Launched 14 years ago in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a simple content blogging platform, WordPress is now the most popular and widely used Content Management System (CMS) in the world. From commercial websites to blogs, it is used by millions of websites globally.

Currently the world’s top tech blogs are run on the WordPress platform and co-founder Matt Mullenweg came up with 51 translations for sites supported by the platform and the current figure stands at 72+ languages, widening its usage world-wide.

With millions of websites using WordPress as their CMS, other platforms like Drupal, Joomla, etc are lagging behind in terms of popularity. 11 out of Fortune 500 companies use WordPress to power their websites because of its ease of use, flexibility and versatile features.

49% of top 1 million websites of the world use WordPress, while 5% use Drupal and 3% are on Joomla. Another amazing fact to employ the platform is that 83.5% of WordPress websites use Google Analytics and WooCommerce, a free WordPress ecommerce plugin powers over 28% of all estores and 52,182 plugins are already available to download! A lot for any commercial website to draw the online customer and provide them a smooth online shopping experience.

Most profitable WordPress companies are – AUTOMATTIC, a web development corporation clocks it revenue at $1.2 billion, followed by WPENGINE, a leading web host in the managed WP host category with a revenue of $73 million and last but not the least is ENVATO, the world’s leading marketplace and community for creative assets and creative people quotes a revenue of $94 million.

Now, with the above stated facts and figures, it is evident that WordPress is the perfect platform if you wish to build responsive, interactive and functional business websites. The most prominent advantages and reasons for this are stated below:

1. The best thing – It’s FREE!

WordPress is 100% free and no matter how popular your site becomes it will always be free to use. Adding to this it is open source, which means you can modify the source code to create the website you have in mind. This also eliminates the need to hire web designers for running or maintaining your WordPress site.

2. Absolutely search engine friendly

Because of the clean coding offered by WordPress making its framework easy to crawl, search engines have a natural affinity towards indexing these sites with ease. The presence of keywords, meta descriptions and tags ensure holistic search engine optimization. With the free YOAST SEO plugin, your site will be increasingly search engine friendly.

3. Very safe and secure

WordPress is always updating its software to prevent attacks and has an automatic update feature since the release of version 3.7. Give the popularity of the CMS, it is on the target of hackers but WP takes the security of its users as a top priority and takes measures to add to your basic site security system.

4. You have complete site control

WordPress CMS’ solutions offer complete site control and reduce dependency on web site developers. You can perform regular updates on your site without any assistance. And if you find yourself stuck or unsure about an update, there is a very active WordPress community to help you out.

5. Easy troubleshooting

The extensive WordPress community offers great support when you find yourself stuck on a feature. Just post a query or concern on a WordPress forum and there will be scores of members ready to troubleshoot for you.

6. Say bye to FTP software and HTML editing

As a self sufficient platform WordPress will not require an additional FTP or HTML software. WordPress easily allows you to upload text, blog posts, images and documents or any kind of multimedia files into a page or post.

7. Gets down to work immediately

WordPress can get down to work immediately after installation. It doesn’t need a tedious configuration to begin working on be it add-ons that come with miscellaneous features or RSS feeds, comments, etc. It is famously called the “5 minute install”. It is easy to setup, manage and update; one doesn’t need to be an internet expert or HTML coder to use WordPress.

8. Plethora of plug-ins

There are 1.5 billion+ WordPress plugin downloads. The most popular WordPress plugin downloads are –

• Akismet with 5 million+ active installs,
• Yoast SEO with 5 million+ active installs,
• Contact Form 7 with 5 million+ active installs and,
• Jetpack with 4 million+ active installs and so many more.

For functionality improvement WordPress offers plenty of unique and amazing plugins for functionality improvement and some of these are available for free. You can add social media feeds, image galleries, event calendars, etc to amp your site. Without coders you can add complex business features to your website.

9. As you like it – Completely Customizable

Umpteen themes and plugins provided by WordPress allow you to decide the appearance and functionality of your site in-line with your plan and expectations. Ability to ‘customize’ is the hallmark of this platform and the single largest contributor to its popularity. Get 100% customizable web designs to engage your target audience.

10. Not limited to one hosting provider

WordPress almost works with every server there is and therefore whenever you wish to change your host or provider, you can do it easily without a lot of downtime. WP also offers many free website hosting options as well.

