You need a brand new website or update the old one. And you are stuck with the options of CMS platform available nowadays. There are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CMS Hub, Shopify, Magento, Webflow and so on. So, which one to choose? The answer depends on your need. Some platforms are better for a simple website, some better for blogging, some better for the online store and bla-bla-bla 😣😏😮 But for the average user, the answer is simple, it’s WordPress CMS. Because it’s so flexible, you can build almost any kind of website on top of it.
According to WordPress.org, 43% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online. This is a huge number and dominates the internet.
WordPress was mainly a platform for blogging, but then it evolves so quickly into a Content Management System (CMS). WordPress architecture makes it possible to build fully functional sites of any category.
Let’s say, you are a restaurant owner, and you need to put menus, with the online ordering system, payment system, delivery system and so on your website. With WordPress CMS, it’s possible to build any features that you need for your business.
Or perhaps you and your friend are yoga teachers, and you want to open a yoga studio, promote your business, and think about having a brand new website. With WordPress CMS, it is possible to have such a website and even to have an online class, offering a booking system, online membership, online payment, and so on. The limit is your ideas and probably your budget as well 😄
The other example is a website for a real estate developer, where you need to put the listing of the properties, or houses or apartments. You can add a few photos of the properties for each listing, and complete them with the general descriptions of that listing. You can also offer the user the possibility to talk with the sales agent and make an online appointment to see the property live.
Also, maybe you have a beautiful accommodation place where you can rent it for holidays. And you want people to know that you offer your place as a vacation rental. So besides having your place listed on Airbnb, Booking.com & other OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), you can also have your website. There you can put a lot of beautiful photos of your property, more detailed information about your property, and offer a booking system that integrates with the calendar system on your OTA. So that you will not get a double booking for the same date from different guesses 😱😭😨 – What a headache, right?!
You see the idea, that WordPress CMS is capable of making a lot of different kinds of websites in terms of its functionalities, design and look.
Source: wordpress.org
Some of the main reasons to choose WordPress are, because, it’s:
- A Free Platform
Yes, a WordPress CMS platform is 100% FREE. However, to have an online website you will need at least the domain name & the hosting provider. The price of the domain name & hosting plans is so varied depending on your need. For the average user, it can cost about USD 80 – USD 150 per year.
So a domain name is like the physical address of your location or house, whereas hosting is like the size of your house. Some domain names are so good, so that other people bought them long before you think about that domain name, (Oopss.. It’s a bit too late now😅). This way, you need to either bargain and buy that domain name from them or change your selection. Choose wisely 😀!
A hosting plan is like how big your space is. If you need only a simple website that builds on WordPress CMS, a minimum of 1 GB of hosting space is a good start. And as your content grows, you might need more space to keep your images, and videos or you might want to upgrade your simple website into an eCommerce. This way, you can simply install WooCommerce on your existing WordPress website and upgrade the plan of your hosting to a bigger one.
- Easy to Customise
For average people, even if you are not a web developer, WordPress CMS is not that complicated to use and customise. There are plenty of online tutorials available on the internet and on YouTube. The platform has a simple user interface, is easy to use and every functionality is presented very well on the main page of the admin area or in the dashboard. Anyone with zero coding knowledge can effectively use it, thanks to the huge amount of available themes, plugins and tools.
However, it depends on how you want your website to be. The more features you want to have, the more complicated your website will be. And in that case, the best decision is to hire a professional to design the look of your website and build it for you. So that it will give the best experience for your website’s visitors. That’s why you need a web designer & developer.
- Has Built-in SEO
People are using search engines like Google, and Bing! Or Yahoo to help them find the relevant websites according to their searches. Search engines are continuously improving their algorithm to bring the best content to their users. So as the website owner you are competing with thousands or millions of other websites in the whole world to get the best place on the search results, which is on the first page of the search result.
Because when your website appears on the first page, you can have much higher visitors and better traffic. Google and other search engines have a few predefined parameters which help them rank sites.
SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. And your website should follow some basic rules to have a proper SEO score. And WordPress handles those parameters effectively.
There are a few ways to increase the SEO score of your page, some of them are on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
WordPress has built-in features to increase your on-page SEO, such as:
- Precise HTML markup
In short, search engines love it.
- Content creation efficiency
It helps you make/write your content easier, you will love it.
- SEO-beneficial permalinks
The link to your website content is more readable to the search engine and user, for example, “http://edamame.agency/web-development/#wordpress” – you can tell that here we talk about web development and mainly about WordPress. That’s is much more readable than “edamame.agency/page/p-89798” – it’s nonsense.
- Image optimization
WordPress helps you to follow the SEO rules even without coding. So for each image that you want to display on your website, you have to optimize it with alt tags, descriptions, captions, and further trimming. And WordPress has that built-in tool.
- Optimise for Mobile User
Based on the latest data being collected by datareportal.com, mobile internet connections are 104.6% of our whole world’s total population. It means more people make the connection even from more than one device from their mobile. The data below also indicates that people are highly relying on their mobile phones.
So, to serve that audience, your website should not only look good but also be responsive for the mobile user. It means your website needs to be responsive to different screen ratios and has a fast-paced loading.
WordPress has built-in functionalities to build Responsive web design (RWD). Most WordPress themes nowadays also offer you that functionality. In Edamame Agency, having a responsive web design is one of our principles.
- Has Plenty of themes & plugins
In simple words, the theme is the look of your website and the plugin is the functionality of your WordPress website.
WordPress has a lot of free and cheap themes and plugins that help you possible to have a very cool and great website with a minimum budget.
Imagine if you want to cook tasty food and need a lot of different ingredients and tools! – I mean you want to have a good looking and fully functional website.
Here WordPress.org is the best place to hunt for plugins and to hunt for themes. So that you can go grab them, go back to your “kitchen” and “start to cook”… and “Voila! Bon appétit!” – enjoy your website.
You can even find themes based on your needs or categories, like eCommerce, portfolio, blog, business, and so on. However, some website owners request special features that required the developer to build a custom theme or plugin for them. In this case, you need to spend some money on that.
- Has a high level of Security
WordPress are regularly release security updates to protect your website from any vulnerabilities. At the time when this article is written, WordPress had just released the latest version of WordPress 5.9. Having your WordPress along with the installed plugins on your site updated can greatly minimize the risk of having your site hacked.
It’s also important to choose the server that builds to host WordPress websites and supports the latest technology to increase its security. There are plenty of plugins to increase the security of your website, protect you from spam and make a backup of your website. Having your website hosted on our server is also one of the wise decisions to make 😊. Where you can enjoy the benefits of a fast, secure, and backed-up website, without the hassle of managing yourself.
- Easy to integrate with other software via API
When you have a website, it’s natural to get curious about how many visitors to your website per day, where are they come from, and so on. To know such information, you need to connect your website with analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
For most people, reading the analytics data from the Google platform might be a bit too complicated. However, there are a few great plugins that can help you present simpler data about your site visitor without the hassle of reading it from Google Analytics. This is made possible by the connections via an API or plugin.
Another possibility is to put your social media content on your website or let the visitors of your website login via social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Gmail.
Perhaps, you want to offer newsletters subscriptions and later prospect the readers with the email marketing tools? Yes, with WordPress you will have plenty of options to achieve that goal too.
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Here we mentioned only 7 reasons to use WordPress, whereas, in reality, there are more reasons than that. With so many good things about WordPress, do you start to feel more confident to have your website built on WordPress?
Just a little bit of assurance, we can help you to achieve that by simply contacting us if you want to know more and discuss your specific needs. We like to help you design and develop your WordPress website that matches your specific needs and brand.