WordPress is one of the world's most popular content management systems. From a simple blog to an eCommerce platform, WordPress can be used to create websites of any size and complexity. Its power lies in the vast array of themes, plugins, and integrations that make it easy for users to build stunning sites quickly and efficiently. This article will explore the many benefits of using WordPress for website development.
In this contemporary age of business digitalization, a strong online presence is key for both businesses and individuals alike. A website is one of the many ways one can use to establish a digital presence. However, there are many ways that one can leverage to create a website, including coding from scratch, using website builders, or a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress.
First off, a CMS is a software application that provides a user-friendly interface that allows anyone to create a website and manage and publish content without the need for technical knowledge of programming.
WordPress is an open-source CMS and one of the most popular in the market. Launched in 2003, WordPress has grown from a simple blog-publishing platform to a powerful website-building and hosting platform powering 43% of all websites, according to W3Techs.
Platform | % All Websites | % CMS Market |
WordPress | 43 | 65 |
Joomla | 2.6 | 4.6 |
Drupal | 1.7 | 3.0 |
Squarespace | 1.5 | 2.7 |
Wix | 1.3 | 2.3 |
WordPress is not the only CMS for website building, and thus the question is why use WordPress?
The mere fact that WordPress is the most popular CMS is not enough to base your decision on starting with it. In the subsequent sections, we discuss some of the reasons why WordPress is the best CMS.
Why Use WordPress
User-friendly interface
Intuitive dashboard
If you’re new to website building and intimidated by technical jargon, you may be asking yourself, Why use WordPress? If you’re in this position, WordPress has an intuitive dashboard that requires no expertise. The WordPress dashboard allows you to manage the behind the scene details, such as the customization of your website and managing posts, without writing a single line of code.
Drag-and-drop functionality
WordPress has a range of editors, such as Elementor, with a drag-and-drop interface. Using this interface, you can build and customize your website by adding, removing, and moving elements without writing code. All you have to do is choose an appealing template and customize it according to your needs. Ultimately, this may save you a lot of time and effort.
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WYSIWYG editor
WYSIWYG is an acronym for “what you see is what you get, ” meaning that whatever content you type in your editor will be published online as it is. WordPress has a variety of such intuitive editors that make content management easier. You do not need to write any HTML or CSS to publish content online.
AI Website Builders
As a newcomer, you may be asking if is WordPress a good website builder. Well besides plugins, many AI tools, such as chatbots and website builders, are compatible with WordPress. As the world embraces generative AI tools to create efficiency, you may also want to incorporate these tools to create a better user experience and increase productivity. And if the question of why use WordPress still troubles you, here is another reason why you should try WordPress.
10Web AI Website Builder
10Web AI Website Builder is an AI-powered website builder based on the Elementor editor. Using 10Web AI Website Builder, you can build websites 10X faster by automating mundane tasks we do while creating websites, such as sourcing images, building pages, and writing text. No coding knowledge is required to use the 10Web AI Website Builder.
You can generate professional-looking websites by answering simple questions about your company’s name, type, description, and services. Based on your answers, 10Web AI Website Builder will automatically generate content and images to populate your website.
With 10Web AI Builder, you can also recreate landing pages by inserting the web page URL you desire to replicate, and 10Web AI Builder will generate the exact copy of the site’s structure and styling.
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Other AI tools to jumpstart your Website creation on WordPress include 10Web AI Writing Assistant, WordLift, Bertha, CodeWP, and more.
Customization options
Theme customization
The WordPress vast library of themes is also one of the persuasive answers to the Why use WordPress question. WordPress has both free and premium themes that can be customized in terms of color, font, and layout to create personalized websites that align with your brand needs.
Themes may have a basic level of functionality integrated into them. Still, you must install a separate plugin if you want to add a website element with more advanced functionality.
Plugin options
Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your WordPress site. For instance, you can add contact forms, social media integrations, e-commerce features, beautiful image slideshows, navigation buttons, a gallery with a pop-up window to view its images in full mode, and many more.
The presence of multipurpose plugins also allows you to extend the functionality of your site without the need to install more than one plugin.
Advanced customization with coding
If you’re a geek and would like to take your website an extra mile, here is an answer to why use WordPress over other platforms. WordPress provides customization options that allow you to edit and customize your website’s underlying HTML, CSS, or PHP code. Advanced customization allows you to achieve advanced customization and functionalities impossible with plugins.
SEO
Built-in SEO features
WordPress built-in SEO features are one of the top benefits of WordPress. These features make it easier to optimize your WordPress site for search engines. These features include SEO-friendly URLs and titles, autogenerated XML sitemaps, site verification, and title tags. Using these features, you can optimize your website so that search engines index and rank it higher on SERPs.
Customizable permalinks
WordPress permalinks are URLs that point out to individual posts, pages, and categories. Customizable permalinks are one of the advantages of WordPress, allowing you to create a URL structure that is SEO-friendly and easy for search engines to crawl and index.
