At present, there are about 25% of the websites in the digital world run with WordPress. This versatile platform has gradually proven its worth in the online world, becoming a leading platform. Being one of the fastest-growing web publication software, it is one of the most significant sources of driving traffic.
With the development of technology and continuous advancements in the digital world, it is easy to create a simple yet attractive website for any brand and business. Besides the facts stated above, it is often asked what WordPress is?
In this article, we are going to learn; what WordPress is, reasons to use WordPress and some behind the scene works, which enables the software to become a leading website development platform.
At its core, WordPress is an open-source content management system that enables the users to build and manage their own full-featured website without having any knowledge of coding. It began as a simple website designed for people who wanted to create a basic blogging site and host them on the internet. However, with time it has grown to become a flexible and powerful tool for creating almost any type of website that the user requires.
It might seem a little intimidating at first glance, but it is relatively easy to understand and operate it. You only need to have an introduction, and you’ll be able to create your own website. Not just that, it also allows customising the website according to your goals and mission.
With many amazing features of WordPress, many renowned enterprises today use it to power their websites. To get a more detailed view of why you should use WordPress to make your website, here are six reasons which can give you an insight.
Six Commonly Known Reasons to Use WordPress
WordPress is free software. It means you can download, install, use, and modify it to match your needs. In order to operate the software, you’ll need a domain name and web hosting for installation. A domain name is the address of your website on the internet and web hosting is your website’s house where all your website’s files are stored. Once you have installed the software, you can simply start by developing your website.
A large portion of WordPress users are neither designers nor programmers. The fact is that most people start using WordPress without having any knowledge of design or programming. WordPress is a perfect solution for tech-savvy people, as it contains many amazing templates that you can choose from. Be it a blogging website or a business website, WordPress doesn’t disappoint! Not just that, it also allows you to add customised functionality to the website through plugins which are advanced features that can be added to the website. Just like themes, it is easy to use free and premium plugins available for you to use on your website.
WordPress comes with a built-in management system. It allows you to update the plugins and themes within your WordPress admin dashboard. It notifies when an update is ready, so you can simply update your website with a click of a button. Not just that, it also enables you to save valuable data to a safe location using the WordPress backup plugin. It allows you to manage your site on the go with the WordPress mobile app.
WordPress is considered as a safe and secure platform to run a website. However, just like the real world, the digital realm is also filled with intruders sitting underground to hack as many websites as possible. With that in mind, there are many security tools to help and keep away the common threats such as Malware and more.
WordPress is not limited to only written content; it comes with a built-in media uploader to cater to images, audio, and video files. WordPress supports oEmbed websites that allow the website to display embedded content such as YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio by merely passing the URL in the WordPress Editor.
WordPress designs are out of the box and SEO friendly. The WordPress codes are written to meet the high-quality SEO standards, which means websites made using WordPress has a chance of ranking higher in the search engines. The software has many plugins such as Yoast SEO which can help in optimising the website.
WordPress is open-source programming—meaning anyone can contemplate its codes and compose their very own application and formats for it. However, figuring out its codes and what goes on at the back can help the user to enhance the execution and compose better codes for your project.
Word press isn’t held back by any platform-specific limitations, and its flexibility is the key selling points of the platform. With WordPress, the themes and plugins you choose to opt for your website determine the features that are available on your website.
WordPress gives the website owners control and flexibility to use the themes and plugins to control the features on your website. It doesn’t limit you, unlike the other website platforms in the market.
Now that you have the idea of how WordPress works. Let’s move on to some essential features which are yet unpopular among the users.
Website builder usually has a drag and drop option which is user-friendly and give the same outlook in the editor as it will when it is published. This feature enables the user to quickly and easily move the content around with a click and a drag, which makes it simple to understand how it will look once alive.
On the other hand, WordPress has a different content control panel which enables the user to insert the content in a box like any other data entry software. The content control panel provides the users with two options—visual and text.
Once you press publish or preview and don’t get the result you required, you might have to reread every line of the text and fix the broken code. However, if you are a newbie and do not understand HTML codes to define your website, it can be frustrating to understand and fix. If that’s the case, you need not worry as WordPress provides the users with “short Codes” which are HTML codes shortcuts explicitly created for WordPress.
WordPress doesn’t allow the users to move the content on the page as easily as a Drag-and-Drop website builder. This is true even in the visual mode of the website because of the selected WordPress theme that controls where a specific content goes. You can use the content control panel only to insert content, but you are not given access to the page layout design. Change in the design is only possible with the change in the theme code.
WordPress works best with a large amount of data on your website. It is easier to manage hundreds and thousands of posts and product pages using WordPress’s data entry style and content management system than a Drag-and-Drop website builder.
Consider this: you have a website that talks about the latest tech products. You have a load of news, articles and product reviews to post. Making and management of all those pages can be unthinkable in other website builders. However, WordPress makes it easy for users. There are three key ways which make heavy content management effortless.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is important for your website because without if your website will struggle to rank high in Google SERPs. WordPress is a tool which helps in increasing the visibility of your website without needing to be a tech genius.
WordPress provides the users with options and suitable plugins to make your sites visible on the SERPs. It allows the website owners to create custom categories and tags on WordPress to sort the content which makes it easier for the search engines to understand what’s on your site and bring it up on the result pages.
Not just that, WordPress enables the website owners to create a unique, SEO-friendly URL that is descriptive and can help the search engines to identify the relevance of your page to specific research. Moreover, WordPress allows the user to use HTML tags when writing content in the text editor, which gives weight to the keywords by including them to the titles and subtitles.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are SEO plugins such as Yoast which provides free access to SEO tools. It enables the user to add Meta titles and Meta description to your pages which are displayed in google search results. It also allows the user to preview them to understand what it looks like once published. It provides insight on how you are using the keywords only to improve the SEO of your website.
It is only logical to think that WordPress being a free software doesn’t have a support community it help available for the new users. However, this is not the case. WordPress has a huge support community which can provide guidelines and free tutorials for a user. All that it takes is to search on Google to find a relevant answer.
There are WordPress forums where you can search for problems that other WordPress Users may be dealing with and post relevant questions and wait for the community to help.
Moreover, there is also WordPress Documentation known as WordPress Codex, where you can find every relevant information and guideline related to your website. It is most useful for changing codes on your WordPress website. However, it is important to understand that it is not the most user-friendly resource.
Apart from that, you can also access tutorials to learn the basics before beginning with WordPress. Having a higher learning curve, it is essential to understand the basic operations and behind the scene works of the software to take your website on the next level.
WordPress is not for everyone. However, if you understand how to take full advantage of the software, it is an exceptionally powerful tool and has many things to offer. It is flexible and an excellent platform for anyone who requires a highly functional and content hay website.