One of the most important decisions you must make when launching your new website is which content management system (CMS) you’re going to use. There are a lot of options out there such as Drupal and Joomla, however the most commonly used CMS for personal, business, blogging, shops, or basically any other kind of site you can think of is WordPress. It’s the undisputed king of content management, and there are several very good reasons for that.
1. It’s so easy to use.
It couldn’t be easier to get started with WordPress, and you don’t have to be a web designer or developer to use it. When you register your domain and hosting with a company, they offer simple installation options which will automatically install WordPress on your domain. From there all you have to do is find a suitable theme from WordPress itself, buy one from a site like Themeforest, or download one for free from any number of sites which offer them. It only takes a few clicks to upload it to your new site.
Depending on the theme you choose, you can easily customize your new website to your heart’s content. There are also thousands of plugins you can download directly in WordPress to do such things as enable email capture boxes to appear on your page, display your social media apps, and manage your blog’s comment section. Most of them are super easy to use, and install in just a few clicks.
2. WordPress Is Cloud-Based.
Unlike some CMS’s where you have to make changes to your page offline, then manually upload them to your site via FTP, WordPress is accessed via your browser. This means that, no matter where you are (or what computer you’re using), you can easily log in to your WordPress Admin and edit your site as long as you have a connection to the internet. This is perfect for suitcase entrepreneurs, working from your local coffee shop, or just making quick updates on the fly. You can even email new content to your site and have it appear as a new page or blog post. However, like anything else, you should always be careful not to leave yourself logged in on another computer or you never know who might take control of your site.
3. WordPress is SEO friendly.
We’ll go ahead and say it, Google loves WordPress. You can easily customize your URL structure, add tags, and meta data, robots.txt, and inject your Google Analytics script. SEO plugins like Yoast add a whole other level of SEO-ablity to your pages, and will even rate your on-page SEO for you and tell you where and what you can improve. In fact, Google likes WordPress so much that Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search quality, recommends using WordPress, and uses it on his own personal website. It’s hard to find a more ringing endorsement than that.
4. WordPress always looks good.
If doesn’t matter if your readers visit your site on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or even Internet Explorer you can rest assured that it’s going to look good, it’s the most universally-compatible platform around.
It’s also responsive design ready, meaning it works well with responsive templates which automatically resize your site to fit whichever device it’s accessed on. With mobile internet use having surpassed desktop usage way back in 2014, this is especially important. It’s safe to say that a majority of your readers will be looking at your site on their phones. Google has even said that it gives search rank preference to responsive sites, so take this one seriously. When picking out your WordPress theme, make sure it specifically says “Responsive Design” in the list of features.
5. WordPress Is Social.
Most themes come with built in social sharing options, but you can additionally download a plethora of plugins to add any kind of social media like, share, or tweet you can think of. You can add your Facebook business page box to your site’s sidebar, you can add a counter to your blog post to show how many times it’s been shared or liked, you can even add buttons which allow readers to automatically tweet quotes from your posts. WordPress does pretty much everything it can to help you get noticed except write your posts for you.
6. WordPress Is FREE!
Yep, you read that right. It costs absolutely nothing to run your site with WordPress. This is because WordPress is 100% open-source, community created and maintained. Anyone can contribute by writing patches, helping with support, creating plugins, and a handful of other ways. When you download WordPress, you become a part of this community, and who knows, maybe you’ll be helping others get started with WordPress someday soon.
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