October 1, 2022
WordPress is really all you need to think about when it comes to choosing a foundation for your business website. There are many tools in the website builder space, including Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace competing for your attention. They promise “Great websites you can do yourself fast and cheap”. Unfortunately, as anyone that has ever tried these tools has found out, it’s rarely that fast or that simple. And the drawbacks to those systems are subtle but significant.
A common source of clients for us are businesses that tried to DIY a website and couldn’t get to what they were promised by these ads.
We’ve developed and managed websites on all the major platforms and one stands out for us head and shoulders above the rest: WordPress. WordPress is a “content management system” (CMS). A CMS is software that “runs” your website. To create and edit the pages, posts, and functionality of your site, you will log in to the CMS through a private, administrative area of your site (the dashboard. From there you will make simple changes the same way you would change a Word document.
So why choose WordPress rather than one of these other “web builders” as your CMS? So many reasons.
1 – WordPress is the best website foundation because it is the most popular CMS on the web.
According to research, over 75 million websites, nearly half of the web, are built with WordPress, including big names like CNN and Time Magazine. With many sites with similar needs, you can tap into their knowledge base to find solutions to do exactly what you need without much customization.
Nearly half the web is built with WordPress.
Also, the fact that WordPress is so popular means that just about every web hosting company optimizes their servers to host WordPress and has technical support that knows WordPress really well.
2 – WordPress is Easy to Use and Has a Great Support Community
WordPress is super easy to use. Even if someone doesn’t have any technical experience, they can still make changes without much trouble at all. The built in tools and editors make adding and changing content very simple.
WordPress has a vibrant community of users and developers improving WordPress, adding new features, and keeping it secure. This support community is also willing to help you with any problems you run into. Whereas with proprietary builder systems, you’re generally stuck with whatever tech support the platform can give you. And because only they know how their code works, it can be a challenge to get it to work like you need it to.
3 – You don’t need coding or design skills to add or change content on WordPress.
Because you don’t have to know code or design to add content to WordPress, it is easy to use for non-technical people, who may not be familiar with HTML or CSS. Other tools may give you templates, but if you want to change these, you often need to dig into things like hex color codes, javascript, and HTML itself. WordPress has tools to make all of that simpler. Visual page builders and post editors make working with content similar to working with the MS Office documents you’re used to. This gives you more control over how people perceive your brand.
WordPress functionality is also easy to customize. With thousands of plugins available, you can add just about anything from contact forms to social sharing buttons, with just a few clicks using the WordPress dashboard.
You don’t need to know HTML or CSS to customize WordPress, it’s a lot like editing a Word Document.
4 – WordPress is Great for Search Engine Optimization (Google loves WordPress)
SEO is critical for any business, big or small. WordPress is great for SEO because it’s so easy to set up. With a large selection of plugins, you can easily optimize your site and get great results on search engines.
5 – WordPress is the Best Website Foundation Because It Has Many Plugins Available
Plugins are how WordPress adds functionality. Plugins are super easy to install, use, and customize. There are a great number of plugins available for you to use with your WordPress website. These include:
- Customization Plugins – These plugins help you add specific features like contact forms, social integrations, calendars, events, or sliders.
- Security Plugins – These add security features and prevent hackers from entering the site and stealing data or compromising the site’s integrity.
- Analysis Plugins – Plugins such as Google Analytics track activity on your blog/website and provide insight so you can make improvements.
- Ecommerce & Payment Plugins – WooCommerce allows you to sell products directly from your site. Payment plugins allow you to process credit cards or integrate Paypal.
With some builder platforms, if they don’t have the functionality you need, you’re basically out of luck. Trying to integrate with an email or payment system that they don’t support? You’re unlikely to have any success. With WordPress being so popular, the reality is that nearly every significant service available has a WordPress plugin and there are probably several options to choose from.
With WordPress, you’re never reinventing the wheel. Someone has already figured out how to what you’re trying to, and there’s a plugin that will do it for you.
6 – WordPress does not limit you to any specific hosting company or platform for your website
WordPress is a Content Management System. It’s not a hosting platform that dictates where your site lives. As such, it’s easy to install on any hosting platform and easy to manage. And if you ever need to change to a different webhost, increase the capacity of your site, or just change things up, WordPress makes it super simple. Other proprietary builder platforms (Wix, WebFlow, SquareSpace) don’t do this. Once you’re in their system, getting out can be a real challenge. Your data, your content, even your customers are essentially trapped in their ecosystem.
WordPress lets you keep control of your data, your content, and your customers.
Conclusion
WordPress is a powerful tool for your business, with many features that make it easy to manage and customize. It has a huge support community, tons of functional extensions through plugins, and great SEO capabilities that will help you rank higher in search engines like Google, which means more customers will see your website. WordPress also gives you the freedom to retain control over your site, your content, and your data. That’s why if you want a reliable CMS with lots of options then WordPress is the best website foundation, definitely worth checking out before committing yourself elsewhere.
Stratifi Creative are WordPress site experts, having designed and developed sites as small as one page informational sites to huge directories and ecommerce sites. Nearly all of our development is done with WordPress and we stand by it. We’d love to talk to you about your site needs and offer you some direction.
