WordPress has become a household name among people who want to build or have built a website, and for very good reasons. About 25% of all websites on the internet in 2017 are built with WordPress. That makes up about 10 000 million in total and the number is growing every day. This way, about every fourth website is built with this awesome platform!
This free, open source software is trusted by millions of professionals all over the world. Many businesses and big brands such as the New York Times and PlayStation rely on it to run their website and it succeeds with flying colors.
WordPress is a Content Management System that makes it incredibly easy for a user to build a website. It can be done in a few clicks and a few more if you want to customize your website’s design as well. Its ease of use is one of the main reasons why people love it, among many others.
WordPress was launched in 2003 as a blogging platform and has outgrown itself to do much more. Today, it can handle large eCommerce websites as well, making it a big player on a massive and very diverse market. It offers an efficient framework that allows you to create awesome websites like:
- Portfolio websites
- Company websites
- News website
- Forums
- Ecommerce websites
- Social Media websites
- Blogs
WordPress has all the tools to create these websites, but if it doesn’t, you can just download a plugin and have the functions you need anyway. It is an open-source platform, so you can develop a plugin or theme yourself or have someone else develop it for you.
If you’re looking to start a blog, especially if you’re starting your first blog, WordPress might just be the perfect choice for you. In this article, we’re going to talk about the most awesome things WordPress has to offer and give you plenty of reasons why you should use it to run your new blog! So, without further ado, let’s get down to it.
12 Solid Reasons To Use WordPress
There are at least a hundred reasons to use WordPress for something as simple as a blog. We’ll outline the main ones here.
1. Free To Use
Not many bloggers start off by throwing heaps of money into their blog. In fact, most of them try to work it out as cost effectively as possible. Which is where WordPress does an awesome job. Since it is a free open-source project, it doesn’t cost a dime to use. You still have to pay for hosting if you want to run a decent website, and some plugins cost money as well, but you can pretty much work your way around everything through the free route. Starting something simple as a blog shouldn’t cost you anything more than what you pay for a decent hosting plan.
2. Helps You Save Time
It’s a lot easier to build a website with WordPress than almost any other solution out there. If you’re not feeling like you would learn to code in HTML and CSS, than this is an ideal solution. You don’t have to do anything more than download it or install it on the server you want to host your website on. Once you’ve installed it, it even makes creating posts incredibly easy. You can manage your content quickly and easily, create new posts and schedule them if need be. The only places where you might require some technical knowledge is when you want to make complex modifications to your theme or if you have some kind of error. But you can pretty much work your way around these things even if you don’t have any knowledge in coding and web development.
3. WordPress Is Incredibly SEO Friendly
The internet can seem frightening when you’re such a small player on it, with so many competitors on the loose. There are plenty of massive blogging sharks that could easily devour small preys like you, but WordPress has you covered with that. If you’re creative and have great ideas, you won’t have any problem with your website’s Search Engine Optimization. Most of the SEO problems an average website comes across, won’t affect you because they are already solved in WordPress. Every website is structured in a way that it makes it easy for search engines to crawl through it.
To top it off, it also has awesome SEO plugins like Yoast SEO. It’s a great tool that will analyze all the posts you create and give you useful suggestions and guidelines to how to improve their SEO. Through a snippet, you can change how your post’s title and meta description is displayed when it is shown in the search engine results. It will also analyze the text you have written, checking its readability and whether you’ve put your keywords in the right places.
I suggest that you install this plugin right after you have your website up and running.
4. Has An Infinite Amount of Customization Options
The look and feel of a blog is incredibly important if you want to keep readers around for as long as possible. With WordPress’ theme system, you can customize your website whatever way you imagine. You can add or take away any visual element you want and the same goes for your website’s functionality. You can freely customize your website’s layout, navigation elements, colors, images, fonts, backgrounds, page sections and whatever else you might fancy. You can download a new free or premium theme with a few clicks (they are even easy to find) and have it shown on your website right away. Most themes have a separate interface for customization or were built in a very comprehensive and convenient manner. But keep in mind that if you want to make some throughout customizations, than you’ll have to have at least some coding knowledge.
