Benefits of WordPress as CMS

A Content Management System, or CMS, is an application that can be used to publish and manage web content. WordPress started out in 2003 as a blogging website, it has since become perhaps the most popular CMS choices for a variety of websites. In fact, over 32% of all websites are powered by WordPress.

While there are numerous alternatives to WordPress, it still holds almost 41.3% of the CMS market share, accounting for over 30.5 million live websites. If you set out to look for web developers, you are much more likely to find a WordPress development company than for any other CMS. Here are some reasons why.

1. It’s Free

The first and most important reason behind the popularity of WordPress is that it is completely free to use. You can download the full WordPress software application whenever you want, completely free of charge. You will not be charged any software license fees for hosting a website built on WordPress on a domain that you own.

2. Easily and Fully Customisable

The WordPress framework is very flexible. The code involved is light and fast, which means the ever-growing community of WordPress software developers always has a rich framework on which to constantly develop newer plugins, themes, and templates.

Plugins are web applications for WordPress that enhance its core functionalities. There are over 55,000 available plugins for WordPress, most of which are free or very reasonably priced (usually also with a free option). This makes it easy for absolutely anyone to make a custom and interactive website that’s chock full of features, with little to no coding knowledge required. In fact, you can create almost any kind of website you want using WordPress.

There are also thousands of themes and design templates you can choose from, which means you don’t have to make any extra expenditures to create a unique looking website, whether it be for a blog, business site, or eStore. A majority of the themes are also themselves customisable, which means you will have a full ability to play around with colours, fonts, and the webpage formatting.

3. Multilingual Support

Plugins like the WordPress Multilingual (WPML) or Sublanguage also make it possible to create multilingual websites easily, which would otherwise not be possible with WordPress out-of-the-box. There are several plugins of this kind, and each works in its own way, as each of the various methods of switching site language has its own pros and cons. Some plugins might offer automatic or external translation services (though the quality of translation isn’t always the best). Plugins like WPML also provide separate text boxes for the languages you have chosen, and allow you to manually enter the texts. WPML also lets you translate your site’s meta tags and titles, thus optimizing it for searches in different languages. 

Choosing the right multilingual plugin for your website is not an easy procedure, since there is a huge list of such plugins. You could even choose to hire a WordPress developer for this part. However, the benefits of having a multilingual website is manifold, and will let you reach out to even more customers than ever before.

4. Accessible and Intuitive

The flexible and scalable nature of the platform makes your websites almost infinitely extensible. This means that as your business grows, so can your website. It is possible to add thousands of pages or blog posts to your website without any hiccup in performance.

The content management system is simple enough that any writer, photographer, podcaster, or business owner can easily publish, revise, or update their content without having to know any code. A blog is already built in and ready to go, and publishing blog posts with added images doesn’t involve any more skills than creating a slideshow or a simple document. With correct plugins, addition of audio and video logs can also be done with just a few clicks.

With WordPress, it is also very easy to add additional contributors to your website. Whether they contribute with more content, or with editing skills, or with the structure of the website in general, contributors can not just be easily added, but you can also specify the level of access they will have.

5. Easy SEO

Any content-driven venture has Search Engine Optimisation as its core, and WordPress has plenty of plugins, many of them free, that will make sure that your website’s search engine performance stays optimized. You can use plugins like Yoast SEO or AIOSEO to quickly optimize your keywords, preview your pages in the SERP, create a crawler-friendly sitemap, ping search engines whenever you update content, and many more. 

Additionally, search engines like Google or Bing find WordPress websites particularly easy to crawl because that is how the platform formats the site. WordPress gives you options to easily enter and refine the meta descriptions and title tags without the need for any coding. These tags, added with WordPress’ well-optimized structure, mean that search engines crawlers will be able to navigate your website much faster.

6. Lots of eStore Facilities

WooCommerce is another famous name, especially in the domain of eCommerce. It is a free plugin for WordPress that has the express purpose of letting you create eStores that are good-looking, interactive, and packed with features. It is easily one of the most popular plugins WordPress has to offer, as it seamlessly integrates with WordPress to provide powerful eCommerce solutions that puts the store owner in complete control.

