With businesses growing rapidly around the world and competition going up a notch every day, you need to be prepared for anything and everything that may block your growth.
One such action is to have a brand website – either for professional or personal usage.
Websites define you and help your visitors decode your story and eventually connect with you and your purpose. Numerically speaking, websites help you reach masses, spread your messaging and eventually grow your business – all in an effective manner.
The question here is – how to build the website? Which technology and platform to choose? You need to go for a flexible and user-friendly platform which makes your website accessible to the audience in no-time.
And there’s no limit to the platforms, frameworks and technologies in the market for website development. In this blog, we are going to talk about WordPress for website development and why it is the best option to go for.
Getting Familiar with WordPress
Now, we are not going to act as if you don’t know what WordPress is. But there are a few facts you should know.
WordPress has been named the simplest content management system to develop appealing and user-friendly websites.
Launched in 2003, WordPress currently runs 37% of all websites worldwide and is used as a content management system (CMS) by 60% of businesses.
So, how and why did WordPress become the first choice for website development? Let’s dig deeper.
Why is WordPress the Best CMS?
There are countless reasons for businesses to blindly choose WordPress for website development. But we recommend you be sure of your choice and keep these reasons in mind.
1. WordPress is extremely user-friendly
The key reason for choosing WordPress is its ease of use. It is an adaptable and dynamic system that anyone can use to build websites without having sound knowledge of coding.
WordPress has made it painless to manage websites, content and admin panel. The navigation it provides helps users to explore and perform necessary actions for different purposes.
Let’s not forget how smooth its installation can be.
That being said, WordPress has taken away the hassles of website development and maintenance – ranging from backend updates, automatic plugin updates to content updates. This has led to better website health and security. Keeping your website up to date with regular updates is necessary for the security reasons and for the better website health.
2. It is open source and free
WordPress can be easily downloaded for free in your mobile apps, desktops and tablets or in your hosting environments for better access.
Because it is an open source system, you can modify it to adapt to your requirements without any limitations.
3. Flexibility & Accessibility
WordPress has innumerable free and paid themes and plugins available. This means that the system is extremely flexible; thus helping you build your website exactly as you envisioned it to be.
With WordPress, you can build eCommerce, eLearning or CMS sites without exhausting the theme and plugin options.
It’s accessibility is top-notch as it can be hosted on any operating system such as Linux, Windows, iOS, etc.
4. Dependable, Convenient & Cost Effective
If we compare WordPress with other frameworks and CMS in the market, you’d know that WordPress is used in the majority of the websites around the world as seen in the W3Techs, firstsiteguide, trends.builtwith reports.
This proves its dependability and convenience; not ignoring the fact that all of it comes at an extremely affordable price.
WordPress has made website development accessible and light on the pocket.
5. It has a Flexible Editor
The best thing about WordPress is its extremely flexible editor. WordPress editors are wysiwyg (what you see is what you get).
The default one is Gutenberg, which is a block editor that introduces a modular approach to all parts of your site: each piece of content in the editor, from a paragraph to an image gallery to a headline, is its own block.
And just like physical blocks, WordPress blocks can be added, arranged, and rearranged, allowing WordPress users to create media-rich content in a visually intuitive way and without work-arounds like shortcodes or custom HTML.
The classic editor is a tiny MCE editor. Other editors and drag-drop page builders such as Elementor, Divi Builder, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer made it very easy and flexible to create rich dynamic pages using page builder elements.
WordPress also lets you save your content as drafts, giving you the ability to publish your content as and when you deem fit – on the go.
6. Managed admin panel
WordPress has a pre-built admin panel having modules such as:
- Pages – create/update/delete pages.
- Posts – create/update/delete blogs & manage categories.
- Comments management – manage comments you get on blogs, approve or delete them.
- User management – create/update/delete users and manage their roles and capabilities.
- Media management – upload all your medias such as images, videos, documents and categorize them as per your need.
