Why Choose WordPress Over Other CMS Platforms?
Beginning out, WordPress was a well-known blogging platform. Now, not only used for blogging, it is a great content management system (CMS) to consider for your business website. There are other free and paid CMS options out there, but WordPress solutions can help improve your user’s online experience while answering your company’s need for website control, flexibility, and ease of use.
We have created a list of reasons why WordPress is a great avenue for your website.
WordPress is free for anyone to download and it an open-source platform that has been around since 2003. Open-source platforms typically offer free services, with large communities. The users will take part in the community as beta testers or simple brand advocates, but there are no real requirements for participation if you don’t want to.
Keep in mind: even though the software is free, you will most likely have to spend some money for hosting and advanced plugins. Their hosting fee starts around $3/month, for the cheaper shared servers, and can go all the way to a couple of hundred/ month for those needing ultimate speed and performance.
You can find themes and plugins for free, but the premium (paid) ones will provide better features and followed quality support. Many users resort to paying for additional services, whether it be from freelancers or agencies. Ultimately, you can keep your WordPress costs to a minimum by using the free plugins and themes and going with their hosting program.
Flexible to Make any Type of Website
I’m sure you have heard before that WordPress is mainly for building blogs, this is not true. At one point in time, this was the case but over the years and many releases, they have changed their offerings and web design solutions. WordPress is at a competitive advantage with their blogging history. It has one of the cleanest and fastest ways to write and publish pages and posts, and that’s all included from the start.
Websites that you can create with WordPress:
- Blogs
- Business Websites
- Portfolios
- Forums
- Ecommerce Sites
- Ratings Websites
- Membership Sites
- Personal Websites for Self-Promotion
- Job Boards
- Non-profit Websites for Collecting Donations
- Auction and Coupon Sites
And the list goes on! The advantage of WordPress is that the functionality for features like forums and ecommerce websites is achieved with simple plugins and themes.
Supports a Variety of Media Types
Another advantage of WordPress sites is the long list of accepted file types, these are the primary categories are all accepted:
- Images
- Documents
- Audio
- Video
You can upload common files like .jpg, .png, .gif, .pdf, .doc, .pptx, .mp3, .m4a, .mp4, .avi, and more. You will not have any problems with more obscure file types like .odt, .key, .ogg, and .3pg.
Keep in mind: WordPress does support pretty much any type of media. However, don’t forget to follow the rules and only use legal media that is either owned by you, has free downloads, or you can use when given credit. Someplace to find legal photos and video are:
Big Community & Easy to Learn
Since WordPress is open-source software, it can be used by anyone. Their user base is not limited by pricing, premium customer support, or even a user’s skill level. Since there aren’t many roadblocks to accessing the software. Users have made blogs, forums, online courses, seminars, webinars, and even books, all outlining aspects of the WordPress platform. And there is always the option of paying for more official dedicated support or work through those forums and online courses.
Customizable Plugins & Themes to Scale Up and Expand Your Website
As mentioned before, WordPress themes and plugins make it easy to construct your website, but those elements are essential for scaling up your personalized site. For a blog, you will install a theme, adjust any design features you’d like, then start writing your blog. The same goes for other business websites or portfolios. Your chosen themes will serve as your site’s foundation. The design work will become minimal besides color changes, adding your logo, and the creation of new pages and posts.
You will realize that additions to your site will want to be made. Maybe you want to include your social media profile streams in your footer or add a membership section to your site. Those will be successfully executed with a variety of plugins accessible to you. There are hundreds of plugins that are available to you, to learn more check out our free eBook The Ultimate WordPress Guide to Relevant Plugins.
Expanding your site isn’t solely accomplished with plugins, you might find yourself needing a new theme. Yes, plugins typically can run the show when it comes to adding functionality to your site. Most of the time you’ll only need one theme once you launch your site. But as everything grows, you’ll notice you want different functionalities and needs, along with changes within the industry. An example of this was when Google started rewarding mobile responsive websites. Once that was enforced, many developers started offering mobile-friendly designs. Therefore, owners of websites needed to switch their themes to ones that offered mobile-friendly designs.
Other desired themes for growing websites are for the following reasons:
- A needed switch from a free theme to a premium one
- Wanting a fresher look
- Wanting better customer support
- A shift in product offering
Easy to Manage
WordPress is not all that difficult to manage if you learn the ropes and go through some training courses. Some website management typically involves a couple of things:
- Checking and making sure your server is performing
- Keeping up with your security
- Running backups of you site
- Keeping your plugins up to date, and the WordPress software
- Managing spam
- Fixing broken links and testing sites functionality
- Improving SEO and making page speed improvements
SEO Comes First
A great advantage of WordPress is that SEO is built into the platform. WordPress will automatically generate title tags and meta descriptions for your pages and posts. Implementing title tags and meta descriptions allows search engines to understand your content better, and will get your pages/posts indexed and ranking higher.
The Yost SEO Plugin, is a favorite amongst SEO experts that helps them take their rankings and mobile responsiveness to the next level. The Yost analysis shares how effective you are targeting your keyword. You’ll see insight on keyword density, where to add more keywords, SEO title mentions, page title suggestions, meta suggestions, and more. It’s a great checklist for you to make sure you are ticking all the boxes for SEO optimization.
Clearly, joining WordPress doesn’t make users sacrifice much to test the waters. It’s a free, open-source software that is easy to use and comes with numerous resources for insight on how to build a successful website. There are tons of plugins that allow you to create a website that functions for your specific audience and not to mention make it mobile-friendly.
If you are looking for help with your website, contact Spectrum Net Designs today OR check out our WordPress portfolio to give you some inspiration!
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