Why is WordPress so popular?

WordPress
WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. There is no more to say. Let’s have a look at why that is. WordPress is the CMS of choice for 38.2 percent of the top 10 million most visited websites on the internet, and the brand controls 63.5 percent of the CMS market.

WordPress’s influence and reach are clear, but why is that? What makes this CMS the obvious choice for the majority of webmasters? This article summarises all of the causes for WordPress’s popularity.

The Benefits of using WordPress

1. WordPress is free

First and foremost, downloading and installing the WordPress core software on your website is completely free. One of the main reasons for WordPress’s popularity is that it was made free; this substantially lowered the barrier to producing a high-quality, professional website.

It’s vital to note that only the core programme is available for free. You may be charged extra for any themes or plugins you install. Despite this, WordPress allows you to create a beautiful professional website while saving money for other important business needs.

2. WordPress is open-source

WordPress is open-source
WordPress is open-source

WordPress is also open-source, which means the software’s source code is freely available for others to modify and adapt for various purposes, including commercial ones.

The open-source nature of WordPress has allowed a large community of contributors to grow and flourish throughout time. Their ultimate goal is to continue to innovate WordPress through upgrades to the core software as well as the development of ancillary products such as themes and plugins.

3. There’s a plugin for just about everything

Wordpress Plugins
WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins are small bits of software that add extra features to your website. There are a range of plugins available to satisfy a variety of needs, ranging from page builders to contact forms.

Plugins can be free or expensive, and while many free plugins will suffice, there are a few purchased plugins that are well worth the money. One of the greatest ways to judge the quality of a plugin when looking for one to match your needs is to look it up on the WordPress plugin repository. All WordPress users have access to the ever-expanding plugin repository, which includes both free and paid plugins. Don’t forget to check out our article on how to choose a WordPress plugin.

4. WordPress is the best blogging platform in the business

WordPress began as a blogging platform in 2003, as most people are aware. And it’s still the best one around today, 17 years later. True, WordPress has faced competition in the past — many of which are still active today, such as Tumblr, Medium, and Blogger — but they have shown to be no match for WordPress.

You may establish a simple single-author blog with regularly published content with WordPress, or you can go as far as creating a complete online magazine with scheduled entries, many authors, editors, and contributors. You may see and edit your content once it’s been submitted, and you don’t need any coding knowledge or experience.

5. But it’s not just for blogging

While WordPress has a reputation for being a blogger’s dream, it’s far from a one-trick pony. What else can you do with WordPress other than blog? Here are some examples of what you can do using WordPress:

eLearning portal: Do you want to start your own online academy? With Learning Management System (LMS) hosting, you can do this in WordPress. The most common option is to use the LifterLMS plugin, which allows you to develop and sell online courses. With this plugin, you can even integrate multimedia lessons.

Invoicing systems manager: WP-Invoice is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create and send invoices for your products and services. It’s simple, yet it gets the job done. If you decide it’s not for you after trying it out, don’t worry: the WordPress plugin library contains a plethora of different options.

RSS news portal: Only providing access to the news will never be adequate in today’s frequently overwhelming online world; you’ll need an RSS feed. WordPress makes displaying feeds from numerous sources alongside your posts a breeze. For quick RSS feed integration, look into plugins like WP RSS Aggregator.

Knowledgebase: WordPress makes it incredibly easy to create an encyclopedia-style knowledgebase with glossaries and dictionaries. To efficiently display your content, create tags, categories, and user-defined templates, guaranteeing that people can locate answers quickly. Knowledge Base plugins like Heroic can generate papers, which reduces the need for support.

Converting your WordPress site into a job board: Have you considered turning your blog into a job board? It’s as easy as installing a single plugin. You can simply add, organize, and manage listings on your site with the WP Job Manager. Registered users and visitors can use this plugin to look for and apply for jobs posted by employers.

Systems for event management: Many corporations hold events throughout the year. So much so that a whole different web system for managing these events is required. Several plugins in the repository make it possible to integrate and sync major calendar apps, making event administration easier.

Appointment scheduling: Appointments are made by people from many sectors. A simple online appointment management system would be quite useful for these experts. Bookings are thankfully managed by WordPress.

6. WordPress prioritizes SEO

WordPress prioritizes SEO
WordPress prioritizes SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be an important aspect of any website owner’s marketing plan. Why? When done correctly, SEO improves your site’s search results rankings, influencing whether or not your target audiences can find you. Many website creation platforms make it tough for customers to execute complete SEO techniques. Fortunately, this is not the case with WordPress. WordPress is the best-rated CMS for a variety of reasons, including its SEO capabilities. WordPress makes SEO simple for all users thanks to a multitude of plugins and the ability to customize things like permalinks, metadata, media optimization, and the ability to incorporate other SEO software management tools into your site.

SEO by Yoast, All-in-One SEO, and Schema or Schema Pro are some of our favourite WordPress SEO plugins. These enhancements to your WordPress site will make it simple for any user to take their search engine performance seriously.

7. WordPress websites grow with you

Consider your company as a budding plant, with your website serving as the container in which it thrives. As a plant matures, it may overrun its container. Starting your company with a WordPress website makes scaling up and “repotting” your company a breeze.

How? When it comes to creating a website, you have three options: DIY, template, or custom. Because WordPress allows you to construct all three types of websites, you’ll never have to switch from one platform to another and start over in order to keep your business expanding. Let’s have a look at the three most common forms of websites:

The Do-It-Yourself Website: WordPress makes it simple for almost anyone to create a website fully on their own, though you’ll probably want to brush up on your HTML abilities if you choose this route. Even yet, with plugins and page builders at your disposal, building a website from the ground up is considerably easier when using WordPress as a strong foundation.

