We not only recommend using WordPress for your small business website, we use it for our websites too. Here’s why we use WordPress for all our websites.
1. Most widely used CMS
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. A content management system (sometimes called a CMS) is essentially software that allows you to easily make changes to the ‘look and feel’ or appearance of your website without the need for detailed coding.
WordPress has almost 60% of the CMS market and around 30% of all websites use WordPress.
That’s a whopping 26,938,805 live websites around the world using WordPress at the time of this article!
Source: W3Tech – Survey of identifiable domains on the top 1 million domains.
Side Note: If you are doing your own research, just know that there are two versions of WordPress available (this can get a bit confusing). They are WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The difference is one is hosted and the other is not. We use WordPress.org (which we install on a separate website hosting provider). This allows full control and transferability of your site, unlike some other proprietary platforms.
2. Easy to set up, use and maintain
Once your business website is up and running, if you have the time and inclination to DIY from there, then with a bit of training, WordPress makes this possible. You no longer need to hire a developer to make simple changes. It also makes website management services more affordable if you prefer to have someone do it for you. Contrast this to if you build your website on a static platform or a proprietary CMS. These can be expensive to tweak after the initial website build.
WordPress provides you with a simple interface that reduces the amount of time, knowledge and effort required to manage your website.
“Whether for personal use or business, you’re in good company with WordPress, which is used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, Beyoncé, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress offers “the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable,” which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet.”
3. Open Source
WordPress is what’s known as open source technology. This means that the code that creates the CMS is in the public domain and not owned by a single corporation. This means you can use the software and host your website as and how you want to.
Also as a result of being open source, there is a huge community of developers around the world who maintain WordPress and contribute to it’s ongoing development. It has also been developed to be both SEO and mobile friendly. Two very important factors in online success today if you want to appear in search engines like Google.
What’s the alternative to WordPress?
If you decide to go it alone and build your own website, you could use a framework or another CMS, such as Drupal and Joomla.
Frameworks such as Ruby On Rails and Bootstrap are like a library of code that you use to build a website from scratch. To build a website, you usually need two frameworks. Think of it like a car – one framework for the engine and one for the chasis.
When using the WordPress CMS, the engine is built for you already.
4. Flexibility – huge range of themes and plug ins
Themes
There are thousands of themes already available for use on WordPress and more being developed everyday. Themes are basically files that modify the way a site displays without changing the underlying software that powers the website. The changeable display elements can include many things such as fonts, page layout and colour schemes, allowing you to have a custom site that reflects your business.
Some WordPress themes are free, others paid. The cost of a theme will often reflect the themes level of sophistication and therefore what it can do for you. Paid themes are often referred to as premium themes.
Plugins
Currently there are more than 55,600 plugins available in the WordPress official directory (and untold more available online). Plugins essentially extend the functionality of your website allowing you to add and remove components much more quickly, cheaply and easily than coding them from scratch.
This huge range of themes and plug ins makes WordPress really versatile meaning you can use it for many different types of businesses.
5. Scalable
Due to the amount of available themes, plug ins and the open source nature of WordPress, it’s scalable as your business needs change. It’s easy to start simply and add to your site as your business grows.
6. Cost effective
WordPress.org (the self-hosted version of WordPress) is free to install and use. You just need a hosting account and domain name. Saving your budget for more exciting things – like SEO to help grow your business.
7. Maturity
Let’s face it, no one really wants to use the first version of a software product, it’s often buggy and tedious. The good news is that WordPress is more than 10 years old (and that’s a lifetime in software years). It works smoothly and efficiently due to the huge developer community continually contributing to it’s expansion.
So there you have it, 7 reasons why we have chosen to specialise in using WordPress to build websites for our clients.
Ready to get started with WordPress?
For a no obligation consultation call us on
1300 793 037
Watch our “Why we use WordPress for website design” at our Sydney agency video below. Subscribe to our You Tube Channel for regular updates.
