What is WordPress?

As an entrepreneur or a business owner, one of the basic requirements you need is a professional well-designed website. This will help increase your credibility and visibility giving you access to a wider audience with potential new clients empowering you to grow your business. But which platform should you choose to create your website? In this article, we explore the benefits of using wordpress for your business website.

WordPress is a Content Management System(CMS) that enables users to create blogs and websites from scratch. In simple terms, a CMS is a platform which enable its users to create, edit and publish information on the internet. According to this research by WPShout, WordPress runs 43.5% of the entire internet as at 2023. This means wordpress alone powers more than 40 million sites on the internet!

Before we proceed to the benefits, its worth noting that WordPress.org is a free software. You can always download it from wordpress.com then install into to your web hosting to start building a website.  This should however not be confused with wordpress.com which is a separate solution where you dont have to acquire your own hosting however you lose the flexibility and control to how your site looks.

WordPress has been around since 2003 and is the most popular blogging software on the market. Over the last few years, it has also become the content management software of choice for non-blogging websites. Here are the top 10 reasons why it is so popular and why you might want to consider switching to a WordPress platform for your company’s website.

1. WordPress is Easy to Use

WordPress is very easy to use and has an intuitive interface. Adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly. Because the technology is so simple, time spent on formatting is greatly reduced

2. You Can Manage your Website from Any Computer

WordPress is browser-based. You can login from any Internet connected computer and manage your site.

3. No HTML Editing or FTP Software Required

WordPress is a self-contained system and does not require HTML editing software (such as Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver). You can create a new page or blog post, format text, upload images (and edit them), upload documents, video files, image galleries, etc. all without the need for additional HTML or File Transfer Protocal software.

4. Search Engines Love WordPress

The code behind WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a site’s content. In addition, each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title, and be optimized for specific keywords, allowing for very precise search engine optimization. You can also use tags to further enhance your search engine optimization efforts.

5. You have Control of the Site

No more waiting for your web designer to make simple updates to your site. With WordPress, you have control of nearly every aspect of your site and can easily make those simple updates yourself.

6. The Design of your Website is 100% Customizable

WordPress acts as the engine for your website. The look and feel of the site can be 100% customized so your brand can shine through on your site and provide a unique experience to your visitors.

7. Your Website Comes with a Built in Blog

Since WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform, blogging capabilities are built-in and are easy to integrate, if desired. Setting up RSS / email subscriptions to your blog, commenting capabilities, and automatically adding the most recent blog posts to other pages of the site (your home page, for example) are also very simple to set-up, and help to extend your company’s reach and make your site more dynamic and interactive.

8. Plugins are Available to Extend Functionalities of the Site

Want to add an event calendar, video gallery, Twitter Feed, Facebook Fan Box, and more to your site? WordPress makes this possible with plugins, most of which are free or very reasonably priced.

9. Your Site Can Grow as your Business Grows

WordPress sites are very scalable. You can have hundreds of thousands of pages or blog posts on your site and the performance of the site will not be compromised in the least.

10. Multiple Users

As an administrator of a site, you can set-up multiple users for the website and assign access levels and capabilities to each user. The available roles within wordpress are Administrator, Editor, Subscriber, Contributor and Author.