WordPress, WordPress… Everyone knows WordPress but what is it really? Why does 1/3 of all websites in the entire world use WordPress? This is what we are going to discover in this list of the 12 best reasons for creating a website on WordPress.
Note: A small clarification — we will be talking about WordPress.org, the open-source solution, and not WordPress.com, the commercial version of WordPress which has its own hosting.
1. It Is Easy to Get to Grips With
WordPress is a content management system, more commonly referred to by the acronym CMS (Content Management System). A CMS makes it easier to create and manage a website by using tools rather than writing lines of code.
If you have no skills, are not a designer or not a developer, creating a WordPress site that actually works is almost impossible; however, creating it in itself is as simple as anything. What is interesting for any type of business is that WordPress has what is called a back office. A back office makes it easy to modify the content of a page. In short, it is very simple to carry out actions such as modifying an image, a text, or making updates, which allows you to be autonomous rather than having to ask the developer to modify your texts every time.
2. WordPress Saves a Phenomenal Amount of Time
This is more or less related to ease of use but it is why WordPress or CMSs more generally are used — they allow you to save very precious time.
3. WordPress and Lines of Code
You can do whatever you want.
Imagine you need a very specific feature — it is perfectly possible to call upon a developer to add it to your site. Do you need animation? 3D? You can write any line of code and create any animation on your pages while still using WordPress. You do absolutely whatever you want and save time by using the power of this CMS.
It is all very well to have a site built by hand, but if you are running a blog it is only putting obstacles in your own way. Creating a website in pure lines of code because WordPress has had a bad reputation would be a shame, unless you want to create the next Instagram or something extravagant like Amazon. There is absolutely no reason to create a site in “pure” lines of code just to say it is not WordPress.
4. WordPress: For Everyone, Even Multinationals
If your friend told you that WordPress was made for people without any knowledge, they were wrong! Did you know that jQuery, a “programming language” or rather a JavaScript library, has a website for downloading it? One can certainly guess so, but the site uses WordPress — which is less obvious to guess.
I mention jQuery, but there are many others like the NGINX website (reverse proxy, HTTP cache, load balancer), MariaDB (MySQL database management), the Mozilla Firefox blog, etc. But WordPress is not only used by genius developers but also by the world’s largest companies such as the VOGUE website, Ubisoft, Microsoft, TripAdvisor, Spotify, Disney, the New Yorker, Toyota, Renault, Lafayette, LVMH, and even more “technical” sites like pluto.tv, an online television service. But it is not just commercial companies — one could note other types of sites like “government” sites: the official Swedish website, the White House website, or Harvard, the University of Washington… Plenty of more or less technical sites that sometimes required a great deal of specific development and use WordPress to benefit from the power of the CMS. As I was saying, it is only in very, very rare cases that WordPress cannot be considered — and even in those cases, their article / blog sections, product pages, can be powered by WordPress.
Note: I wanted to mention many other brands and entities, but that is not the subject of this article. In any case, if I have not mentioned your favourite brand, they very certainly use WordPress.
So… why not you? It is not a coincidence that they use WordPress!
5. WordPress Is Open Source and Free
WordPress is an open-source solution, meaning it is freely accessible and anyone can suggest modifications to the source code to improve it. The software is completely free and open to modifications.
6. The Power of WordPress Is Above All the Community
There are countless people who improve the flexibility of WordPress every day, whether through the software’s source code itself or through everything that gravitates around it, such as WordPress plugins and themes.
7. WordPress Themes
WordPress themes make it possible to edit the pages of your website and much more. The classic WordPress editor is very poor in features, which is why these famous themes exist.
For example, WordPress themes make it possible to create very technical animations by simply adding a module via drag & drop, just as you would add a text colour in a text editor.
Modern themes can also add “code” modules, which allow you to add your own lines of code of any kind. This means you can add your animation in lines of code while using their “text” module just below. This is the power of WordPress and everything that gravitates around it — it makes your life easier, simpler and faster and does not constrain you in any way. As a very complete theme we could mention Divi and Elementor; some are free, others are paid or freemium.
