Why WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that supports over 43% of all websites in the world, making it the most popular site builder available (W3Techs, 2023). In this article, we’ll cover why WordPress is the platform of choice for websites from sleek blogs and online stores to enterprise-level company websites.

1. Free and open source

As an open-source platform, WordPress is free for anyone to share, alter, and use, with no download or licensing fees. You own your WordPress site and are able to install plugins, switch hosting services, edit the source code, and more. WordPress is available for free at both WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Although WordPress itself is free, running a website is not—there will still be costs for development, hosting, and maintenance—but avoiding the monthly subscriptions and licensing fees charged by many other website builders and CMS platforms saves money that can be put towards those costs.

2. A CMS for all kinds of websites

WordPress may have started as a blog builder, but it’s evolved into a much more flexible tool. As an open-source platform, WordPress and its community offer a wide variety of plugins and themes that enable you to build almost any kind of website. Using plugins like WooCommerce, it can even host online stores and eCommerce websites.

With WordPress, you can create:

• Blogs
• Online stores
• Business websites
• Landing pages
• News websites
• Job boards
• Portfolio websites
• Forums
• Multilingual websites
• Directories
• E-learning websites
• Membership websites

3. Versatile websites with themes and plugins

Thanks to the wide variety of themes and plugins available, WordPress is a scalable CMS for businesses of any size—no matter what the future holds for your website, it can adapt through WordPress. You can get started with your website by selecting a theme from one of over 30,000 free and paid options (HubSpot, 2022). When you need more features than a standard WordPress installation, you can expand your website by installing plugins. These pre-programmed packages add new functionalities like search and filter options, forums, contact forms, and spam protection.

Since WordPress is open source, its flexibility goes even beyond its many themes and plugins—by editing a site directly, you can tailor its appearance and functionality to your needs, and avoid the unnecessary slowdowns and compatibility issues that can come with commercial themes or bloated plugin bundles. With the help of a professional web developer, almost anything is possible with a WordPress site. You can create forums and customer portals, job boards, sites with multilingual functionality implemented through WPML or multisite structures (link coming soon), scheduling systems, online shops, and more.

4. Easy to use and learn

Whether you’re experimenting with a basic WordPress blog or building a professional enterprise-level website, the platform is user-friendly and accessible. As a content management system, WordPress allows users to create, manage, and publish digital content through its dashboard and Gutenberg Editor—all without programming experience.

Getting started is easy with the 1-click installation offered by many hosting services. Once WordPress is installed, beginners can experiment with a variety of page builders right away—although we can’t recommend using page builders (link coming soon) when setting up a professional website. Since they rely on drag-and-drop visuals rather than direct numerical inputs, many page builders aren’t pixel-precise, leading to visual errors and inconsistencies. These plugins will also clutter the source code of your site to implement their tools, using up storage, slowing down your website with dozens of features you’ll never use, and conflicting with other plugins, leading to unwanted incompatibilities and bugs.

Instead, we recommend working with a professional web developer or WordPress agency. A website developed specifically for your needs is fast, reliable, and clean, without any unnecessary features or a bloated commercial theme. Through WordPress’ user-friendly content management system, you can still edit content and update your website on your own without relying on a developer for every small change.

5. A large community

WordPress supports 63% of all websites using a CMS—the runner-up, Shopify, only supports 5.8% (W3Techs, 2023). Its popularity and huge community make WordPress the best-documented CMS available. If you have a goal for your website, chances are good that someone has already done it, and unlike less widespread platforms like Typo3, you’ll have access to many service providers with a wide range of specialties.

Blogs, forums, tutorials, workshops, and trainers are available to support you as you implement new features and solve problems, and premium products like paid plugins and integrations usually come with extensive documentation. WordPress even hosts events called meetups, where users of all skill levels can gather for presentations, workshops, and more.

6. WordPress is SEO-friendly

Since its early days as a CMS focused on blogs, WordPress has been designed with a structure friendly to search engines. In addition to its clear and easily-crawled architecture, WordPress will automatically generate meta descriptions and title tags for your pages, ensuring that they are easy for search engines to find.

You can also fine-tune your SEO optimization on your own, or install popular SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and All in One SEO. At svaerm, we recommend the Rank Math SEO Plugin as the best tool for meta information management. Rank Math’s efficient code keeps your website lightweight while offering more convenient management of schema, Open Graph tags, and meta information, as well as many other extra features.

7. Mobile-responsive design

As more and more users browse the internet with mobile devices, it has become essential for websites to have mobile-responsive designs that adapt to the size of the visitor’s screen. This is also key to search engine optimization—Google factors whether a page is mobile-friendly into its SEO rankings, and its indexing even accesses the mobile version first.

No matter how you choose to build your site with WordPress, it will have a mobile-responsive design. All of the standard WordPress themes are mobile responsive, and for themes designed by professional web developers, mobile-friendly pages are already an industry standard. Even the WordPress dashboard and page builder feature mobile-responsive design, allowing you to edit your website from your phone. With a mobile-responsive design, your entire website will be published and edited from one unified code base that displays smoothly on any device.

8. WordPress: Safe and secure

As the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress and its plugins receive frequent updates to keep them secure. Admittedly, some cybercriminals and hackers specialize in attacking WordPress sites due to their popularity—but the platform’s size also means that there is a large community of developers and testers working to patch vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

WordPress is a stable and reliable platform that is continuously updated with new features and security measures. When kept up to date, a WordPress site is just as safe as any other webpage, and if something does go wrong, the size of the community means you are likely to quickly find a solution to the problem.

9. WordPress.org can operate on your own server

If paying for hosting with another company isn’t within your budget or doesn’t suit your security standards, WordPress can still meet your needs. Through the free packages available at WordPress.org, you can host a website on your own server for greater control and security, an option that many other CMS services don’t offer. In addition to the option of private hosting, WordPress is a secure platform that can meet the standards of the GDPR and DSGVO, ensuring the protection of your business and of the privacy rights of your users.

10. WordPress supports many types of media

As a versatile and open-source CMS, WordPress supports pictures, documents, audio, and video in over two dozen file types. These include all of the most commonly used file formats, such as .jpg, .png, .pdf, .mp3, .mp4, .mov, .doc, .pptx, and more.

Even file types that are not supported by default can be made technically compatible with the right setup or the help of skilled developers. An example of this are SVG images in WordPress (link coming soon), a type of compact file that can be freely scaled without loss in quality.

11. Flexible and interconnectable

WordPress‘ flexibility also extends to project management. Multiple users can work at the same time editing the site (albeit not the same page without “taking over”), and each user can be assigned their own roles and permissions within the website. Through API integration, WordPress can also be connected to a variety of other third-party tools.

Contact for business

Need an experienced web developer to get the most out of your WordPress site?

svaerm can help. Our full-service online marketing agency works with you every step of the way, from concept and design to editing and marketing.

You can get in touch with us through email or using the contact form below. After we receive your written information, we are happy to arrange a consultation via phone or video chat.