WordPress is a content management system (CMS), which means it’s designed to help organize and display the content on a website. It’s the underlying platform or framework behind the scenes of a website. We use WordPress for all of the websites we build.
Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into a creating our websites than just WordPress, such as third-party addons and plugins, custom code, and of course a unique design that’s hand-crafted for your brand. This is why our websites can look entirely different than any other website out there even though 41.9% of all websites are also built on WordPress (as of June, 2021). Think about it: almost every other website you visit is built upon WordPress.
So why is WordPress our platform of choice for building high-quality, modern websites?
62% of the top 100 fastest growing companies in the US use WordPress. – Nelio Software
Robust, Mature Technology
WordPress is developed on a mature platform that uses technologies like PHP, HTML5, SQL, and JavaScript, which meets the strict International coding standards set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
Another key technical selling point for WordPress is that it’s scalable, which makes it especially suitable for enterprise use. When it finally lands, the REST API will enable developers to programmatically interact with the software in a completely new way, also important for enterprise use.
WordPress Is Open Source
WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms:
- To run the program for any purpose
- To study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish
- To redistribute
- To distribute copies of your modified versions to others
This means that with WordPress, you’re not locked into an inflexible, private platform or proprietary content management system with exorbitant fees. Instead, you’re leveraging software that anyone can manage and modify.
WordPress is also free because it’s open-source. This reduces the costs for website developers like us and allows us to provide websites for less cost than those using a proprietary or custom-built platform.
Using an open-source CMS that’s been around as long as WordPress comes provides other benefits. The platform is frequently updated, easy to customize, and extensively tested—and there’s a huge community offering unrivalled depth of support.
One myth about WordPress is still unfortunate reality in some sectors of the corporate world: the idea that open source software cannot be relied on at the enterprise level. But in addition to WordPress powering the vast majority of the web, Linux is also steadily increasing its grip on the enterprise space. Massive firms such as Facebook and Google also have open source at the absolute heart of their technology stacks.
WordPress is Great for Good SEO and High Ranking Sites
WordPress is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. The code is written in compliance with the highest web standards and produces semantic markup that makes it easy for search bots to crawl and index your website. It’s also very flexible when it comes to SEO and gives you more options for optimizing things, such as setting up automatic SEO titles/descriptions that include dynamic data.
“Searchability” is the key to ranking high on Google and other search engines. WordPress sites tend to rank high for their keywords, largely because they’re constantly being updated (blogs are still a key SEO strategy and WordPress is a blogging platform at heart) and because WordPress includes a variety of tools and plugins for optimizing content for SEO (search engine optimization).
Having a good foundation for strong SEO built into the website platform means little however if the website isn’t built by someone who knows the intricacies of on-page SEO. This also applies to non-WordPress platforms like Wix, Squarespace and Shopify—you still need to know what you’re doing when building the site to rank well. All else being equal, a WordPress website will generally be easier to rank higher in search engines than other website platforms.
And of course using WordPress and building the with on-page SEO best practices will not allow you to outrank your competitors unless you employ an SEO campaign (assuming your competitors are using their own SEO campaigns, which they probably are).
You Have Full Control of Your Website
A Google search for “website builders” or “website platforms” will reveal all sorts of results. WordPress will most likely be on all website building lists, along with competition like WIX, Squarespace, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, Weebly and Webflow. All of these are perfectly fine for making websites, but the non-open source ones, like Squarespace, Shopify, and WIX, limit your control to whatever features are offered in the premium packages.
This presents some limitations:
- E-commerce functionality is built-in, so there’s not much that can be done about expanding with plugins.
- You’re typically stuck with whatever hosting is provided. You don’t have the freedom to test hosts and go with the best value or highest performing.
- Adjusting code is limited to what the companies share with you. Even worse, you get stuck with a completely unique coding language, like with Shopify (which uses a language called “Liquid”). It almost guarantees that you have to hire a specialized developer for changes.
- You don’t technically have full ownership of your site and content. You’re renting the website from these companies. So when you stop paying, all of those files and pages are either lost or held by the company.
It should be no surprise that none of these limitations exist with WordPress. We don’t like to feel trapped and we do not want to force this on our customers.
Blogging is Hands Down the Best in the Business
WordPress was born as a blogging platform. It’s had its competitors, but nothing currently compares to the power, elegance, and advanced tools you find in the WordPress blogging engine. Options like Tumblr, Medium, Ghost, and Blogger are all perfectly fine for hobbyists, but the pros go for WordPress. An incredible set of tools is located inside the WordPress blog editor.
You can run a simple, one-author blog by taking advantage of the formatting and media tools. There’s also the option to build a full online magazine by scheduling posts far in advanced and setting multiple user types for contributors and editors. Along with options for previewing, editing everything in the post, and keeping code completely out of the equation, you really can’t beat WordPress.
Flexibility
This is the most important aspect of WordPress for us: the near limitless expandability, extensibility and flexibility that allows us to create virtually anything. We can choose from around 22,000+ plugins in order to provide the exact functionality required to properly communicate a customer’s story, obtain a meaningful lead or close a sale. In most cases, we add additional customizations that are done with native javascript, CSS or PHP. In some cases we code our our own plugin to do exactly what we want.
With other platforms, installing specialized functionality can be incredibly complicated and is usually expensive (with a new subscription of $20/month not uncommon for individual addons).
It’s this flexibility that makes WordPress ideal for building many different types of websites, including:
- Blogs
- Business websites
- Portfolios
- Forums
- Landing pages
- E-commerce sites
- Membership sites
- eLearning sites
- Galleries
- Job boards
- Business directories
- Q&A websites (like Quora)
- Non-profit websites for collecting donations
- Wikis and knowledge bases
- Media-centric sites like YouTube
- Auction and coupon sites
Integrates with Everything
As WordPress is the most commonly used CMS in the world and an open-source platform, it integrates with pretty much everything. If there’s a service you’d like to integrate with your website, chances are there’s WordPress plugin, or at the least an easy to use API.
For example, it’s super easy to integrate Facebook, Twitter, Freshbooks, Hubspot, MailChimp, Stripe, PayPal, Quickbooks, Google, and many more.
WordPress Can Scale
From a tiny hobby blog to a massive enterprise-level website, WordPress can scale to any size site with any amount of traffic. Some popular sites that are powered by WordPress include:
- New York Post
- Disney
- TED
- USA Today
- CNN
- Fortune.com
- TIME.com
- People
- National Post
- Spotify
- TechCrunch
- CBS Local
- NBC
- AMC
- BBC America
- Mercedes-Benz
- Wired
- Vogue
- Zoom.us
- Microsoft.com
- Etsy.com
- Intuit.com
- Zillow.com
- Salesforce.com
- Grammarly.com
- Vimeo.com
- Realtor.com
Custom Content and Dynamic Websites
WordPress excels when it comes to creating custom content for dynamic websites, like blogs, real estate directories, job listing sites, event directories, and others where you want to create custom fields and content that changes based on data, user behaviour, and preferences (dynamic content). For example, it’s very easy to create a membership website in WordPress.
This is exactly where most website platforms struggle—dynamic sites with custom content and/or membership sites with user registration and content restriction.