11. Mobile friendly already

It is essential for websites to be responsive on all devices, especially smartphones and tablets. But with WordPress these concerns can be put to rest because the platform is already mobile friendly due to the availability of large number of responsive themes. Mobile website usage is skyrocketing and for you to be able to handle your website from anywhere WordPress is designed to work from smartphones as well as PCs.

12. Allows easy integration

Your WordPress site can easily integrate with the most handy and powerful platforms and service providers for getting an edge above others like integration with payment gateways, launching mail campaigns and much more.

13. Site management is a breeze

Along with the built-in updater for security purposes, WordPress also notifies you when there are updates for themes and plugins. This keeps your site updated with all trends and updates, keeping it fresh and seamless.

14. Blogs, etc

WordPress has a post and page structure which allows daily blog posts, static pages, etc which takes it beyond its reputation of a good blogging platform. While WordPress started out as a blogging platform, it has gradually metamorphosed into a 360 degrees web content management system. So you can use WP to manage both your whole website, not just the blog.

15. Offers amazing ecommerce solutions

To convert your site into a full fledged online store, plugins like Shopp, WooCommerce, WP eCommerce can be your go to tools. These plugins will help generate a revenue stream for your online business.

16. Create an exclusive membership site

For establishing a community around your site and to continue increasing the loyalty base along with generating an additional income, then you can transform your WP site into a full membership site by providing useful and niche content.

17. Multi-user capacity

WordPress also realizes the possibility of having multiple people running you site, in that case it has made it easy for you to assign roles like that of the Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and subscriber with respective profile functions which can be found on WordPress Codex.

18. One-click publishing

Ready with your article, thought piece or blog post and can’t wait to share it with the world? All you have to do is click one button and your post will be published. Also, there are some mobile apps that allow you to publish content from any location. It is a world-class web publishing system.

19. Constantly evolving

The best developers are absorbed by WordPress making it one of the most self-improving platforms. To add to this given the open source format, any developer can up the user experience to make it the best CMS out there.

20. Extremely scalable

WordPress sites will always offer seamless functionality along with scalability for your business website. This scalability offered by WP will take your venture to new heights. High performance with powerful media management clubbed with overall security helps one add all sorts of functionality that makes WordPress a complete package.

To scale up a WordPress installation for meeting the requirements of a form/company’s website with millions of monthly page views or thousands of users, there are some considerations that go beyond a basic installation and require certain provisions, let’s look at them –

1. Search option: WordPress’ search feature is very basic and enough for most of the websites but with websites that have millions of posts to run through, the inbuilt search option can be slow and spoil the visitor’s experience. For this there are open-source scalable search solutions, like Elasticsearch and Solr that work with WordPress to optimise search indexes delivering instant search results across millions or billions, of source documents.
2. Content provision: A content delivery network (CDN) or a network file storage system act in the same way as a reverse proxy by storing and distributing files and media separately from the existing WordPress installation. This speeds up delivery, giving visitors much faster results on requested pages.
3. Caching: To reduce or remove server load, WordPress offers many caching tools like reverse proxies that acts as intermediary services, collecting and serving cached data to users without enquiring the WordPress database. The reverse proxy simply serves a static cache of data, eliminating interrogation of the database and the need to implement code or process commands.
4. Understand horizontal scalability: For websites receiving high traffic, another prerequisite is to build the website with a flexible server base so that when the demand soars you can depend on extra servers to cope with the traffic. With cloud-based options, this horizontal scalability conveys that you can always have adequate architecture on-demand and no downtime is suffered. This balances the load and optimises the resources being used so that there is enhancement of capacity and reduction of response time.

With the above cited advantages and factors it is clear that WordPress can be one of the most powerful and best platforms for your business if the right infrastructure, resources and services are employed. Business sites like Sony Music, Vogue, Mercedes Benz, Bacardi, Microsoft News Center, SAP’s information platform and Rotary Club are all powered by wordpress.org. Some of the trendsetters in the global entertainment industry like Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, The Rolling Stones and many others have their sites running on WordPress. The opportunities offered are limitless and give you complete ownership of your site which may be the ultimate reason to use this platform.