Why WordPress?

WordPress remains one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) on the web, with almost 40% of the internet being powered by the CMS. After years of discussion, debates, and building our own platform – WordPress is our platform of choice when building almost all of our sites. And we’re not alone…

WordPress Stats (hat tip to hosting tribunal for this info).

  • WordPress powers 39.6% of the internet in 2021, a growth of nearly 5% from 35% in 2020, and a 4% rise from the year before.
  • If you count only the CMS-built sites, then 64.1% of them are WordPress – 4% growth from 2020.
  • Over 400 million people visit WordPress sites each month.
  • In 2016, nearly 118 billion words were published on WordPress
  • But WordPress is not only for blogging – nearly 28% of all e-commerce goes through WooCommerce
  • 281 new WooCommerce shops appear on average every day
  • 661 WordPress sites also pop up daily
  • WordPress.org offers over 50,000 plugins and over 3,500 GPL-licensed themes
  • In 2018, the non-English WordPress downloads were more than the English ones

WordPress has gained in popularity so much, that most clients we build sites for are requesting that we use the platform by name. People are comforted by the fact that WordPress developers are ubiquitous and by the ever-growing market of plugins. We standardized on WordPress for a few reasons: 

Ease of use and adaptability – 

It is easy to use for both developers and our end user clients. When we first starting building sites (circa 2005), we had to custom code each page. It was time consuming and made it hard to teach our clients how to make some of the basic updates. When we built our own CMS, we put a lot of thought into what most (80%) of our clients would need. We built in a Word-like editor, page creator, template editor, and form builder. It was enough to reduce the development time by at least half for most of our clients. 

While we were developing our platform, WordPress was also being developed. The key difference was that our platform was not open-source (we didn’t give the code to anyone) and WordPress was. With WordPress being open-source, they were able to enlist the coding community to help build the application at a rate that a small development firm could not keep up with.

Around 2016, we finally decided we couldn’t beat them, so we joined them and never looked back. We use a specific set of tools to create our sites and have had great success in teaching even the most tech-challenged folks how to make simple updates to their sites.

The fact that it is so adaptable cannot be taken for granted. It is flexible enough to accommodate all needs through its extensions and plugins, whether you’re using the CMS for a small business website, personal blog or an ecommerce website. 

Search Engine Friendliness – 

If you’ve read any of our other blog posts, you know that a website that can’t be found is no better than having no website at all. Making sure the sites can be indexed and found quickly in the search engines is important for all our clients. The good news is that WordPress makes it easy to set your site up for SEO success with clean page URLs, editable meta-tags, and easy on-page management. WordPress is widely considered the best CMS for SEO.

Built in Ecommerce – 

With the addition of WordPress’ e-commerce platform, WooCommerce, you can sell all kinds of products, services, subscriptions, etc. on your own site. You retain full ownership of the store content and data and the look and feel of the cart is integrated directly with the theme of your site.

Support Options – 

While we typically don’t tell our customers to “Google it”, there are plenty of Googleable options for support in WordPress. If you need to know how to add a page or modify an element, a quick Google search will likely bring up a YouTube video showing you exactly what you need. While we tend to be more hands on and show our clients how to do these things, it’s good to know that if you’re up and editing a site at 2am and need to know how to do something, Google probably has the solution.

Accessibility - 

Accessibility is about making the web easier to use for individuals with physical or sensory impairments. The WordPress core team puts a special emphasis on making WordPress software accessible to everyone.

It just keeps getting better - 

Thanks to its open-source coding and innovative developers, WordPress keeps improving as the years go by. Whether the WordPress staff are adding new features, developers are creating new plugins, or coders have programmed new features to customize your site, the CMS keeps evolving for the better.

The one concern we hear from customers around WordPress is security. With the application being open source and updates coming out regularly (on both the core application and on plugins), security can be a concern. The easiest way to make sure your WordPress site is secure is to have the proper security solutions in place and to keep the site up to date on the latest version of the application. Updates come out frequently and patch security holes as well as offer new features that will be beneficial to the business.

Managed hosting is the easiest way to deal with WordPress security concerns. With managed hosting, we make any core application and plugin updates daily. This ensures your site is always on the most current version of WordPress and any security holes are plugged immediately. 

Ready to make the switch to WordPress? Let's chat!