If you’ve been exploring the many ways to design your website, chances are you’ve come across WordPress. Since its launch in 2003, this free web design platform has evolved into the world’s most popular tool for blogging, e-commerce, and website creation.
But why has WordPress become such a go-to solution? Let’s explore.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a software that anyone can use to build and publish their own website. It is also called a content management system, or CMS for short. It is currently the most popular publishing platform in the world.
Why is WordPress so popular?
WordPress has been on the market for two decades now, meaning it has a pretty good understanding of what its customers want. The platform has done a great job at creating and improving its functionalities over the years to make it accessible and easy to use for everyone. So if you’re a beginner, no worries; WordPress has got you covered.
1. Easy Installation and Setup
WordPress is designed to be accessible for users of all skill levels, from beginners to experienced developers. Its user-friendly design comes down to a simple one-click installation with no coding required.
2. Easy to use
The platform is straightforward, with an intuitive interface. Whether you’re adding pages, publishing blog posts, uploading images, embedding videos, or customising your site with plugins, WordPress simplifies the process. This efficiency helps you save time and focus on creating content that matters.
3. Speed and Efficiency
Launch a fully functional website in days instead of weeks or months!
WordPress is perfect for those who need a straightforward website to showcase products or services quickly. While other platforms may offer similar features, WordPress stands out with its unparalleled flexibility and virtually limitless customisation options.
4. Manage Your Website Anytime, Anywhere
WordPress is browser-based, allowing you to access and manage your website from any device with an internet connection. Whether at home, in the office, or on the go, your website is always within reach.
5. WordPress is Free and Open-Source
WordPress is completely free to use because it’s open-source software, continually enhanced by a global community of developers. This collaborative approach ensures constant improvements and new features.
Keep in mind, however, that you will need to host your WordPress site somewhere. There are two options:
- Managed hosting: Professionals handle hosting, updates, and security, giving you a hands-off experience.
- Self-hosted: You manage hosting, maintenance, and security yourself, using services like GoDaddy.
6. Hosting Made Easy
Hosting doesn’t need to be complicated. Think of it as the digital storage space for your website’s content. Hosting platforms handle all the technical aspects, so you don’t have to worry about storing large files or maintaining servers.
7. Open Source
As an open-source content management system, WordPress allows developers worldwide to contribute to its growth. This collaboration leads to constant innovation, new functionalities, and a wealth of plugins, enabling the creation of highly customised, professional websites.
Thanks to WordPress, our web and graphic designers often work together to create stunning-looking designs to help our clients stand out from their competitors.
8. Support Forums
WordPress offers robust support through its extensive forums and knowledge base. These resources are invaluable for troubleshooting, especially when you’re just getting started. Because the platform has created an extensive knowledge base library for its users, chances are before reaching out to the community, you might find the solution from someone else who has a similar question.
9. Mobile responsive
Designing a website that is both mobile-friendly and responsive has never been easier with WordPress. Depending on what type of drag-and-drop web design options you’re using, these web builder tools give you the ability to create a website that is mobile responsive.
It is so important nowadays, with most internet users accessing online content via their mobile devices, that your website is a mobile-first design.
10. Intuitive interface
The backend of the platform is very intuitive. It contains easy-to-read labels, easy-to-use navigation, and easy-to-follow designs allowing anyone to get started with the fundamentals of building a website.
After a few practices, even the most novice beginner can start creating their website with confidence for the first time.
11. Easy integration with APIs
Different social media networks offer APIs ( Application Programming Interfaces ), which allow the integration of 3rd party services with user websites. Amongst the many benefits of WordPress, the platform makes it simple to integrate thousands of different APIs. Hence giving you the option to integrate outside resources into your website.
12. Integrate with almost any service or application.
Out of the number of users that use a CMS, about 65% use WordPress. Having a popular platform means that integration with other services or applications is more accessible with other platforms.
This means you can take full advantage and turn your website into a profitable hub for your business online.
For instance, you can integrate MailChimp for email marketing, embed contact forms, or connect your online store to your Facebook business page and Instagram.
Using WordPress correctly alongside your marketing efforts will be a vital tool and an integral part of how you will grow your business online.
13. No HTML Editing or FTP Software Require
WordPress is a self-contained system that does not require HTML editing. This makes it easy for anyone wishing to edit, update, and build their website by adding new content or features without needing additional HTML or FTP software.
14. Search engines love WordPress sites
When designing a website, it is important to remember that the final design needs to be well-optimised for SERP. Luckily, one of the many benefits of WordPress is that it contains very clean and simple codes. This makes it easy for search engines like Google to crawl and index a site’s content.
In addition, each page or blog post can have its own SEO title, meta description, focus keywords, and alt text.
Implementing SEO fundamentals alongside your web design will help with getting the right audience to your site.
15. You’re in control of your website
Most businesses would like to do as much as they can themselves when first starting due to budget limitations. If you have a business selling products or services, the best way to start growing your customer base is via a website.
WordPress allows you to start with a simple website to showcase your product and services.
This brings us to benefit 15.
16. You can customise your website to suit your brand
You’re in control of the look and feel of your website. As you increase your brand awareness, business, and audience, you might want to customise your website to match your business growth.
The platform gives you the freedom to customise your own website resulting in a web design that is on-brand and unique to your business.
17. A huge range of themes to get you started
The beauty of WordPress is that you are able to choose from thousands of different themes or different template layouts that can help you determine the look and style of your website. The themes allow you to tweak all the text, typography, and font sizes, introduce your brand colour theme, add different buttons and images, and so much more.
