WordPress is almost synonymous with web development. Since I started building websites in 2014, WordPress has been the leading CMS, or content management system, on the internet. There are definitely reasons not to use WordPress but I wanted to take a moment to document the reasons why WordPress would be a good fit for you.
Content Marketing
In my opinion, WordPress shines with content marketing. Content marketing is when you write blog posts or websites pages that intend to garner visits from search engines like Google and social media websites and generate leads or sales from visitors reading your content.
Why is it good for content marketing?
WordPress is excellent for content marketing because it is blog-centric, as in, at its core, it is a blogging platform. It also features both a classic editor and the new Gutenberg block editor and even markdown plugins, so you have many ways to write blog posts. I “grew up” using the classic editor but for the posts on this website, I’ve started using the Gutenberg editor and find its much better than it was at the beginning.
The real advantages to WordPress are in plugins. I use Yoast and either a caching plugin like WP Fastest Cache or I build my own themed website using Frontity or Gatsby to harness the power of modern Javascript and static site generation, or dumping WordPress content to unchanging HTML, CSS, and JS files.
Basically, this combination gives me search engine optimization, or SEO, of the content through Yoast and speed. Using WP Fastest Cache with CloudFlare or any other CDN or building a theme with Frontity or Gatsby means my pages load lightning fast.
The combination of speed and SEO tailored posts means that content that I write on WordPress are sure to gain traction on Google. Yoast guides me to add images and links and makes sure my text is easily readable and my themes are lightning fast, which Google loves.
The WordPress “One-click” install
Now WordPress really isn’t a “one-click install” process, but it’s also not hard to set up. I use the Softaculous install that comes with my Veerotech cPanel because it’s just too easy:
- Set up your domain on your domain hosting to point to your web hosting server’s IP address.
- Set up the domain on your web host so you have all the necessary DNS (domain name server) settings and that Softaculous has access to it.
- In Softaculous, click the WordPress install, follow the prompts, and click the “Submit” button to install WordPress.
That’s it. It takes maybe 5-30 minutes depending on your familiarity with the systems and how long your DNS records take to propagate (could take between 24-48 hours of waiting time, but Google Domains are pretty quick to update).
Then setting up a custom theme isn’t hard (for me) if you’ve done it before. Lately, I’ve been partial to Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud because Frontity is no longer being actively developed. I have another blog post comparing theming here so I won’t go into details of that in this piece.
I don’t need to tell you why installing something quickly is good but it is. Even if you were to manually install WordPress via FTP, as long as you are comfortable with what that entails, it doesn’t take long to be up and running.
Themes and Plugins
This is a bit of a double-edged sword but the themes and plugins ecosystem is intimidating. People make a lot of money just selling plugins and themes, its an industry in and of itself. But that means as a consumer of those plugins and themes, you have choice.
Themes
Themes determine how your website looks. Some are just plug and play and whatever you have on your website, as long as you stick to default functionality in WordPress, it’ll look differently based on the theme.
Some themes rely on other plugins, like Elementor or Divi, to facilitate drag-and-drop capabilities, making WordPress more like Squarespace or Wix. These themes are mighty powerful; however, they can mean you are locked into using themes that use those plugins or your website will need to be completely updated.
Plugins
Plugins extend the capabilities of WordPress. As I mentioned, you have some plugins that make WordPress a drag-and-drop website builder. You also have plugins that give you e-commerce capabilities like WooCommerce. There are plugins that help with optimization like WP Fastest Cache or EWWW Image Optimizer. Almost anything you can think of using a website for has a plugin in the WordPress ecosystem.
Turning on or off or changing plugins poses similar issues to changing up themes so picking the right ones at the beginning is best. I usually look to how popular a plugin is and read through their feature-set before making a decision. Popular plugins will receive more support and ensuring you’ve picked the plugin that does exactly what you need is important.
Affordability
The key selling point of WordPress is it’s essentially a free platform. WordPress.org provides the downloadable WordPress code and you can upload this anywhere for free. That doesn’t mean your website is free, you still need to pay for domain and server hosting, but WordPress is no additional charge on top of that.
Support
Because it’s so widely-used, WordPress support is unparalleled. You can find answers on their website, in their documentation or on the forums, or on StackOverflow or on other people’s blogs. There are just so many people using WordPress, if you have a problem, someone else has also probably had it.