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If you have decided to create a blog or website, the most pertinent question is which tools you should use to create one. When you ask this question to your tech-savvy friends, most of them will respond with just one word, “WordPress”. Although you might get a couple of more responses as well like Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace, Shopify, Magneto, or Wix, but WordPress would be the most common answer.
What does WordPress Do?
WordPress can be simply regarded as a software that can be used to create a blog or website but the cool part is that you don’t even need to have any coding skills or have to be tech-savvy to create a website using WordPress. You can easily manage your website pages, user comments, upload posts, video or audio files, etc. on WordPress.
For those of you who understand technical jargon and are more familiar with computers, WordPress is basically a content management system (CMS) that is open source as well as licensed GPLv2, which gives you the choice to use the software the way you wish to use it.
You will get amazed by the wonders of WordPress when it comes to creating a blog or website, especially the useful features like themes and plugins. For those of you who don’t understand themes, they are a collection of files used to create a graphical interface with a unifying design for a website or blog. These template files create themes that alter the way a website is displayed without the need to alter the underlying software code.
As far as WordPress plugins are concerned, they are the tools that increase functionality that is already present in WordPress. When someone needs to customize their WordPress created website, they use plugins to get the job done.
So, in short, you can use WordPress to create a website and if you think it lacks some features, you can simply use a plugin to add that feature to your website. There are 50,000 plugins and you can always find something useful from them.
Who Needs WordPress?
The best part about WordPress is that almost everyone can use it for creating a website for business or non-business purposes. It does not target any market niche like Magneto is particularly for e-commerce. On the contrary, WordPress offers solutions to all categories of websites, which is amazing.
WordPress is used by content writers, musicians, e-commerce business owners, charity organizations, and even developers. You can find some big brands that have WordPress to create their websites.
Now let’s talk about the benefits of WordPress as compared to other platforms.
WordPress Vs Other Platforms
According to WeTechs, WordPress has more than 60% market share. Joomla comes after it with around 4 %. It is followed by Drupal that has around 3.8 % market share.
Who doesn’t love watching TV, right? Availing our favorite content through great packages like Spectrum Gold that comes with endless entertainment is something we all want. You would be surprised to know that WordPress has its own TV, WordPress Tv. It’s like an online community of WordPress and you will find all kinds of stuff relating to it over there, ranging from slide-shows to video tutorials.
You can see that WordPress is way ahead of its competitors and there are many reasons behind its success:
WordPress gives you the Charge
We all realize the importance of data. After spending a lot of time building content and audience on your website, you surely want to own everything and use it in any possible way you want. With WordPress, comes this freedom.
If we talk about other platforms like Squarespace or Wix, you are technically not the owner of your website and although it won’t likely happen if these companies decide to change the terms and conditions, your account might get suspended and your website is gone. Again, we are not saying that this is going to happen as Squarespace and Wix have reputations to maintain, but if they ever want to do it, they can and that would be problematic, right?
With a self-hosted solution in this case WordPress, you enjoy complete ownership of your website and are free to do whatever you feel like doing.
However, there are certain rules that you need to obey, but they are a minimal restriction that doesn’t seem to be a problem. Moreover, WordPress has this option through which you can host it at your own server provided that you have the required resources.
Easy to Install and User-Friendly
Within a few hours, you can learn to install and properly use WordPress. Although you won’t become a pro overnight, you can surely learn a great deal about WordPress that can help you get started and you can keep on learning as you move forward.
Squarespace and Wix may feel a lot easier to use because they are made specifically for non-technical users. Wix is quite user-friendly and with just a few clicks you can build a page. It’s just Drag and Drop and your pages are ready.
No doubt that Squarespace and Wix hold great attraction, but soon you’ll realize that the customization options are very limited. That’s when you start appreciating WordPress for its limitless customization options!
WordPress is SEO Friendly!
WordPress offers many SEO features like the ability to use .htaccess, which helps in creating static URLs known as Permalinks, Blog rolling and Pinging. Apart from this, you can use a lot of third-party plugins for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you start using themes and customizing your WordPress site, you may lose the search engine friendliness of WordPress. So, it is very important to use an SEO friendly theme otherwise a lot of extra work is required to maintain optimal friendliness of your WordPress site. Using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO and doing SEO of your content, using relevant keywords will make your website stand out.
Flexibility
WordPress is no more the blogging platform that it used to be years ago. Now, it offers flexibility to use it in any possible way you want.
WordPress, which appears to be a simple blog, just like this Spectrum TV stream Service page can be transformed into an e-commerce store, a social networking site, an online music store, a charity website, and even an amazing job portal by using relevant plugins and making few changes. Plugins provide great value addition by leveraging advanced technologies like real-time tracking, browsing, filtering, and last but not the least, 3D rendering.
You don’t have to be a developer or need to hire a developer to make a WordPress site for you. Just choose a suitable plugin and get your work done. It also provides the flexibility of changing themes on your website in case you don’t like the existing theme.
Scalability
If you configure file servers and database servers efficiently, WordPress can offer a lot of scalabilities. Your WordPress site can be easily tailored to get the desired outcomes. It is capable of handling thousands of requests in a short span of time and can handle the delivery of millions of monthly page views.
Themes
From Top to bottom, themes are responsible for how your WordPress site looks. In fact, themes bring together the HTML code that is received by the browsers. This gives themes the power to control the outlook of your website including choices of colors, fonts, display styles, and a lot more. If you wish to see the kind of themes WordPress offers, simply go to the WordPress theme directory where you can view a huge collection of themes.
WordPress is Free to Use
“Free” sounds like music to the ears and knowing that WordPress is free to use in any way excites a lot of people. Yes, this is right. WordPress is 100% free apart from some limitations for which there is no need to worry. It comes as a great surprise for many that themes and plugins offered by WordPress are also free. Like we mentioned previously if you don’t like the theme you’re currently using, simply delete it and install the one that grabs for attention.
What About Setup and Maintenance Cost?
Hosting a WordPress site is inexpensive and with some shared hosting platform, you can get it for as low as $3 to $5. As far as the maintenance is concerned, you don’t require a lot of time and effort to run your website. Even updates are easily manageable with few clicks and are completed in less than a minute. Finally, premium quality themes on WordPress cost around $50 in case you’re not satisfied with the freely available themes.
Take Away!
WordPress is your one-stop solution to all your website management tools. There isn’t anything you can’t do with WordPress. Its diverse framework and a large user body make it easier to learn. You can find tons of videos online to help you through. Hope this was helpful, Happy Web Building!