WordPress is the most powerful CMS used widely to develop new blogs and business websites. According to a recent study, WordPress has grabbed about 60% of the share in the CMS market globally, while 14.7 of the Top 100 websites are powered by WordPress.

Some top brands using WordPress are BBC America, Microsoft News Center, cPanel, Reuters, and Mercedes Benz. There is no wonder that top celebrities like Katy Perry, Beyonce, and Snoop Dogg have their website in WordPress. Guess why?

Why WordPress is so popular? The popularity of WordPress could be related to the number of things. It is an open source content management system equipped with several powerful tools to publish your content professionally. You can easily decorate your website with dozens of widgets, and add advanced features using free plugins. Because it’s an open source CMS, you can customize it according to your needs. Moreover, it allows you to install hundreds of Free or Paid themes to make your website more charming. WordPress is quite easy to operate, even a layman can use it easily. Another benefit of having a WordPress based website is that WordPress Maintenance is easy, as normally you need to update themes, plugins, and WordPress itself with some clicks.

In this blog post, we are going to discuss the powerful features included in WordPress built-in tools. These tools help you write and publish your content with ease. Let’s dig deep in WordPress tools.

1: Powerful Editor with Visual and HTML support

Visual and HTML editors are built into WordPress and can be used to customize the pages and posts on your website. Using the visual editor, you can improve the looks of your website very easily as you have the option to format the content as per your requirements. Adding images and embedding videos in the content are super easy.

Additionally, you can add headings, bullets, read more tag, special characters, and many other options very easily. If you need some more advanced customization such as to add a table in the content, you can switch to the HTML editor. However, the knowledge of HTML is necessary to use the HTML editor. Switching from one editor to the other one is just a matter of single click.

2: Powerful Theme Customizer

All the versions released after WordPress v3.4 are supported by the powerful theme customizer using which you can do some advanced changes in your WordPress website. Remember, the customization options may be different in different themes because every theme comes with its own framework and options. The purpose of the customizer is to gather various WordPress options in a single place to edit and preview in real time. Some of the handy tasks you can do using a WordPress Customizer are given below.

• You can define a static front page instead of a blog type front page.
• Add Site Title, Tagline, Header image, Site Icon, and Logo.
• The WordPress Customizer gives you the ability to change the background image.
• You can add a new menu or edit the existing one.
• You can add and remove widgets instantly.

Customizers allow you to preview each setting option so that you may save and publish it instantly with making any adjustments later.

3: The Power to Embed a YouTube Video

Another wonderful built-in option WordPress gives is the ability to embed any YouTube video on our website easily. Although there were minor complexities in embedding a YouTube video, now you can do it within a blink of an eye. The purpose of this built-in option by WordPress is to integrate your data with helping videos, such as a tutorial or a vlog, into your post as well as adding videos to any part of your website, for example, sidebar or footer.

Embedding a video is super easy. Simply, Right Click on a YouTube video and you’ll have several options to check. Select –Copy Embed Code, come back to your WordPress Editor and switch into the HTML editing by clicking on top-right of the editor. Once switched, paste the Embed Code that you copied from YouTube and you are done with it.

4: Permalinks

These days, SEO is the essential part of any website as a majority of the businesses are online and you have to compete them smartly.

The permalinks are among the important aspects of SEO because an SEO-friendly permalink helps you improve your website’s position. With WordPress’s built-in Permalink settings, you have the ability to select five different permalink structures or you can define a custom structure as per your plans. You may add years, months, categories, post name, author, and a bunch of other tags in a permalink.

5: Pagination (or NextPage option)

The importance of the Pagination option can be asked from a blogger or website owner who writes long contents and posts. Pagination is used to break long posts into several pages enabling NextPage option on every page.

Most of the people don’t know about this handy tool and they usually install a plugin for this task but WordPress’s powerful editor enables you to apply pagination on your posts instantly. Along with other options in the editor, you’ll see a button with the Title Insert Read More Tag, or simply, you can add <!–more–> code into your HTML editor to break the post. You may add as many Read More Tags as possible, depending upon the length of your content.

