Why have a Word Press site?

Why WordPress?
If you want to develop a website or if you would like someone to develop a website for you, WordPress is a name that you will hear almost certainly. Honestly, we recommend it to almost anyone who wants a website for many different reasons.

So today we are here to bring you over 10 different reasons why WordPress might be the tool that suits better for your new professional aesthetic website! But quickly before that, let me clear some misunderstandings about this great tool.

What is WordPress?
WordPress is a Content Management System, AKA CMS, and does not provide hosting, so to have your website live on WordPress you will still need to pay for hosting, luckily WordPress itself is a free tool and you can find some trustable, good quality cheap hostings out there.

So, WordPress is a very complete tool that creates and manages your website so you don’t need to start from the 0 when building one. It allows you to easily build blogs, professional/ business websites, e-commerce stores, dropshipping, social media and much more!

It is an online tool, so you don’t even need to download any software, you can do everything from your browser, either this is Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and even Internet Explorer, it doesn’t really matter.

Now that you understand what WordPress is better, it is time for us to talk about why you should be using this tool and some of its top qualities.

By the end of this post, I’m pretty sure your understanding of this tool will have shifted.

WordPress is Trustworthy/ Reliable
Something that you want to avoid is the constant change of tools due to limitations or lack of trust on what you are doing, mostly if you are managing an online business. People who want to build a website tend to look at many different tools trying to understand which one is the most reliable/ trustworthy.

WordPress currently dominates the CMS market, according to Kinsta (one of the most reliable hostings out there), WordPress manages 37% of all websites out there, 63% of the websites built with CMS, uses WordPress, followed by Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace and so on. Here’s a quick graph for you to have an idea and here you can read their article.

WordPress’ market share is 38% of all websites
By analysing this graphic you can realise that if WordPress was not reliable, it wouldn’t be so widely used. To give you an example, here are some big names that also use WordPress:

TechCrunch
BBC America
The New York Times Company
Bloomberg Professional
Sony Music
MTV News
PlayStation.Blog
Sweden’s Official Website
Microsoft News Center
Facebook Newsroom
Mercedes-Benz
The White House
Around 73 million new posts are published on WordPress every single month and they generate roughly 80 million comments during the same time span.

By having all this into consideration, we can say that by using WordPress, you are in very good hands. The community is huge and they keep working together to improve this great CMS but this subject is for the next topic!

WordPress has a huge support
Due to the fact that WordPress is used so widely all over the internet, you can easily find all resources needed online, like tutorials, courses, support groups and so on. We inclusively advise you to use in your favour the WordPress forums, where you will find great support from the whole community there, as well from the WordPress Support Team.

On a paid plan on the Official WordPress website, you can as well have 24/7 support depending on the plan you have, lower plans, the support is only Monday to Fridays. But this support is only regarding WordPress, if you are using 3rd party tools on your website, they won’t be able to help you, if that is the case, you will have to get in touch with the developers of the tool you are using.

WordPress is Flexible!
This CMS can be as simple or as complex as you want, you decide!

The simple basic version of this platform allows you to publish blog posts and create professional pages. On the other hand, the more functions and plugins you add to it, the more complex it becomes, like every tool.

A positive side is that even though you add more functionalities, many of the plugins out there are made with the focus of being simple and code-free, so you don’t have to worry about learning code to be able to develop great professional websites.

Basically, almost everything you want to do with your website can be accomplished by using WordPress. You may need to add plugins and other 3rd party tools, but pretty much everything can be done easily without having to spend months coding or even learning how to code.

Another very important aspect of WordPress being flexible applies to the people using it technically.

You can easily change developers and most of the time he or she will be able to manage your website without having to start it all over again. And even if he has to start from the beginning, he will be able to export and import easily most of the content into your new WordPress website.

So this makes WordPress an extremely flexible tool! The way you use it and which tools you prefer are completely up to you.

Simple to create and add content
It is very easy to start a WordPress website, anyone can do it with a couple of clicks.

Once your site is live, all you need to do is navigate to the “posts” section of your dashboard menu. From here, you’ll be able to find everything you need to write and publish a new blog post. You’ll find text editors, formatting tools, and ways to upload media files.

As you’ll quickly learn, the entire content creation process on WordPress is very straightforward. So you won’t have any excuse for lacking in that department.

After your content has been published, you won’t have to jump through hoops to edit it moving forward. All you need to do is search the post and make any changes or updates using the visual editor.

Once those changes have been made, just click on the “save” button and the new version of that content will be live instantly.

WordPress is great for SEO
Search Engine Optimization, AKA SEO, can make a difference in your business, which means it is good to have the right practices since the beginning of the development of your Website as this will organically give you more visibility in Search Engines like GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING and so on.

This is where WordPress once again gets points on why you should use it, as WordPress makes it very easy with some built-in tools that make the website SEO-friendly and where you can improve it.

Yoast SEO for WordPress
If SEO is a priority for you, have a look at Yoast SEO, they are one of our top picks and they also have great courses if you want to go even further!

Yoast SEO free version is just great, you should try it and get familiarized with it and as the need comes, consider in getting the premium, but before that maybe doing some of their courses would be a great opportunity to understand why their premium version is so good and so that you can use it in the proper way.