- Plugin management – install/activate/deactivate/delete any plugins
- Themes management – install/activate/deactivate/delete any themes
- Import/export data – import/export whole content or a bunch of content of a web site website settings – manage your general, media, links settings of a website
This keeps your tasks separated and straightforward.
7. Large community and support
WordPress has a massive community of enthusiasts, support team, meetups and wordcamp organizers in 18 countries across 5 continents which is growing day by day.
Anyone having WordPress knowledge can contribute in the community which makes it easier for you to access support and get help any time you want.
8. In-built user role management
WordPress uses the concept of roles designed to give the site owner the ability to control what users can and cannot do within the site. A site owner can manage the user access to such tasks as writing and editing posts, creating pages, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and managing other users, by assigning a specific role to each of the users.
WordPress has six predefined roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. Each role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. There are many capabilities including “publish_posts“, “moderate_comments“, and “edit_users“.
The Super Admin role allows a user to perform all possible activities. Each of the other roles has limiting privileges. For instance, the Subscriber role only has a reading privilege.
One particular role is not to be considered a senior to another role. Rather, consider that roles define the user’s responsibilities within the site.
9. Has a Large directory of Plugins and Themes
WordPress comes with a large collection of plugins, themes, drag and drop page builder and widgets which help build the website in an easy manner.
A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that “plugs into” your WordPress site. Plugins can add new functionality or extend existing functionality on your site, allowing you to create virtually any kind of website, from ecommerce stores, SEO, directory searching to portfolios to directory sites.
Every theme will provide appearance settings for the website such as colors, background, page templates, sidebars, widgets, header-footer settings.
10. Easy integration with tools and libraries
WordPress’s code structure is managed in a way that any third-party tool or library can be integrated with it, such as Google Login, PDF Creation, and more.
11. Security
Every website comes with security challenges and technical aspects you might not be aware of. WordPress provides every possible way to protect your website through plugins, action/filter hooks, htaccess rules.
Both – free and paid plugins are available to monitor malware, activity tracking, clean database and files, regular backup of the website, prevent brute force attacks, limit login attempts, adding captcha, 2 factor authentication and many more configurations.
A strong password generator is provided by WordPress by default, so that one can never have weak passwords.
12. Mobile friendly & optimized
WordPress themes are responsive and optimized so that they can be mobile friendly and give the best performance across all types of devices.
In addition, it enables AMP for mobile page acceleration using a plugin.
13. SEO friendly
WordPress is a SEO friendly platform which provides different types of permalinks structure for blog, date, author, pages, categories and this makes crawling easily.
Sitemaps are automatically created and updated by WordPress which takes away the hassles of doing it manually.
Social media sharing and integration can be done simply through plugins and a few configurations.
14. Multisite support
WordPress supports multisite networks, because of which it is easily achievable. You can control and manage all your sites from a single admin dashboard.
15. Speed and Optimization
Getting a higher page speed score is difficult these days, but with WordPress, you don’t have to worry about that.
It’s caching and page speed plugins will allow you to configure every tiny detail for the website speed and optimization. From database to files, WordPress’s optimization step covers everything. You can configure CDN as well.
In addition, image optimization plugin will provide you different types of compressions such as lossy, glossy, lossless that will speed up image loading time.
16. Multilingual support
This is the most powerful feature of WordPress that allows you to create websites in 70 languages.
Install a translator plugin such as WPML, Polylang and translate your website in any language.
17. Ease of migration
Using WordPress’s powerful import export feature as well as migration plugins, the entire migration process from one platform to another is flawless.
18. Built-in RSS feeds
RSS feeds are the default feature of the website which can be accessed directly by adding the feed end-point after the domain name.
Anyone can use this link to get updates of the website. This RSS can be customized too through WordPress’s mechanisms.
In Conclusion
These were a few reasons why WordPress is the best CMS.
While I have not even covered half of the reasons, I am sure this blog will help you get a better idea of WordPress and why you should go for it for website development.