5. Has a Massive Community Supporting It
WordPress is incredibly widespread and receives support on a global level. Whatever problem you might have on your site, someone has already had it or solved it. It’s incredibly easy to get any sort of help with your WordPress website. It has a massive community of supportive people who are either developers or devoted users, but they’ll definitely help you overcome any challenges you might have. There are also plenty of guides and tutorials online that you can use to learn new things. All you have to do most of the time is post a question on a forum and people will bombard you with help and resources.
6. It’s Mobile Friendly
Over the past 5 years, the number of smartphones on the web has drastically increased. Which makes about 50% of online traffic, mobile traffic. More and more people browse the web from mobile every day. So it’s important that your website adopts to these changing trends and supports different screen sizes and devices. It is also very important from a SEO standpoint, that it supports mobile devices.
WordPress has you covered with that, since 90% of all its themes are responsive themes. Not to mention the new themes that are coming out. It’s nearly impossible to find a theme that wasn’t perfected for all screen sizes and devices, so you’ll blog will definitely be easy to navigate from mobile.
7. It’s Easily Scalable
WordPress is perfect for a simple blog, but it can handle so much more. Even if your website becomes hugely successful with thousands of hits every day, you can easily become accustomed to it. Big brands that use WordPress, such as CNN, MTV News, Sony Music and so on, have plenty of traffic every day and they’re happy with using WordPress.
8. Has Support For Multiple Content Types
With WordPress you can add pretty much any type of media or content you wish. You’re not stuck with writing blog posts with pictures only. You can add audio, video or whatever you like with absolute ease. For example, adding a YouTube video only requires you to paste the link where you want the vid to show up. If you can’t add it exactly the way you want it, you’ll find a plugin or a tweak that will make it that way. You can add Instagram photos, Tweets, SoundCloud audio or even interactive content. Whatever you come up with, you can definitely implement into your site.
9. It’s Secure
WordPress is one of the most widely used content management systems, which gives plenty of reasons for hackers to target it. There were numerous exploits in the past, all of which WordPress has learnt from and continues to learn from. Even to this very day, the platform becomes much safer with every update that comes out. You just have to make sure you install new updates all the time and add a few plugins for security and you’ll be safe and secure all the way.
10. Easy To Monetize
Monetization is one of the main ways you will make money from your blog, so it’s important that you keep it in perspective. Once you have built trust and respect with your readers, you can contact ad networks and private advertisers to make some cash. A lot of these ad networks have their very own dedicated plugins for WordPress, which makes them easy to integrate into your website.
But even if you don’t want to place advertisements on your site and would prefer a different way to make money, you definitely can. WordPress has a plugin for just about everything and supports you to have numerous revenue streams within this platform.
11. Regular Updates
Someone, in fact numerous people are working on improving WordPress even as you read this. The platform is regularly updated and maintained by its creators and its leadership. Others are working on improving it as well, because it is an open-source platform, so anyone can contribute to make it a whole lot better. There are hundreds of developers and security professionals who make new themes, plugins and other improvements for the system.
12. Has a Plugin For Almost Anything
As I already explained above, WordPress offers plenty of diversity and possibilities for your blog. You can add plugins, neat little pieces of software that provide you with a certain functionality that will make your blog better. It will enhance the platform and your functionality, enhance security, and speed up the blog’s performance or build email lists. Whatever you want to achieve with your website, there’s probably a plugin that will help you achieve it.
Conclusion
WordPress is the go-to solution for millions of bloggers all around the internet for solid reasons. It offers all the stability, functionality and diversity a website needs, so well, that you would have to argue why not to use WordPress. It’s simply a great piece of software and it can handle everything you would want to get out of your newly created blog.
I hope you have enjoyed reading through this article and that we have helped you learn something new today!
