Article: Why use WordPress for your website?
- Author: Lalit Uttam
- Date: 12 October 2022
Reasons to use WordPress as the CMS for your website
WordPress is not just a blogging platform anymore. It has become a giant now.
WordPress at the moment, is the most widely used Content Management System (CMS)Â on the internet. WordPress comes equipped with tonnes of features like:
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It is free and open source software
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It is quick and easy to install WordPress
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It has a user-friendly interface and it is very easy to use WordPress
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It has the capability to add unlimited number of pages and posts
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It is very easy to add multiple users with different user roles to the website
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It is very stable and reliable
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It uses modern day technology
There are hundreds of other WordPress features to talk about. For now, we’ll take a look at the reasons to choose WordPress as the CMS of your website.
Why use WordPress to power your website?
Well, there are quite a number of reasons to choose WordPress as your Content management System that powers the backend of your website. Performance and stability of WordPress has always been discussed from time to time. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the key features or advantages that WordPress has over the other content management systems.
1.
WordPress can be used to create any type of website
Apart from other website builders, WordPress Content management system (CMS) comes in handy when you need to set up a business website. Whether it is your blog, a simple business website for a small business, an eCommerce store, a forum, or even a complex website that uses APIs from different sources, you can always use WordPress to get things done for you. Large, medium, and small business owners love WordPress.
One-third of global websites are using WordPress as their content management system. Not just the small business owners but some of the big brands are also running on WordPress.
2.
WordPress websites are search engine friendly
The online success of the website depends on the way the website and its content are optimized. Search engines love WordPress websites. WordPress offers ease in managing the SEO part of the website. The SEO-friendly structuring of the URLs starts things initially and helps search engines to index your web pages. You have an option to install any of the search engine optimization (SEO) plugins and WordPress themes of your choice. There are thousands of WordPress plugins available to serve the purpose.
Apart from the free plugins like Yoast SEO (free), Rankmath SEO, or any other free plugin, there are premium plugins with advanced capabilities to boost your website or online store’s presence on the web.
3.
WordPress offers great support related to themes and plugins
Being open-source software, WordPress has great community support as a very large number of developers and designers are constantly working on improving the performance and design of WordPress websites. There are video tutorials and articles related to almost any aspect of designing or developing WordPress. Not only do they save time in adding new features to your website or blog but also help in rectifying any issue persisting in your website, which could be related to plugins or the theme.
Even if you plan to change the developer of your website, the new developer can start almost instantly as they do not need to spend time in understanding the code and structuring of your website.
4.
WordPress websites are flexible to use
Being able to create any type of website, WordPress offers great support for developers to create simple as well as highly complex websites. It is very easy to use either the drag-and-drop functionality to create a basic website or to switch to a complex mode to add functionality to your website. Most of the time, there is a plugin to add almost any type of functionality to the website. However, if you want something specific, you can always customize the code to develop or add functionality to the website or your online store.
Again, it all depends on the level of your technical expertise on how you would like to use WordPress.
5.
Quick to set up and fast to use
It hardly takes 5 minutes to install WordPress and a couple of hours to create a website with a basic structure. As WordPress is free, it is also provided by your hosting provider as an installable script. Some web hosting companies offer one-click installation of WordPress content management system. To set up your business website, you can always take advantage of WordPress in designing a basic website for your business using the drag and drop feature available in WordPress.
You can also make your website social media friendly by integrating various social media platforms into the website. If you’re running a blog, social media sharing can help your blog posts to reach thousands of people or businesses.
6.
WordPress is a safe and secure platform
In general, WordPress is a secure platform and is very safe to store your information on. But, being an open-source platform, sometimes it becomes a playground for hackers. This doesn’t mean that you cannot enhance the security of your WordPress site. There are some of the best security plugins available to enhance the security of a WordPress site. Not only you can add multi-factor authentication to your WordPress site but can also scan your WordPress site for the presence of any type of malicious code on the website. These plugins certainly help to make your site secure.
Backup options are also available through plugins or through manual ways. Almost every hosting provider offers this service either free or paid. Sometimes it becomes very crucial to back up your data if you are running an online store.
7.
User-friendly when it comes to creating content
Once you have installed WordPress on your web hosting, you only need to install the right theme for your website. WordPress repository is full of free WordPress themes for any type of website or online store. As soon as the WordPress theme is set up, you can start creating content by adding posts or creating pages with Gutenberg, which is the default content builder for WordPress websites.
