What is special about WordPress?
From its inception in 2003 to today, WordPress has grown into a powerful blogging platform and, more importantly, the CMS (Content Management System) of choice for many web developers. Just to illustrate how popular WordPress really is, let's mention the April 2016 stats that showed WordPress powering an impressive 26.4% of all sites on the web. Even high-traffic websites like The New Yorker, Forbes, Variety, Fortune, and Reuters Blogs to name a few use WordPress for content management. But what is special about it?
WordPress is an open source project with a large community
WordPress is a free open source project. This means that you can use and change all components freely. The source code is available to anyone curious enough to find out what's going on behind the scenes. Because WordPress is an open source project, thousands of dedicated and talented people update and improve it every day. Additionally, over time, WordPress has built a community of users willing to help anyone who might encounter any issue with the platform.At this point, the knowledge base is pretty detailed and covers almost every issue you might run into. But if you're still stuck, feel free to ask; You will get the answers in no time.
WordPress is easy to use
One of the main reasons for the popularity of WordPress is its ease of use. Let's talk about the installation first. To get started, all you need is a hosting place that supports PHP programming language and MYSQL databases. If you meet these two requirements, you can start creating your first page. But fear not if you're not too proficient at coding, as WordPress allows you to set everything up without writing a single line of code.However, let us be clear that knowing about encoding will give you many additional benefits. The dashboard is cleanly designed and it doesn't take long to get used to it. Adding content and writing posts to your page has never been easier.
WordPress is highly customizable
WordPress offers a variety of plugins to take your site to the next level. These plugins are actually small programs that, once installed, can significantly improve the functionality of your site, both in the frontend and in the backend. For example, plugins allow you to add simple things like the Twitter feed, an image gallery, and social media buttons to your page. However, plugins can be of great help with more complicated functions, such as adding website security, setting up a web store, generating a special XML sitemap, creating contact forms, scheduling backups, etc. The sky is the limit here.
If you also want to change the visual style of your page, you can do so with a variety of WordPress visual themes available across the web. As with plugins, these themes can be free or sold as premium products. All you have to do is find a suitable theme that goes well with your website's style and easily apply it from the dashboard.
WordPress is Search Engine Friendly
WordPress is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly from the start by using high quality standard code. This basically means that you don't have to put a lot of effort into optimizing your site to finally appear in the search results of Google and similar search engines. However, according to SEO experts, this can be further improved with the additional use of popular plugins like All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO, which teach you how to write good, search engine friendly articles.
WordPress is a powerful platform. You can use it for almost any type of site, be it a personal blog, webshop, online portfolio, magazine or anything else.With visual themes and plugins taking care of your website's look and functionality, you can focus on bringing your ideas to life.