The Template Website: Don’t want to do everything yourself? A template website is an excellent option. This option allows you to purchase a ready-made canned template from which to develop your website. Template Monster, ThemeForest, Array Themes, and CSSIgniter are all good places to look for one of these. You can set it up yourself or have someone else do it for you once you have it. Although there are customizable places in templates, the structure of the templates remains intact. You’ll be able to change a few elements like color and content, but for the most part, the original theme will remain. The site, however, is scalable and can grow with your business because it was built with WordPress. This is in stark contrast to SaaS website builders like Wix or Squarespace, which are very stiff and impossible to scale up as your business grows.

The Custom Website: Do you require a unique website to fit the unique requirements of your company? It’s best to go with something unique. When you choose a bespoke website, you’ll be working with an in-house developer or a freelancer or digital agency to design and create it from the ground up. Your WordPress developer will build a custom site to meet your precise requirements, and as with any custom task, you pay for uniqueness and fulfillment of your goals.

WordPress, unlike other software service providers, ensures that your website is always scalable and exportable, regardless of the path you take.

8. It’s supported by a massive community and industry

The fact that WordPress is open-source software implies that anyone can study, create, and innovate using the source code of the WordPress core programme.

This freedom has resulted in the formation of a large community. Although there is a lot to learn with WordPress, it isn’t limited by pricing, skill level, or even premium customer service. There are no barriers to getting access to the programme, and users have created blogs, forums, online lectures, webinars, and even books that detail how to get the most out of it. Anyone can get the hang of it with a little time spent playing around with the dashboard and watching some of the innumerable lessons available online.

Aside from how easy it is to learn from the community that has grown around it, WordPress has spawned a thriving industry – plugin developers, theme producers, web hosting providers that offer WordPress-specific services, and digital agency like SiteCare all owe their existence to WordPress. And they’re all growing with the same goal in mind: to make WordPress more user-friendly.

9. Managing content in WordPress is simple

You don’t have to worry about your lack of coding experience or technical site building understanding using a CMS like WordPress. This platform was created with the goal of empowering non-developers to manage a website’s day-to-day operations.

That is why WordPress is so widely used, from professional bloggers to corporate marketing departments. They can manage the website themselves, relying on a developer only when they need to add a new feature or make a change.

10. Everything is in your control

The vast majority of WordPress rivals are not open-source. And, while they’ll perform an adequate job hosting your site, their versatility is limited. The following are some of the limitations you should expect:

The code isn’t entirely available, making it difficult to make changes. Worse, the coding language is frequently proprietary to the platform, which means that even if it is available, you are unlikely to understand how it works. You’ll have to engage a skilled developer to make the necessary changes.

The e-commerce feature is built-in and cannot be enhanced with plugins. It’s not your content. Yes, you created it, but once it’s published, it becomes a part of the site where it’s stored. This implies that if you cancel your subscription, all of your files and pages will be lost or stored by the platform until you decide to reactivate it.

The good news is that WordPress gives you complete control over your website’s content. With WordPress, you can easily move site files, construct and expand your online store, and do just about anything else.

11. WordPress supports many media formats

WordPress supports many media formats
WordPress supports many media formats

A short Google search will turn up a comprehensive list of all the media formats that WordPress supports. But, for the time being, you can rest assured that the most common media kinds and formats are covered:

  • Images (.jpeg, .png)
  • Documents (.pdf, .doc, .pptx)
  • Audio and video (.mp3, .mp4, .m4a, .mov, .wmv, and .avi)

Do you need to send a file in a format that isn’t widely used? No issue; WordPress also supports unusual file types like.odt,.key,.ogg, and.3pg.

WordPress is the greatest in the industry, but there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. WordPress updates

Many website owners find it difficult to keep up with WordPress upgrades.

To begin with, the software update notifications on a WordPress dashboard never seem to cease (and frequent, if you have a lot of different plugins installed). Second, wrongly rolling out updates can cause parts of websites to cease working as intended, or even bring the entire website down.

As a result, rather than dealing with the problem head-on, some WordPress site owners procrastinate or roll back upgrades. This is bad because failing to update obsolete plugins and themes might lead to serious security and compatibility issues in the future.

So, what are the options for a website owner? If your developer isn’t handling these upgrades, there are professional WordPress maintenance firms (like SiteCare!) that can take care of them for you and provide you peace of mind.

2. Site speed & performance

Site speed & performance
Site speed & performance

There’s nothing like a slow-loading, under-performing website to drive visitors away before they can get the information they came for.

What is the most typical reason for a website’s slowness? Although there are several reasons, plugins and extensions like page builders are the most common culprit. They load your site with a lot of superfluous code, which slows it down.

It can be difficult for the typical person with little to no coding skills or understanding to vet the design of a theme, plugin, or page building software, and as a result, badly designed themes, plugins, or page building software can easily seep in. It’s critical to hire a professional from the start to avoid this.

3. Security vulnerabilities

WordPress is already quite safe, thanks to its core software, which is well-maintained by the firm. Plugins, themes, and scripts, however, are a major target for hackers due to the platform’s vast popularity and open-source nature.

There are several reasons why WordPress websites are hacked, and understanding them can help you improve the security of your site. There should be no issues as long as your WordPress maintenance company strives to keep the installed software up to date through frequent updates.

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