There are other website builders or plugins such as WPBakery Visual Composer or Elementor that you can use to create a website, blog or online store. You can either save a draft of your content, publish your content on the web or create a page with the content.
8.
WordPress can be used to create apps (REST API)
WordPress powers a number of apps on the web. REST API which stands for Representational State Transfer API has enabled developers to build apps using WordPress platform. A WordPress website is not only capable of displaying content on the web but is also capable of handling API calls to send and receive data. You do not need a special WordPress hosting environment to perform such operations as even the basic hosting service is capable of handling WordPress REST API requests.
WordPress runs on PHP but you do not need to write any code in PHP to run API calls, all you need is to make requests in HTTP format. This is one of the WordPress powers that has enabled developers to use WordPress as their app development platform.
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WordPress is fast
Faster websites perform better. This is not an unknown fact for WordPress developers. If you use a lightweight WordPress theme, you will have a fast-loading WordPress website. There are tonnes of free and paid plugins available that help in making your website load fast by using the caching and compression capabilities of your server/website hosting. Moreover, WordPress makes it very easy to control all the features of a plugin right from the WordPress dashboard.
In order to load the website faster, you can also use image compression plugins which help in compressing the images and reducing their size. Some of the plugins can also help to make your website compatible with modern-day image compression formats such as WebP.
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10.
WordPress offers scalability and migration capabilities
WordPress websites can be scaled which means the system can be upgraded at any time. WordPress also offers migration capabilities. All you need is the backup of all your files and the database associated with your WordPress website. There are a number of WordPress plugins available that also help in backing up and migrating your WordPress websites. If you are stuck at any step while migrating your website, the WordPress community is always there to help you at every step.
If you are planning to upgrade your server or changing your web hosting provider, WordPress offers quick migration options via third-party plugins like Akeeba Backup. Apart from this, you can always search for tutorials for WordPress website migration on YouTube.
11.
WordPress is here to stay
There have been website builders which got discontinued or reached their end of life. WordPress, on the other hand, has kept on evolving. The most recent version of WordPress is one of the best content management systems out there. A WordPress website just needs to update the core in order to upgrade to the latest version without having to worry about any errors (most of the time). All this is because WordPress is free and open source software. WordPress software receives updates through a community of developers which is one of the largest at the moment.
The way with which you can upgrade your WordPress code is the same way you can upgrade your WordPress plugins and WordPress themes. The WordPress dashboard will notify you as soon as an update is available. You can also keep track of your WordPress core, WordPress theme, or WordPress plugin version number right from your dashboard.
12.
It is very convenient to create users & manage permissions
For any website which requires multiple users to work simultaneously or registration is required for users to perform a specific task on the website such as making a purchase, user registration is required. WordPress offers user creation and user-level permissions. So, you can add someone to your website for instance, as support staff or someone to manage your CMS or even to write blog posts for you. All these can be added with specific user privileges. This functionality is free to use and is already embedded in WordPress core.
Although, a specific plugin can sometimes be required to further enhance this WordPress capability. You can also use WordPress website to set up your social media network. The plugin – BuddyPress which is free to use comes in handy in this.
Conclusion
There are millions of uses of WordPress. Sometimes, using WordPress can be considered as an art. Be it any domain name type (a domain name is basically the name of your website) or any hosting provider, WordPress is present everywhere.
Why use WordPress? It is because WordPress is the most loved content management system and the most preferred choice when it comes to building a website. A very large number of big brands and businesses are already having their websites powered by WordPress. A very large number of community users, developers, and freelancers are easily available to work on a WordPress website. You may use WordPress to write a blog, set up your eCommerce store or develop complex web applications. WordPress makes it very easy to manage your business website, doesn’t matter you have a small business or a large one. If you’re running a blog, it is very fast to create/add blog posts to your blog using WordPress as CMS.
You have millions of plugins and themes available in WordPress library. There is a plugin to serve almost any purpose you need. SEO Plugin support makes WordPress a loved CMS for search engines. Even if you run into trouble, the WordPress community is always there to help. Frequent updates keep WordPress websites safe and secure.
You can also set up user registration on your website and new users can sign up and make payments through your WordPress website. Instead of saying why use WordPress you can say “Why not use WordPress”.