You can choose from a variety of thousands of plugins and widgets to help optimise the functionality of your website. This is perfect for businesses that might be looking to open an online store or gallery. The opportunities are endless!
18. Lower maintenance cost
Because the platform is easier to use, manage, and free to download, it tends to have a lower setup and maintenance cost. This is not to say that all sites built on WordPress are cheap. The cost will be based on your business goals and needs at the same time, your budget.
The main thing to note is that there are no initial or ongoing licensing fees for WordPress itself.
19. Built-in blog options
WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform. It has blogging capabilities that are built-in and very easy to integrate. As part of different marketing strategies, implementing different sales funnels within your blogs is very simple with WordPress.
The platform allows you to set up RSS/email subscriptions to your blogs, allows your readers to comment, and provides a nice layout showcasing your blogs. All of these are easy to set, which adds to the many benefits of WordPress for its users.
20. It supports several media types
Whether you have text content, infographics, a gallery of images, videos, slides, or white papers etc. WordPress is able to support and display all of them.
In addition, if you’re working with a web developer, you can also create custom post types to display your content. This will allow you to offer more value to customers and, at the same time, create a unique user experience.
21. WordPress is safe and secure
The platform is designed with security in mind, which makes it safe and secure to use. WordPress contains different plugins to help protect your website against common threats like malware.
22. Adding content is fast and simple
Not a coder? No problem.
You can easily add your content in WordPress and build it up as your business grows. Depending on your business type, whether you’re an e-commerce store, a B2B business, or a blogger, WordPress gives you the ability and tools needed to build your website based on your business type.
You can create different pages and blog posts and add products with one mouse click.
23. Customise your website even further with plugins
You can extend the functionality of your website by adding different plugins. This can be an event calendar, video gallery, chat box, social media feed, and more.
24. Grow your website
As we’ve mentioned previously, as your business grows, you might want to update and edit your website to tailor your growing audience. The platform permits its user to add more pages, blog posts, SEO-friendly tools, and analytic tools to monitor your website’s performance and CRO ( conversion rate optimisation).
All of these are essential marketing tools that give you essential data and metrics to stay on top of your marketing objectives.
25. Structure
If you ask any web designer or SEO experts what one of the most important parts of your web design is, they will most likely answer the structure. A good design, customer journey, easy-to-use sales funnel, and high-performing UX ( user experience ) will help your website load faster, increase user retention, and increase conversion rate.
WordPress allows you to create XML sitemaps, which helps inform Google where your website pages are and which content is worth crawling hence boosting your SEO.
26. Updating your website is easy
Once you’ve got the hang of the functionality of your site, updating and maintaining your website is super easy. Many platforms require a phone call when you want to update or edit a feature. This can be time-consuming and sometimes frustrating.
This is not the case with WordPress. Once you’ve logged into the back end of your WordPress site, you will see notifications showing you what might need updating. It is then just a case of clicking update.
Caution. Whilst it is that easy to update a plugin or any other functionality, there are times that this is not advisable. We always recommend checking what the WordPress community says about certain updates before proceeding. This ensures that any changes made don’t negatively affect your site.
27. Flexibility
You have the options to choose between 22,000+ plugins, thousands of themes and templates to experiment with or give your website a new look. This is especially important in today’s marketing, as keeping up and adapting to new trends of what works and what doesn’t will make or break your marketing efforts online.
For example, we use the Yoast plugin for SEO, which helps us understand how well-thought-out or intuitive our SEO effort is.
Or perhaps you’re doing Facebook marketing or Google Ads; implementing either Facebook pixel or Google Analytics into your website will help you understand how productive your marketing efforts are progressing.
28. A community ready to help
There are millions, and yes, we did say millions of knowledgeable users who are ready to help you solve any problems or answer any questions. That is one of the many reasons why WordPress is used roughly by one-third of all websites on the internet.
This is also one of the reasons why if you decide to go with a web design agency to create your website, you should invest in one that specialises in WordPress.
The reason is if any previous designers have built your website not to your satisfaction finding another agency that specialises in the platform is much easier and will yield a better outcome.
29. Sharing ability
With social media marketing taking over as the lead in digital marketing, it is important to ensure that the content from your website can easily be shared. This includes sharing products, blogs, or case studies.
Adding different widgets for social media, plug-ins, APIs, and any other tools you need to connect to your social media platforms gives your audience or marketers the ability to share your content easily.
30. Have Multiple Users
Any administrator of a WordPress website can give access to multiple users and set the access levels and capabilities of each user. This allows the workflow to be faster and more efficient.
31. Stable and innovative
Similar to any other digital product, WordPress ensures that it stays up-to-date with the latest technology as well as the latest marketing strategy and user needs.
The purpose and function of a website constantly change to satisfy users’ demands and trends. Thankfully, platforms like WordPress are up to the task. Regular updates mean that CMS stays relevant, solutions are provided faster, and new features and functionalities are added regularly.
32. Offers great e-commerce solutions
The main e-commerce solution on WordPress is Woocomerce, alongside others such as WPeasy cart. Such e-commerce options provide solutions to anyone, both small and large online merchants using WordPress.
Like Woocommerce, the base product is free, and you can pay for the different add-ons and premium features.
The integrated e-commerce platforms allow you to customise your e-commerce store, such as adding an online shopping cart and any other features your digital shop needs.
Take Your WordPress Website to the Next Level
WordPress is a powerful platform with endless possibilities. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to take your existing website to the next level, Nivo Digital can help.
Our team specialises in WordPress web design, crafting websites that are not only visually stunning but also optimised for performance and results. Learn more about our WordPress web design services or contact us today to discuss how we can bring your vision to life.