Integration with SEO plugins
Besides the basic functionality of WordPress that ensures your site’s SEO-friendliness, there are a lot of powerful SEO plugins that’ll help you write better content. Some popular SEO WordPress plugins include Yoast SEO and SEOPress. Using these plugins, you can better write keywords, create meta tags and meta descriptions for posts and pages, fix crawl errors, and improve your website’s visibility.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile responsive themes
With the increased usage of mobile devices, it is essential that your site works seamlessly across devices of different screen sizes. One of the benefits of WordPress is a vast collection of mobile responsive themes. Having responsive themes means that regardless of your chosen theme, your website will display perfectly across all devices, relieving you from implementing this yourself.
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Mobile-friendly plugins
WordPress’s robust plugin collection is incomparable to none. Using the WordPress plugin repository, you can add or modify important functions on your website, such as contact forms, maps, and more. To ensure that user experience is consistent across all devices, WordPress plugins are mobile-friendly.
AMP support
Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source technology that relies on minimal HTML and limited Javascript to make web pages load faster on mobile devices. Implementing AMP on your WordPress site can improve user experience, boost your site rankings on mobile search results, reduce bandwidth usage, and boost server performance.
There are two ways to set up AMP on your WordPress site. You can use the official AMP for the WordPress plugin. Alternatively, you can use the AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages Plugin.
Huge community support
Large user base
Due to its open-source nature and ease of use, WordPress is incredibly popular among tech enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike. According to the latest data, WordPress is the largest CMS, with a market share of about 65.1 %. On top of that, WordPress powers about 43 % of all websites currently active in the world. These percentages translate to millions of users and websites around the globe. With so many users, WordPress has hundreds of communities that actively engage all around the globe and the internet. Therefore, anyone with an issue can easily reach out via the Internet and get help almost instantly.
Active contributors
Due to its popularity and open-source nature, WordPress attracts talented groups of individuals willing to put in their efforts to maintain the technology. An active development community ensures regular updates to meet the latest technology needs. Apart from that, they also maintain the platform’s security and fix bugs.
Wide range of resources
A large community of users and contributors also implies that a ton of resources are created on a daily basis. A simple search about any WordPress topic on the web will reveal this. These resources range from technical articles, blogs, videos, and tutorials. You can also find support forums across different social media platforms where commonly asked questions are answered.
The most well-known and in-depth sources to look for WordPress-related knowledge are:
Security
Popularity can be considered among the pros and cons of WordPress as it invites hackers and scammers that want to take advantage of new users on the platform.
Regular updates
Keeping your WordPress updated, including themes and plugins, is one of the best ways to keep your site and users safe. Patch releases and bug fixes normally fix code that may be causing undesired behavior. On the other hand, security releases are meant to address bugs that may be causing vulnerabilities that affect your WordPress site security.
Security plugins
Security plugins are a great way to keep your WordPress site secure. A security plugin can help regularly scan your site for malware and weaknesses that could affect your site, limit login attempts, filter requests through a firewall, file integrity monitoring, 2FA, and more. Using these features, you can keep your WordPress site more secure. Some popular security plugins include Sucuri, WordFence, WP activity log, and iThemes security.
WordPress security team
The WordPress team comprises about 50 well-known and trusted security researchers and developers. The security team works closely with other experts, companies, and the WordPress community to discover and resolve bugs. Once a vulnerability has been identified and confirmed, the vulnerability is addressed, and a new security update is released, fixing the issue before an advisory is published on the WordPress official website.
Scalability
As your website grows in size and number of users, you need more resources to support the new demand for your services. Choosing the suitable hosting service for your site is as important as choosing the right CMS. WordPress is highly scalable, making it ideal for almost any website. Here is why WordPress is ideal for sites that grow.
WordPress customizability
As your website grows, you may need to add more features to serve the needs of new customers or ensure that user experience does not degrade. WordPress has a vast library of plugins and themes that allow you to customize your website and add more functionality as your needs grow. Since most WordPress plugins are cheap and easy to use, your business can save time and resources.
Performance optimization
WordPress includes features that allow you to optimize your site to meet increased user demand without slowing down or throwing weird errors. Plugins such as 10Web Booster, WP Rocket, and W3 Total Cache can help improve the performance of your WordPress site. Other techniques include image optimization, using Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and caching.
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WordPress is open source
Perhaps you may be asking why to use WordPress if there are other free alternatives. WordPress too is a free and open-source CMS. This point is one of the main reasons why bloggers and business owners prefer WordPress.Besides being completely free to use, it’s also an open-source project, meaning its main source code is available for anyone to view or modify.
Conclusion
WordPress remains a dominant and versatile CMS and website builder for many use cases in 2023. We have highlighted most of the top reasons we believe answer the question “Why use WordPress” in 2023. From an intuitive user interface, open-source nature, built-in SEO features, mobile responsive themes and plugins, scalability, security updates, and a large community, you can never go wrong with WordPress CMS. Even as we witness a surge in AI website builders, WordPress is likely to remain a popular and reliable choice for website building.
Get a head start on website creation with AI
Create a custom website tailored to your business needs 10X faster with 10Web AI Website Builder!
Get a head start on website creation with AI
Create a custom website tailored to your business needs 10X faster with 10Web AI Website Builder!
FAQ
Do you need any coding knowledge to use WordPress?
What is the cost of using WordPress, and are there any hidden expenses?
Can WordPress be used for all types of websites?
Is WordPress still dominating the website builders' market?
Can I stick to WordPress in the long run?