WordPress first made an appearance back in 2003 as a blogging platform and within a short space of time, its popularity skyrocketed. Today it is used by individuals and brands alike. Big names such as TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Sony and Disney’s Star Wars (let’s be honest, we love Star Wars), have all put their trust in WordPress.
Today, WordPress powers over 30% of the ENTIRE Internet. Let’s put that into perspective: that’s over a quarter of all websites on the Internet! With that said, it’s clear to see that its popularity is growing year on year.
“WordPress powers over 30% of the ENTIRE Internet”
We at Xpand highly recommend WordPress for our clients and even built our own website with it. The reason we love WordPress is because of its flexibility and ease of use. In this article, we will give you some excellent reasons why you should consider WordPress for your own website.
It’s Free and Open-Source
The WordPress core is entirely free and open-source, which means you can enjoy the benefits of the system without purchasing a license. The WordPress community is huge and if you have any questions about using it then it will be much easier to find the answers than it would be if you were to go down the route of a custom CMS (content management system).
“The best things in life are free”- The Beatles
WordPress will liberate you so that once your website is built, you will have the freedom to manage the content on your site without a degree in computer science. It’s also super easy to use and has a minimalistic interface that even beginners can pick up in no time at all, no coding knowledge required.
WordPress is highly extensible and flexible
From brochure websites to blogs, e-commerce stores to membership sites, WordPress has it all. The default interface offers some great features which can be added to by your web development team or by using some of the many free and premium plugins available on the web. Whatever kind of website you’re wanting to build, WordPress offers a highly affordable and maintainable solution.
55,311 Plugins and Counting
As mentioned previously, WordPress plugins allow you unparalleled flexibility when it comes to extending the functionality of your website. Some of our personal favourites include:
- WordFence Security – a plugin that helps make your website more secure
- Yoast SEO – a simple interface for managing your meta descriptions, titles, and lots of other SEO goodies
- Contact Form 7 – easily add contact forms to your website with this trusted plugin
- WP Super Cache – make the user experience even better by serving cached pages for faster load times
- Advanced Custom Fields – what ever kind of custom data you need on your website, ACF can help you
The beauty of using plugins really comes down to the support and community. Contact Form 7 offers a reliable contact form system that is regularly updated and used on millions of websites (3 million +). When it comes to security on the web, you don’t want to be sending data across an insecure form, therefore, Contact Form 7 offers the perfect solution for WordPress websites.
WordPress is naturally great for SEO
SEO is a minefield; just ask Simon, our resident SEO guru. But by using WordPress you’re giving yourself a great head start. Right out of the box, the core architecture of WordPress makes Google a happy bunny.
The permalink structure (how the URLs are created) is one of its great strengths, allowing you to create what are known as pretty permalinks. This means that instead of having an ugly, prehistoric URL like www.mywebsite.com/about.html, you’ll see www.mywebsite.com/about. Search engines much prefer this type of URL structure and so do users (those are people, in case you wondered).
And if the core SEO features are not enough, the Yoast SEO plugin will allow you to further optimise your SEO titles and descriptions, making it much easier to rank in Google and get onto the fabled first page. Of course, even with all these features, there’s still a lot more that can be done with SEO. If you’d like to discuss your SEO, get in touch with our friendly experts to discuss your needs.
WordPress is secure
The WordPress core is well-built and constantly updated to address new bugs and security flaws that crop up. By alerting you of regular updates, WordPress allows you to keep abreast of the ever-changing world of online security. At Xpand, we also offer this service as part of our on-going commitment to our clients, making sure that you’re always using the latest version of WordPress.
As part of the development process, we also use our extensive knowledge of web security to further tighten up the system and make it harder to hack your site. Every website we build includes the popular WordFence plugin which helps to prevent malicious attacks from hackers. And of course, we always urge you to use a strong password. No matter how secure your site is, ‘123456’ or ‘password’ just isn’t going to cut it.
Conclusion
It’s a no brainer really, WordPress is:
- Free
- Open-source
- Flexible
- Extensible
- SEO friendly
- Secure
- Easy to use
- Well maintained
- Fast
- Awesome!
If you’re still not using WordPress to power your website, maybe now is the time to make the switch. Why not give us a call or drop us a message to discuss your website needs.
