This article was written to help people to understand the basics of why we use WordPress as our Content Management System (CMS) of choice. We choose to use it rather than creating our own proprietary CMS or using any of the other ones available. Not because we don’t know how to, but because it provides the best end result for our customers.
We highly recommend that you build your business website or blog on WordPress (it can be useful for small ecommerce websites too). Why, you ask??? Here’s our main reasons below:
World’s most popular CMS
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. It’s not a random streak of luck that so many people choose WordPress for their website!
As well as the social proof, the beauty of it being so popular is that there is so much support. If you are having a problem, the chances are somebody else has had the same problem. A simple Google search often results in your problem being quickly solved. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world constantly working on improving it.
It used to be considered a blogging CMS, but it has developed quickly to become a very powerful versatile CMS for business use as well.
Ease of use & customisation
WordPress is VERY user-friendly. Isn’t that what any website owner wants? There is plenty of documentation around to help you work out how to maintain your WordPress site, but a lot of people simply teach themselves.
Jump into the admin panel and you can easily add and edit content. It’s pretty much like using Microsoft Word. You can also use the admin panel to change your menu, manage your blog comments and a large range of other functions. Of course we always workwith our clients to make sure they understand how to use their site properly.
It’s also very easy to customise WordPress to provide the functionality that you need for your site. Extra functionality can be hard-coded by a web developer, or it can be added using a WordPress “plugin”. This is basically something that is easily installed on your WordPress site to give you extra functionality such as an events calendar or a contact form.
SEO-friendly code
WordPress is based on PHP, which unlike web languages such as flash, can easily be read and interpreted by search engines. It has been coded with SEO in mind and it is all the better for it. Of all the CMS’s we’ve used WordPress is definitely the most SEO-friendly out of the box. With the help of a few tweaks and plugins you can make it even better. I highly recommend reading Joost De Valk’s article on WordPress SEO for more on how to make it as SEO-friendly as possible.
SEO-friendly URLs
Unlike many CMS’s WordPress also offers easy customisation of your URLs in order to make them SEO-friendly. An example of an SEO-friendly URL would be “www.widget-sellers.com/blue-widgets” where blue widgets is the main keyword you’re targeting. The URL can have a large effect on your search engine rankings and should always be considered.
On-Page SEO Plugins
There are countless plugins (free and paid) that make on-page SEO (and some off-page SEO) easier for WordPress. I’m not going to list them or review them because there’s already plenty of blogs that have done so. But it’s just another reason that WordPress is so great.
I personally use Yoast’s free WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast is a company run by Joost De Valk, who is very respected in the SEO industry, and an authority on WordPress SEO. The plugin allows you to quickly and easily edit meta titles and meta descriptions, robots.txt, create XML sitemaps and a range of other functions which will improve your SEO. It’s all about making the often time-consuming SEO process as fast and easy as possible.
So for all those who are asking us “Why use WordPress” – now you know why. We use WordPress because it’s the best way we know to provide high-quality SEO web design. Why don’t you see what we can do for your business website or blog!
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