WordPress was launched in 2003 and since then has grown into a “household” name in the website development world. 30% of all websites use WordPress. From beginner to expert level, WordPress is a go-to CMS for web developers. In this article, we discuss some of the main benefits of using WordPress.
Open Source
Open-source software is software that opens its source code for anyone to view, modify, and enhance. The source code is the instructions written by developers in a programming language to instruct and change the way a software works. In the case of WordPress, PHP is the name of the development language the platform was written in.
Community
WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is supported by a large community that continues to contribute to the growth of the platform. Because of this, WordPress is free to use. However, you will likely end up paying for some part of WordPress. As your website scales, you’ll have to pay for hosting, and there are additional plugins to enhance your site’s functionality which can come at a cost. But, because it starts free you have total control over how much you invest in your site.
Learning Curve
WordPress is responsible for 30% of all websites. Due to its massive market share and it being an open source CMS, the number of resources to learn how to use the platform are endless. WordPress is already structured for all levels of developers; this combined with the massive community, learning the ins-and-outs is extremely easy for beginners to grow their developing skills.
Scalability
A huge perk of working with WordPress is the ability to scale up, or down with the immense amount of themes & plugins available. As your business grows your website should continue to grow with it. Let’s say you’re growing an audience and they want you to begin selling merchandise. WordPress’s mass number of plug-ins will allow you to easily intergrade almost every big eCommerce service available. Because the plugins are ready-made functionality that, like the term sounds, just plugin into your WordPress site. It becomes much more effective and often less expensive to add complex enhancements to your site as opposed to other CMS solutions like Drupal, which require more direct code customization. WordPress has around 52,000 plugins, and that is just from first-party publishers. There are also thousands of third-party plugins for you to intergrade into your website to take it to the next level.
Blogging
WordPress is best known for its blogging feature. When blogging first started gaining in popularity, WordPress took over as the main platform for people to start. They made it incredibly easy and free for anyone to start a blog. This is how WordPress initially gained market traction and eventually a massive market share. Since then it continues to grow its blogging features making it still one of the best platforms to run a blog on.
Plug-Ins
WordPress has streamlined the process of doing SEO. WordPress makes it extremely easy to add content to your website and offers a ton of plug-ins to help implement best SEO practices. WordPress auto-formats your images to be optimized for SEO by giving you the option to add keywords, metadata, and descriptions very easily. Another key feature is WordPress’ SEO friendly permalink. This allows you to create custom URL’s for your content that you can add specific keywords too. WordPress makes it super easy to optimize content for SEO; making it a favorite for businesses.
Conclusion
WordPress, in general, is your go-to CMS for any size of a project. It has the options to handle any task you throw at it and because of its massive community, it makes it extremely easy for you to learn how to use the platform.