Choosing a good content management system (CMS) for your website is as important as choosing good fuel for a car. It’s what keeps it running!
A CMS helps you upload, maintain, and deliver all of the content on your website. It’s like your site’s backbone, brain, and beating heart. It organizes and indexes your content, making it easier for search engines to crawl through the website and fetch information requested by users.
Of all the content systems out there, WordPress has been around longer than most—over 15 years. With more than 65 million websites and blogs made with WordPress, and with brands like CNN and Sony using it, it’s clear that WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s around.
Let’s look at eight solid reasons to choose WordPress as your CMS.
1. It’s Smart to Choose a Market Leader
As mentioned, WordPress has been around for over 15 years, having launched in 2003. This tells us that WordPress has established a strong reputation, and is now a “major player.” Nearly 500 new websites are created on WordPress every single day!
Currently, the WordPress market share sits at about 33.6% of all websites on the internet. Other content systems pale in comparison, with Joomla’s share at 2.9% of all websites, globally, Drupal at 1.9%, Squarespace at 1.5%, and Wix at 1.1%.
WordPress has displayed a healthy growth rate of 1%-5% per year with no signs of slowing down. On the other hand, the market share of Joomla and Drupal has been shrinking slowly by 0.1% each year. Usage of Squarespace and Wix is growing at a very slow rate.
The right CMS to choose is the one that’s a permanent fixture in the market!
2. Another CMS May Let You Down
With a stable growth rate and an established market presence, WordPress is set to be the CMS market leader for the long haul. It’s also practically guaranteed that WordPress will stay current with web technology and continually update the system to keep up. That means your website will perform great and be more secure in the long run.
On the other hand, if you decide to build your website on a platform other than WordPress, you might weaken its long term viability and technical stability. Smaller CMS platform providers enter and leave the market all the time—most fail to gain market traction due to their inability to offer a significant competitive advantage over WordPress.
Building your website on a new CMS platform that may fail in the near future is not a wise decision. It’s always best to investigate the longevity and future scope of the CMS platform you’re choosing to build your website.
WordPress is committed to the continuous improvement of their user interface and backend technology, so you can rest assured that it will be the world’s leading CMS for a long time.
3. WordPress Is Open Source
One of the best parts about choosing WordPress as your CMS is that it’s an open source platform. Open source means that it’s built using source code that’s freely available to everyone, making it easy for developers all over the world to modify and extend the platform to suit their needs.
Not only can developers customize the WordPress source code for themselves, they can also build themes and plugins to be used by the greater WordPress community. That’s one reason there are so many awesome looking themes and innovative plugins available. You can check out marketplaces like Themeforest to find a wide range of WordPress themes.
Open source software also tends to attract a massive number of people who are willing to share solutions with other users. Discussion forums and other online communities are much easier to grow around open source platforms, because those platforms are available for everyone to use.
4. You’ll Appreciate the Flexibility
If you choose WordPress as your CMS, you’ll be able to customize your website effortlessly. The platform offers a huge variety of themes to choose from. If you can’t find the one you need, you can buy themes from a marketplace like Envato.
The ability to apply professionally-designed themes easily is one thing that makes WordPress so flexible for users. You can have a great looking site without having to write the code to build it from scratch. And if you ever want to give your site a fresh, new design, changing it will be as easy as applying a different theme.
Whether they come from WordPress or from the open market, all the themes and templates that exist to help you build your website can be completely customized to your liking. Most other CMS platforms will not be able to offer you the same degree of customization, with many restricting you to their native features.
There’s no need to settle for limited site design flexibility. With WordPress, you’ll get unparalleled control over your site.
5. A Great Community Drives Continuous Improvement
There is a global community of WordPress users and developers who interact through online forums sharing their wisdom with each other. That makes finding solutions to technical issues a walk in the park.
If you have a CMS issue, you can find a solution by going to the WordPress website and visiting one of its online forums. Or you can simply turn to Google and, because of WordPress’ massive popularity, you’ll find the answer you need in no time.
An active online global community that openly discusses technical issues makes it easier for a platform to innovate and improve. By understanding the pain of real users, the product teams are able to make changes that matter.
Discussions in the online community make it easy for developers to collaborate on building attractive WordPress themes and creating helpful new plugins. For instance, if a great number of users complain about not being able to chat with their website visitors, WordPress developers will take the hint and build an online chat plugin to solve the users’ problem.
You can go to the WordPress forums page to access some of these enlightening discussions or visit a site like WPBeginner.
6. Search Engines Love WordPress Sites
Google and other search engines have become more compatible with websites built on WordPress than those from other platforms, partly due to the sheer volume of WordPress websites on the internet. WordPress also works with plugins that can help boost search engine rankings, like Yoast, for example.
More importantly, since a majority of internet searches are now made using mobile devices, it helps that websites built on WordPress are mobile-friendly. That makes WordPress sites highly suitable for SEO purposes. It’s also a lot easier to find experts with experience in doing SEO specifically for WordPress websites, compared to websites built on other platforms.
7. WordPress Is Easy to Use
Millions of users can’t be wrong about this one—the WordPress platform is easy to use. Everyone, including users with no technical knowledge, will find WordPress to be very intuitive and will appreciate how easy it makes to manage a website.
You can upload content in various formats, including video, images, audio, and text. Adding features is as easy as visiting the plugins section on the platform, downloading the ones you need, and installing them on your site.
Using WordPress makes it easy for anyone to take full control over the design and functionality of their website, and they won’t need a computer science degree to do it!
8. Your CMS Needs to Be Secure
WordPress takes website security very seriously. If you ensure that you’re always running the latest version, you’ll know that you have fresh source code installed with all the latest security updates.
That’s how WordPress can maintain such a high standard of cybersecurity. Keeping your WordPress updated will protect your website from hackers by ensuring there’s never obsolete software running your site.
To further secure your website, you can take advantage of security plugins built by third-party developers. There’s a range of plugins available to boost the security of your site, like Sucuri, Wordfence, or Bulletproof Security. These plugins continuously scan your site for viruses, malicious code, or unusual activity, and then notify you of anything suspicious.
