Your website is your 24/7 salesperson which promotes you even when you are sleeping or holidaying. Therefore it is very important to decide how you want your next website to be. WordPress is a content management system with countless features. WordPress initially started as a blogging platform. Now it has evolved into the most powerful content management system on the internet. There are many benefits of using WordPress as the CMS (content management system) of your website. This is the reason why 27.3% percent of the websites on the internet is powered by WordPress at the point of writing this article.
Benefits of Using WordPress to power your website
1. WordPress is free
One of the main benefits of using WordPress is that it is completely free. All you need is a hosting which has the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack or equivalent. You can download WordPress for free and install it on your hosting. You can also use the one-click install which most hosting companies offer nowadays.
Often people have this perception that free is not always good and there is always a catch. The main reason why WordPress is free is because it is not “owned” by a company. WordPress is built by it’s huge community who help in developing WordPress so that the CMS is up-to-date with the current trend and security.
2. Free WordPress Themes
A WordPress theme is a collection of files which enhances the look of your website. Like how WordPress is free, there are millions of themes to choose from for your website. The WordPress theme repository itself has so many themes that you have endless number of choices in front of you. You can find a theme for any niche and they are easy to install as well. In addition to this, you also get free support from the developer who has created the theme.
3. Free WordPress Plugins
Plugins are ways to extend and add to the functionality that already exists in WordPress. Just like there are millions of themes, there are millions of WordPress plugins also available for free. You can find any kind of WordPress plugins in the plugin repository of WordPress. Like the themes, even plugins are supported by the plugin developer for free.
4. Create Anything out of WordPress
WordPress is a content management system which can be used to create any kind of website. Whether it is a shopping cart, a real estate portal or a photography site or anything that you can think of. The admin interface of WordPress can also be customized in any way so that it is easy for the owner or the administrator to manage their website.
5. Update your own Website
Another major benefit of using WordPress and probably the biggest is the ease of updating your website. The owner or administrator of the website can update the content of their website without any programming knowledge. WordPress has a lot of features such as Custom Post Types, Custom Meta Boxes, which can be used to create a customized administration interface. If you are using WordPress, you have full control over your website.
6. Faster load times of your Website.
Everyone wants their website to load faster. The main reason being that the website can be presented to the customer right in front of them without much time taken. An experienced developer will use the resources that WordPress has to make sure the pages load faster. I have written a separate article here which you can share with your developer to speed up your WordPress website.
7. You can trust WordPress
WordPress is a CMS built by top notch developers from around the WordPress. This is what makes WordPress secure. It is an open source CMS so a lot of developers from big organizations help in making WordPress better. WordPress is highly secure out of the box, so you can rely on WordPress and trust it. The codes are just not pushed by anyone, its actually reviewed and also tested more than a zillion times before it’s pushed out to the public.
8. Expanding your Website as you grow.
You can expand a website based on WordPress to any level. Suppose you a writer or a blogger and one day you think of selling some things that you make or sell any service that you can provide. You can expand your website to have a shopping cart so that users coming to your website can check our the services/products that you are offering to sell. You don’t need to create a new website from scratch at all.
9. Handling your Own Staff
WordPress has an in-built user management system which can be used to delegate access to your staff. Suppose you hire a writer and want to give access to them. You wouldn’t want them to touch your plugin settings or other areas. User roles can be used to grant limited access to the administration area of your website.
10. The Awesome Support
Another major benefit of using WordPress is the support that you can get from the community. Whether you are a developer or the owner of the website, you can get free support from countless forums all over the internet. And the best of all, its all free.
Myths about WordPress
I am neither an internet marker and not a writer. I am a WordPress Developer with over 8 years of experience in creating WordPress based websites. The above points were written based on my experience with WordPress. The main reason for writing an article about the Benefits of Using WordPress was to ensure that people know the right thing and are not misguided and made to believe some myth. I have often come across blog posts on the internet about some of these myths. You can read my article about the Myths of WordPress if you are interested in knowing them.
Are you getting these benefits?
I have written another article about whether you are getting the benefits that WordPress offers. WordPress is one of the most used CMS on the internet now, hence it is very easy to find a developer. However, are you getting the right developer for your website? Read this article to find out whether you are getting all the benefits that you should.