8. Extensions, Also Called Plugins
Just like themes, plugins can be paid, free or freemium. They allow you to add features very easily and very quickly without any knowledge on a website. As a general rule, a few clicks allow you to add these features that would take hundreds of hours (even much more) of development time. Here are some examples:
- WooCommerce → transforms your site into an e-commerce site (product sales, services…)
- LearnDash → transforms your site to create (and sell) online courses
- WPML → allows you to translate your pages into any language
- Yoast SEO → a comprehensive plugin to improve your natural referencing (SEO)
- WP Rocket → makes your site super fast
- Contact Form → allows you to create a contact form
- Mailchimp → a marketing tool for newsletters
- …
Concretely, if you need something on your site, simply formulate what you need on Google by adding “wordpress plugin” to find what you are looking for. If what you are looking for is too specific and no plugin exists, it is obviously possible to call upon a developer to create the lines of code or even create the appropriate plugin.
9. CMSs Are Very Interesting, but Why Choose WordPress?
WordPress is open-source and this means you can make any type of modification and that your site belongs to you. If you create a site on Wix, your site belongs to Wix and you will not be able to modify what you want. The power of WordPress also depends on its flexibility, particularly with all the plugins that exist. You will not find this anywhere in any other CMS. WordPress is the most flexible CMS — flexibility is its greatest strength.
10. A WordPress Site Can Create Any Type of Site
If you need an e-commerce site, a blog, a showcase site or something else, broadly speaking it is possible to choose WordPress for any type of website. Originally, WordPress was only intended for creating a blog, but this has changed radically. It is important to note, however, that it is the best CMS for creating a blog and you should give it paramount importance since blogging is the best lever for optimising a website’s natural referencing (SEO). In general, whatever the main nature of your website, it is important to build a blog on it. In any case, here is a non-exhaustive list of what you can do with WordPress:
- Showcase sites or business presentation sites
- Portfolios
- E-commerce sites
- Online training sites
- Blogs
- Forums
- “Media” sites such as film streaming platforms
- Wikis / knowledge bases
- …
Note: These categories already group a huge number of possible website types; for example, a showcase site could be a site for an association with a plugin to accept donations.
11. Optimised Natural SEO Referencing
WordPress is predisposed to very powerful natural referencing. We can note:
- Images: easy modification of alt tags, title, description, caption.
- It is the most powerful CMS for blogging
- Https in 2 clicks
- Imagify, a plugin to optimise image file size
- WP Rocket, a plugin to optimise the speed of a site as a whole (except images)
- Yoast SEO, a plugin with a multitude of SEO optimisations such as schema markup, metadata, open graph tags, rich snippets, local SEO, and much more.
- Even plugins for creating semantic clusters
- …
See the guide to optimising the referencing of a WordPress site
12. A WordPress Site Is Secure
Yes, this is an assertion — a WordPress site is secure. Of course, if your password is 12345 and the username is admin and you have not changed the login URL, well… Now, ask yourself: if a WordPress site were not secure, why would the White House website use WordPress?
The causes of security vulnerabilities are often due to human errors; in any case, they are not directly linked to WordPress. In the majority of cases, this is due to very old versions of plugins that have never been updated.
In very rare cases, it is possible that a security problem is detected even when the plugin is at its latest version — the community responds very quickly and an update is available in a very short time. Moreover, automatic updates now exist on WordPress to address all these types of problems and to never forget to update plugins.
There are also security plugins or simply good hosts like Kinsta that make your WordPress site more secure than Fort Knox. Now, know that any site, hand-coded or otherwise, is always hackable — zero risk does not exist, far from it.
Summary (using WordPress):
I prefer to clarify, but it is impossible to list all the possible and imaginable reasons why you should use WordPress. The idea of having a CMS with tools to create your pages more easily should not be an obstacle for you — on the contrary. WordPress does not limit you; it is simply there to help you.
For those who had doubts about WordPress, know that it is easier to give importance to fake news than to articles that re-establish the truth, but the facts are concrete. I would still like to clarify one thing about “no-code”: there is absolutely no distinction to be made between, for example, the classic process of a developer who consists of always copy-pasting their same CSS — such as for adding a button — and a theme that copy-pastes the classic CSS of a button when you select the button module.
If you still know people sceptical with bad preconceptions about WordPress, do not hesitate to share this article with them!