Why use WordPress? 5 reasons why it’s perfect for individuals and businesses

Whether it’s a business or a personal need, choosing the right platform to build and manage your website can be daunting and confusing. WordPress is the most popular website building engine and has been for years now. It accounts for more than 40% of all websites out there!

So, there’s no doubt that WordPress is one solution you will come across whilst doing your research to choose a platform.

Before we start getting into the nitty-gritty of our list, we first need to understand some WordPress fundamentals.

︽

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS).

Simply put, WordPress allows anyone to easily create and manage their website for free. That’s why it’s the most popular CMS platform on the internet, with over 40% of websites built in WordPress.

A CMS is a platform or software that allows website owners to create, manage and update their website by logging into an administrative section of the site.

Open-source software like WordPress gives users a free licence to the product (in our case the WordPress engine). Open-source code is made freely available for possible modification allowing anyone to create a bespoke solution or adapt the product to their needs.

Back to top ︽

What type of website can you make with WordPress?

With WordPress you can make almost any type of website you want. WordPress has evolved into a huge ecosystem with thousands of plugins and themes that allow you create a customised a website suit your needs. Some of the types of websites you can create with WordPress include:

• Blogs
• Business websites
• eCommerce stores
• Professional portfolios
• Community forums
• Social networks
• Non-Profits and Religious websites
• …anything you want!

Building a WordPress website is so easy, you can do it in a day.

Ok, now for our list.

Back to top ︽

5 reasons why WordPress is perfect for individuals or businesses

1. WordPress is easy to learn and has a friendly interface

WordPress has an easy learning curve, and even if you never built a site before, with just a few hours of learning you’ll be able to build a functioning site.

This is because WordPress uses an intuitive visual editor that allows users to drag and drop elements or add pre-defined boxes that can then be modified.

This doesn’t mean it’s not designed for those who have developed sites before as WordPress gives you access to the back end of the engine giving you the power to customize it.

So, in short it is perfect for a beginner just as much as it‘s great for the seasoned developer. And if you mastered the platform then there are countless number of employers looking for WordPress developers as well as jobs for competent, robust security WordPress administrators.

︽

2. The power of free templates and plugins

WordPress comes with an extensive toolbox of free-to-use features. These include themes and plugins.

Themes allow a user to choose from predefined templates that ease the time-consuming process of layout design. It also makes sure that the choice of design is consistent throughout the site. Most of the themes are mobile-friendly and include a responsive layout.

This means that your website will work great whether it’s viewed on a mobile phone or on a bigger screen. There are many free-to-use theme/templates available, but this doesn’t mean you can’t build your own website from scratch if you want to (unlike other alternative platforms).

Plugins are snippets of code that add functionality to your site without the need for you to know how to code. Let’s say you want to add a booking calendar to your site, well you will be able to find a plugin that does just that (more than one!). Some plugins are free and some cost money.

︽

3. WordPress is free

We mentioned earlier that WordPress is “open-source”.

Open-source software is free to use which means that the basic utilisation of WordPress is free. It means that if you want to learn how to use and manipulate WordPress first you don’t have to pay a licence fee to use it, but it doesn’t mean everything is free.

Other costs can be involved when building a site. It depends on your needs.

For example, if you require a personalised web address (DNS) such as www.my-site.com, or a particularly large server to handle many website visitors, then additional expenses would be involved.

And if you want to customise your website with premium themes and plugins, you’d need to buy them from the WordPress.org website— but most themes and plugins offer plenty of free alternatives. So, in all, a lot can be done for free.

︽

4. WordPress is widely used, secure and SEO friendly

Since WordPress is such a widely used platform (the most popular on the web) there are several added benefits that are important to mention.

WordPress is built with robust security that is constantly updated which means you or your server are protected when you use it (as long as you keep your admin password private and back up your site).

The WordPress platform is also built with search engines such as Google in mind to ensure that your website can be found by people searching for it.

So part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) is built in the WordPress engine and all you have to do is play by the rules for it to work properly.

︽

5. Online community of support out there

Finally, when choosing WordPress, you choose to be part of the biggest web community. In other words, help is widely available whether through a dedicated WordPress forum, or countless articles and video tutorials online.

︽