But basically, the premium version allows you to add more keywords, phrases and other related terms to your page, articles or other functionalities on your website that can appear on search engines. Besides, it monitors the most important pages you have and sends you notifications letting you know when it is good to update your page to keep it SEO-friendly.

Resuming, the premium version gives you more content insights, also gives you internal link suggestions, no advertisements and many other benefits.

Security
Another important aspect is security. In general, WordPress is a safe and secure platform. This doesn’t mean that you will not be targeted from malicious attacks, hackers or malware, like all other websites.

WordPress makes security easier with different features like passwords and some plugins that can enhance it. Either way, if you mainly have your website up to date regarding the WordPress version and plugins, you fight off most security threats.

Also, use plugins that you trust or have good reviews, sometimes malware gets into your website through not updates or an old version of certain plugins, make sure you know what you are feeding your website with.

You can also easily get and install an SSL certificate, these became extremely popular and people even avoid nowadays websites that don’t have an SSL certificate. An SSL Certificate basically makes the communication between the website you are accessing and the server safe and most web hosting provide SSL Certificates for your websites, like Siteground.

The Builder Hero Security
In the picture above you can see an example of our website that has an SSL Certificate, which is a simple and easy way to enhance the security of your website.

Apart from these, we also advise you to have a WordPress plugin to enhance the security of your website. There are very powerful services out there, that provide you with great plans and full secure websites, but this can be costly. So our advice is to discern your customer needs and if it is a delicate business, discuss with him the options and go for what suits the most. We advise you to have at least the free wordfence version as this one already gives you some protection against brute force and some other types of attacks.

If your website somehow gets compromised, you don’t want to lose all your data, so we also advise you to have a backup of your website regularly.

For example, Siteground makes a daily automatic backup up to 30 days in case something goes wrong, and it is extremely easy to recover, this may not be enough to correct the situation though.

Speed is a must
Nowadays, in the era of technologies every second counts and slow websites are quite useless, having this in consideration it is important to have an average speed website and actually, WordPress might surprise. WordPress has specific features and tools to enhance its speed.

When building you, have in consideration using themes that are lightweight and not too many plugins as these can slow down your website quite drastically.

We also advise you to have light pictures or to have image optimization plugins so that they keep your page load fast.

There are as well options for Gzip compression, minifying JS and CSS files, and advanced-cache.

The good use of this tools can make your website lightning fast by reducing the loading time that results in a better user experience, reduced bounce rate (when people get in and out of the website before it completely loads) and it will increase the conversions of your WordPress Website.

Use of REST API’s
We have been talking mostly about things that any beginner can manage on WordPress, but this topic now is a bit more advanced.

WordPress is for all levels of technical skills if you are a developer you will know what we are talking about as WordPress has a REST API that allows you to build apps using the platform.

REST API
This is used in the following example:

Let’s say you want to create a custom plugin to manage what you need, like developing a new WordPress dashboard.

With the REST API, you won’t have to write apps in PHP. Simply use any programming language that allows HTTP requests and it will do the work.

Even if you don’t understand 100% what we are talking about in the topic, this may be something that you will learn or find interesting as your journey through WordPress develops.

You never know when you will need a developer to create an application for you and if it is the case, now you know WordPress allows you this type of flexibility.

Pricing
If you are worried about the fact that WordPress have all these amazing features and it might cost fortunes, we have good news for you, WordPress is an open-source and free to use platform!

Which means that after getting your hosting and domain, you can have a website completely for Free!And with the amount of free plugins out there, you can do almost anything, even e-commerce for free.

Now, if you are doing more than just a website for yourself, you might need to consider buying some professional plugins as they can easily improve the functionalities of your website and make it powerful.

To give you an example, when building your website, you might find yourself limited by the design of the theme or the building blocks which the theme provides.

To solve that for example, we use a professionally developed plugin which comes with a lightweight theme and allows you to build the design the way you want by simply moving blocks.

It is called Beaver Builder, we highly recommend it as it is one of the best out there, with very clean code and fast.

Multi Language
WordPress is a global CMS platform with over 160 languages available, so regardless of where you are in the world or what language your audience is, you can build a website that targets them.

Currently English is the most popular language used in WordPress and most blogs and websites are in English, 71% actually, you can see more statistics here.

As well, if you want to use other languages on WordPress, it is quite simple and you easily can make websites with more than 1 language.

One of the best multilanguage paid plugins out there is WPML which allows you much more than just multi-language, we highly recommend it if you have a customer who needs a multi-language website.

But you can also find some good free versions out there, though they are not as complete.

Integrations
As mentioned before, WordPress works pretty well with 3rd-party tools.

Besides plugins and widgets, it is easy to integrate WordPress with tools that do email marketing, payment gateways like Stripe, Google Analytics and many other tools that you might need for a full working website to present your business properly and to allow it to work.

Many of the digital tools developed nowadays have WordPress into consideration due to its popularity and the developers of these know that for them to be used, most likely integration with WordPress is a must. So they inclusively make it as easy as possible to integrate.

Conclusion
If you want to run an online business or present something online, having a basic understanding of WordPress is a must!

From the post, I’m sure you got a very good taste of WordPress and a new world of possibilities online just opened for you.

Either you are starting or you are a professional developer/coder, WordPress can be extremely useful, inclusively just as a personal tool to organise content, files and post.

Be creative, there are over a thousand ways you can start an online business with WordPress.