There is also a wide variety of plugins, both paid and free, that will provide you with reports, metrics, and analytic data that will greatly facilitate not just the making of your store, but also in creating marketing strategies and increasing sales. Major payment gateways such as PayMill, Paypal, RazorPay, etc can also easily be integrated into WordPress without the need for a developer.

You also have the option to embed customer reviews on your page. Multiple plugins will let you choose a rating system, a text snippet box, and custom designs for these, which you can then display on your website easily. This will not only allow customers to generate content for you by writing reviews, it can also make sure you don’t risk losing visitors since they won’t need to click away when searching for customer reviews.

7. Ready for Mobile Devices and Social Media

Over half of all worldwide web traffic today comes from mobile devices. Which is why it is so important for your website to be optimized for such devices, both in terms of viewability as well as loading speeds. WordPress makes this easy since a number of the themes available are already mobile-optimized.

Additionally, there is also a wide variety of tools available for creating sharing options. You will have at your disposal multiple tools, both free and paid, to insert social media sharing buttons, create custom sharing icons to match your site’s aesthetics, and also add an RSS feed support so users can subscribe to receive content updates. WooCommerce has built in social media options that you can also use to promote your services and products on social media channels.

8. Multisite Support

Multisite is a kind of WordPress installation that will let you make and manage a network of websites from your WordPress dashboard. This makes it extremely easy to make changes to all of your websites and keep them regularly updated.

When you install WordPress Multisite, you are made the network admin, with admin privileges for any site you create on the network. You can then set up necessary rules for other people creating sites on the network.

Since the websites on a network share themes and plugins, it is easy to make changes to the entire string of websites at once. At the same time, the different sites all have their own media upload directories, which means each site can be further customized individually to go for its own look. As the network admin, you can decide which site admin gets to use which plugins, whether they are able to change their site themes and layouts, whether or not they can publish changes without consulting you, and take any other supervisory actions as and when required.

9. Easy Backend

WordPress has lots of resources to make the life of a backend developer easier. Firstly, given its popularity, there is no dearth of tutorials, tips, and tricks all over the internet for any and all backend-related issues. If you are a first-time developer, or are just looking to try your hand at website building, these resources are bound to prove helpful.

On top of that, WordPress also has innumerable plugins aimed at simplifying, organizing, and enhancing every aspect of the backend procedures, and removing almost any need for coding. Popular plugins such as Elementor, SeedProd, and Beaver Builder let you create your website with simple drag and drop techniques, giving you full control as to how the website looks, starting from its interface to its color to how its icons look. Live page builders like Elementor let you see your page and its changes live as you edit and make them.

10. Security

Here are a couple of interesting stats related to website security:

• On an average, about 30,000 websites get hacked everyday. (forbes.com)
• By the end of 2021, a business fell victim to ransomware every 11 seconds. (review42.com)

These are people looking to steal your information, your customers’ information and private data, release a web virus, or otherwise harm your business for no good reason.

Which is why security should be one of the top concerns for anyone building a website. And WordPress plugins are once again the solution. There are numerous security plugins available for WordPress. Plugins like WordFence and iThemes Security are popular and offer multiple layers of security to your websites. They will notify you immediately if there’s a hacking attempt, while also keeping your site secure. Some will also notify you when parts of your website, or a certain plugin you use has become outdated, expired, or otherwise vulnerable. Some of these plugins also offer a free plan, while the paid options are available in multiple tiers so you can choose the plan best for you. With them in hand, security should no longer be a concern for your website.

11. Community Support & Constant Updates

Since WordPress is an open source CMS, it has garnered around itself a huge community that is constantly working on improving every aspect of it. This means that you can always rely on quality support for any issues with the website. The plugins are constantly updated, and new plugins are uploaded very often. It also means that there are routine updates and patches. As long as you keep up with your regular WordPress maintenance tasks, your website’s speed, performance, and functionality will all stay in top form.

Final Thoughts

It isn’t hard to see why WordPress has managed to retain the top spot among CMS platforms, even amidst competition from other popular platforms such as Drupal, Joomla, Wix, etc. WordPress has consistently proven to be the choice platform for many different kinds of websites. The websites of the White House, jQuery, and TechCrunch may be vastly different from one another, but one thing they have in common is that they all use WordPress as CMS. With the help of a trusted WordPress development company, you too could set up an amazing website that you are in full control of.