WordPress is the most popular website platform on the planet. With 60% of the Content Management market share, WordPress runs at least forty percent of all websites on the Internet (500 new every day). Back up there…Content Management you say? What is that? In short, Content Management Systems (CMS) let you create, store, modify and publish digital content on the web. While WordPress started as a simple blogging tool, today it has ballooned into a full-fledged CMS with an almost unmeasurable amount of features and plugins. Without further ado, let’s show you 5 reasons why WordPress IS the best.

WordPress is open-source software

What does open-source mean? 2 things really – it’s FREE and you can customize it however you like. You can use the platform for business or personal projects and go under the hood to change almost anything therein. And because it’s open-source, there is a giant community of developers creating new tools for it each and every day. You can download the software for free, install, use and modify it to create any kind of website you like! It is easy to install it…check out How to Install WordPress – Complete WordPress Installation Tutorial.

WordPress is easy to use

This is the main reason why the platform has grown so much in popularity. Don’t let words like flexible, robust and powerful scare you – WordPress is easy to use, even for beginners. The interface is a simple dashboard with different menu items listed in the left sidebar, where you can create web pages, posts, site navigation menus and much more.

The platform provides regular software, theme and plugin updates. These can be done with the click of a button. No more database backups and restores, it’s just a single click! You can also backup your data automatically at regular intervals with several backup plugins (many are free). And don’t forget about website security, this can also be managed with a number of excellent plugins (many are free, but better security usually means a bit more investment).

WordPress is customizable

Using WordPress, you can create a simple blog, or build a large, complex, eCommerce website including widgets, powerful plugins, extra code, CSS up the wazoo and much more. The functionality sky is the limit! Need a virtual classroom? A complex forum? Run your social media platforms? Set up an online store for your small business? Power your mobile apps? WordPress does all of the above and that’s just scratching the surface.

If you are non-tech savvy, the platform offers thousands of free website templates to get your website up and running in no time. If you are looking to add lots of content and functionality to your website, you can use drag-and-drop builders like SeedProd, WPBakery or Elementor…landing pages, sales pages, coming soon pages, and the list goes on. Customize to your heart’s content. As in happy, not your heart’s principal substance. Anyway…

SEO is on the menu!

What is a website without traffic, visitors and popularity? A waste of time. You can spend countless hours building the perfect website to suit your needs, but if nobody can find it, your time is lost. The answer: search engine optimization (SEO)…and WordPress has it! Yes, it’s SEO friendly and with the right plugin, is very easy to use.

For starters, WordPress is built on excellent-quality code that includes semantic markup (what? Well, it just means Google and other top search engines love WordPress). You can use SEO plugins like Yoast, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) or SEMRush. This is serious business if you want to get your site ranking at the top of search engines, because that’s where all the eyes are … they are not on page 2, 3 or 4 (is there anything after page 4?). If you are serious and want to increase your traffic, you need to pay attention to WordPress SEO best practices.

Wait, there’s more. It’s not enough to install an SEO plugin, you have to write all your content based on SEO rules and best practices. Make sure your URL is SEO friendly, your headings, paragraphs, image text, and so on. Plugins like Yoast provide a score sheet so you can modify your content on the fly and watch how your content becomes more SEO friendly …that is, more popular on Google!

Security is peace of mind

There is no 1 site on the internet that is completely unhackable. Having said that, with WordPress having 60% of the market share, it’s safe to say security is high on the platforms list, which is evident by the quality of the platform’s code itself and the results from many security plugins geared specifically for hardening WordPress and the web folders the files are contained in.

While WordPress has its own built-in security, you can still add premium security plugins to make your site more secure from hackers, malware, brute force attacks and other lurkers. Sucuri is a very popular plugin, as is WordFence. Don’t forget to update your WordPress each time there is an upgrade to the platform, and be sure to perform a complete backup before doing so. And definitely don’t leave out your SSL certificate or you’ll be doing some major surgery trying to restore your site back to good health. Stay safe friends!