live chat on your website. You can provide real time support to your customers since it has mobile app too.
- WooCommerce – The best choice of plugin for e-commerce website. You can use it irrespective of the size of your business since it is designed for small to large online stores. It is easy to install and customize.
SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimization is must for getting more traffic to your website. Because, more traffic means more conversion, more sales, more results. WordPress automatically generates title tags and meta descriptions for all your pages based on the title you give to your page and the content you put on it.
You can also install plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, SEO Press to add your focus keywords to pages. You can also see the keyword density and other useful suggestions there.
Supports Different Media Types
Website won’t look attractive and informative without graphical representations and videos. WordPress supports different types of media files like images, documents, audios and videos.
It is not limited to just text. You can add any type content to your website. It also allows you to embed your youtube videos, instagram posts and other social media posts by just adding the URL in the post editor.
Some of the supported file formats are png, gif, jpg – images, doc, xls, ppt, pdf – documents, wav, mp3, mp4 – audio, mpg, mov, wmv – video.
Multilingual
WordPress supports multilingual contents. You can translate your website into another language with WordPress. You can opt for a plugin which offers the translated version of your content. So you can easily create a multilingual website just by using a plugin.
Some of the best multilingual plugins for your WordPress website are TranslatePress, WPML, PolyLang, etc.
Big Brands Use WordPress
While lot of small websites are using WordPress, there are number of big brands are also using WordPress. Because, WordPress is the best CMS platform among all and it is easy to use and manage.
If once the website is developed, anyone without coding or programming knowledge can add contents. They don’t have to hire a professional website developer with technical stuff to edit and customize the website. Anyone can learn adding contents and creating posts within minutes and start doing without any assistance.
You can find big companies like Sony Music, Mercedes Benz, The Walt Disney, BBC America, Microsoft News and more are powered by WordPress.
Easy to Find Support
There is a massive support system and community available for WordPress users. You can learn a lot about using WordPress and it’s tools from various blogs, tutorials available on youtube as well as WordPress support forums. Incredible number of resources available for learning about WordPress and getting answers for your queries.
You can find many courses online from various platforms like Udemy, WP101, Lynda, etc. But you can also learn from popular youtube channels.
Some of the youtube channels to learn WordPress
Flexible
You can develop any type of website with WordPress platform. Because it has huge number of themes and plugins to do your specific function. In 2003, WordPress was started as a blogging platform. But now it has grown to be a complete content management system which you can use to build any type of website.
You can develop an E-Commerce website for your online store with the help of plugins like WooCommerce, WP E-Commerce.
You can develop a business website to authenticate your business and services.
If you are freelancer, you can also build a portfolio website with WordPress. It offers number of portfolio themes which you can use to build your website.
You can develop an educational website for your institution or If you want to sell online courses through website, you can also achieve it with WordPress.
You can also have personal blogging website to share your thoughts on interesting topics.
If you are planning to start a food blog, you can build a cooking website with WordPress’s colorful themes and supported plugins.
If you are real estate business owner, it is very much essential to have a website to showcase your properties to people, you can get best themes with WordPress.
If you are an artist and want to develop your self promotional website, you can do it with WordPress. You can integrate audio, video files and photographs, blog contents in your WordPress site.
You can also develop membership website, online directory, etc.
REST API
REST API is aimed to provide built-in API which can be integrated with mobile applications, themes and a lot more. It allows the developers to interact with any application via WordPress. It also allows you to develop apps based on WordPress.
WordPress allows you to convert your WordPress site into an Android or iOS mobile apps in minutes. You have to install the plugin, upload your website URL and name your app and set an icon for your app.
You can convert your WordPress site into a mobile app with the help of plugins like AppPresser, Appmaker WP, MobiLoud,etc.
Connect with Third Party Tools
WordPress allows you to integrate your website with third party tools like email marketing service and payment gateways with their plugins. Contact form is the basic requirement of any website. You can add it with the help of plugins like Contact Form 7, WP SMTP.
Email marketing is the most widely used way to interact with customers. You can integrate your email marketing service through MailChimp, HubSpot plugins. It provides options for enabling all the functionalities you need for your website via different plugins.
Full Control of Your Website
WordPress allows you to have full control on your website and data. There are other non-open source ones available like Squarespace, Shopify, WIX, but they limit your control to the features offered by them.
When you go for other website platforms, the e-commerce functionality will be built-in, so you can’t expand it with plugins and you don’t own your site and it’s control.
Quick Loading
Loading time of your website is directly related to the behaviour of your website visitors. If it loads quickly, they will go through multiple pages in your website and may also fill out a contact form. But if it takes too much time to load, your visitors may close your website as human mind is not ready to wait till loading.
So it is important to maintain a minimum loading time. It is possible to achieve quick loading with WordPress. With proper speed optimization and fast WordPress themes, your website will load quickly.
You have to consider this fact while choosing your WordPress theme. Because if you choose a slow loading theme, your website is also going to be slow.
Some of the fast loading WordPress themes are GeneratePress, Neve, Astra, Writee, OceanWP, etc.
Responsive
Accessing websites through mobile phones have increased a lot in the recent years. it is important to maintain perfect website design on all devices. WordPress themes support responsive design i.e.it adjusts it’s layout to different sizes on different devices like computers, tablets, smartphones.
WordPress themes offer better readability on all size of screens and resolutions. You don’t have to develop mobile specific website version. It allows you adjust to the size while you are designing for desktop itself. There are tons of responsive themes are available in WordPress. These themes ensure that a single site can be viewed on various devices without any additional themes or plugins.
Continuous Improvement
WordPress is updating and adding more and more features to it’s users everyday. It never failed to focus on user friendly features. With the latest version, you can see how WordPress is enhancing their features. Every time they release a new update, you can expect much more user friendliness and additional features. It always maintains it’s flexibility advantages that’s why WordPress users never switch to other platforms.
Comparing to other CMS platforms, WordPress has made it’s interface more user friendly, easy to understand by yourself if you just go through the dashboard for minutes, You can customize your website even if you don’t anything about coding.
Finally, WordPress is a very large community which you can trust and build your website. It doesn’t involve any coding and complicated techniques to build a website. It has made everything simple to understand, use by individuals. It is optimized for SEO and comes with a convenient dashboard.
Big companies, most popular blogs, wide range of small businesses and individuals use WordPress to create fully functional and beautiful websites.
WordPress’s growth is getting exponentially better with years and latest versions.
If you are a blogger, business owner, e-commerce professional, online course seller, realtor or a person involved in any kind of legal activities and business, then WordPress is the best choice for you to build your website.