6: Widgets

Want to display recent posts or a gallery in the sidebar or footer? Don’t worry as you don’t need to be a hardcore WordPress developer to do so. WordPress gives you a dedicated section to manage a variety of widgets.

Depending on the theme’s flexibility and options, you can add, edit or remove various widgets into your sidebars, headers or footers. A number of handy widgets are included in this section and many new widgets can be added by installing new plugins. Your theme may also come with a variety of widgets to use on your website.

7: Users

You can add dozens of users within a matter of no time using Users option in WordPress. Not only you can add them, but also delete and edit them. WordPress gives you the power to assign them different user roles such as Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor, and Administrator.

8: Screen Options

Are you a WordPress geek and haven’t seen screen options? It is not surprising. Although screen options are not hidden, they can be accessed through the tiny drop-down menu which is located at the top right corner of your WordPress Dashboard. You’ll find various wonderful options hidden under the screen such as featured images, tags, categories, and custom options. Additionally, you may find different options in different themes and plugins.

9: Search Engine Visibility

A handy option to let search engines not index your website. This option is usually used when your blog is in development mode and there is no content on it, or you have imported demo content and you don’t want this content to be indexed. So, it’s just a matter of a couple of clicks and you can hide and unhide your website from the search engine’s robots.

Once your website is complete and ready-to-go, make sure you Discourage Search Engines from Indexing this Site to give a green signal to the search engine’s robots.

10: Plugins

Want to add a totally different and new feature or a social media gadget? WordPress has got your back. You can find thousands of different plugins in WordPress depository which can extend the functionality and usability of your website, and you can have additional features on your website as per your requirements.

For example, you can add contact forms, social media widgets, SEO plugins, and hookers, and a lot more. The plugins can be searched and installed very easily as well as you can update them instantly, once an update is released. For more advanced features, you may need to purchase premium plugins.

11: Post Revisions

Want to rollback a post or a page in its previous version? There are many reasons behind the domination of WordPress and Post Revisions is one of them. Now, WordPress has the built-in option that saves all the previous versions of your page and you can easily restore them. It can be found under the Publish tab in the post or page, but if it isn’t there, you can activate it using “Screen Options”. Remember, every time you edit your page or post, a copy of its revision is automatically saved.

12: Categories and Tags

You can easily add new categories to your blog. While writing a blog post, you can easily assign a category to your post. The use of categories is very important in your blog for the better user experience as your readers can easily find the relevant posts on your blog. Using the same Categories option, you can create sub-categories too. Try to use up to 10 categories so your users may not get confused.

Add as many tags in a single post as you want. They are different from the categories. Relevant tags help your users find the relevant posts very easily.

13: Media Library and Settings

The powerful media library gives you some wonderful options to customize your images. While adding an image, you can define its size and alignment, if you are adding it in a post or page. You can also add a title, caption, alt text, and description of the images.

14: Theme and Plugin updates

WordPress maintenance is very easy because you receive a notification whenever a new version is released so that you may update to the newest version easily. In fact, manual update is now needed only for plugins as WordPress updates automatically and you do not need to worry about that.

A Bonus Upcoming Option | Gutenberg Editor

A new and powerful text editor is about to release. Gutenberg, the new entire editor by WordPress, will provide you with the best experience while creating media-rich posts and pages. The developers of the Gutenberg editor claims that it will enable you to do more with fewer plugins as the editor will come with a number of advanced features. It is available to download in WordPress repository and will be available by default in WordPress v5.0. With the addition of Gutenberg Editor, WordPress will become more powerful and customizable because it allows adding responsive pages very easily.

Final Words

Without any doubt, WordPress is the best option for bloggers and small business owners because of its flexibility, adaptability, and advanced features. It enables even a layman to set up a new blog without advanced knowledge of coding. If you haven’t switched to WordPress, you should rethink about it. WordPress is the future not just for blogging, but also for the large portals.