We love WordPress and so should you. Here are our reasons why.

Launched in 2003, WordPress has become one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world. Today there are nearly 75 million websites built on the WordPress platform, powering more than 25% of websites.

As a small business owner, you’ll obviously want a professional looking website that is fairly inexpensive while having all the features you want and the ability to edit and manage it. Sounds like a pipe dream, right? WordPress is a free open-source program that is designed to make things easy, making that dream start to seem more like reality. Here are our top reasons why we love WordPress and how you can benefit from it.

Easy to Use and Learn

Ease of use is the main reason WordPress has become the most popular CMS and the first choice of millions of users. Even beginners are able to easily navigate the dashboard and make edits to pages and update content. WordPress is a web-based program, so you will not need to download or pay for any other applications to be able to make edits and add things to the site.

Most Popular Content Management System

WordPress was initially developed as a blogging platform designed for ease of use, and there’s no doubt that it is the best blogging platform available today. It made sense for designers and developers to focus on building out websites using this open source platform that will work for any kind of business. WordPress is continuously developing new features that enhance customization and make the editing and updating process easier. That’s why many popular brands like CNN, Time, Best Buy, TED, Dow Jones and NBC Sports have trusted WordPress and adopted it for their websites.

SEO Friendly

Building a website without at least basic SEO is about the same as not having a website at all. In today’s competitive world of online marketing, every business owner needs to have their website built with SEO in mind. A beautifully designed website is just not enough these days; you will need quality SEO to make sure your site is being found above the competition.

WordPress is built on clean, consistent, and streamlined code which makes things easier for search engines such as Google to index your page and read your content. It’s built on logical architecture, responsive design, and the ability to set up Meta Tags for each post and page. With WordPress, you can drive more traffic to your website easily.

Security

WordPress is open-source, which means everyone has access to the code. This makes it an easy target for intruders and hackers. However, just like many other content management systems who take security very seriously, WordPress is continuously working to keep their platform safe. As WordPress is so popular and owns over 25% of the market, there are are also other developers creating solutions to make WordPress more secure. These solutions and plugins to safeguard your website are available for sale or for free.

Free Themes and Plugins

If you are more of a tech and design savvy person who likes to do things yourself, there are many free WordPress themes and plugins available. If you go this route, you’ll be able to create a fairly good looking basic website with little to no investment other than time. Many designers and agencies will develop a WordPress theme for you as well.

Once you have a WordPress theme developed and you are managing the website, you will find thousands of plugins that can be added to the site for enhanced features. Keep in mind, it is still good to have a developer working with you when adding plugins for enhanced features because sometimes there can be conflicts or plugins that haven’t been updated to run with the current version of WordPress. It’s a lot cheaper to hire an agency to customize a plugin to work with your theme than to have one built from nothing.

Multiple Media Types

Content plays a very important role on your website, but having content can only go so far. A great way to make your website more engaging is by creating other media types such as animations, images, videos, audio, etc. WordPress offers a program that supports and can handle multiple media types.

WordPress supports images that include .jpg and .jpeg, .png and .gif. It supports audio files that include .mp3, .m4a, .ogg, and .wav. The video file types that WordPress supports include .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .avi, .wmv, .ogv, .mpg, .3gp and .3g2. With so many file upload options, WordPress gives you more freedom to upload.

Supports Multiple Users

Another feature that draws a lot of people to WordPress is its ability to handle multiple users at one time. The ability to have multiple different users managing different aspects of the website is a big reason why a lot of larger companies with marketing, design, and development departments love WordPress so much. You don’t have to hand over control of your entire site to be able to give access to content creators.

WordPress offers you access to four main author roles which include: administrator, editor, author and contributor.

• An administrator is the most powerful role which has access to all functions of a site, including publishing content and managing users.
• An editor has access to publish and edit their own posts as well as other users posts.
• An author has only access to publishing and managing their own posts whereas a contributor is only capable of creating and managing their posts.
• A contributor cannot publish their posts, it is the responsibility of an editor or the administrator to review and publish them.

Keeps Getting Better

Let’s face it, WordPress just keeps growing and getting better and better as each day goes by. Since the day it was developed as a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved significantly and fairly fast. The popularity of WordPress has never seemed to decrease they continue growing and making their platform a force to be reckoned with and we are sure will continue to dominate the market in years to come.

Millions of active users and large team of developers are always working together to make WordPress better than before. WordPress is really something special thanks to them and their community of supporters.

If you haven’t considered a new website design before, now is the time to start thinking about it. Airglow offers great options for website design and development at an affordable rate. To learn more about how we can help you reach your target audience with an exciting website, get in touch.