There’s a reason why WordPress is the most popular CMS out there, and the content-management-system-of-choice of millions of blogs and websites out there!
In the years gone by, in order to get a website up, you usually had to hire a designer and pay him or her bucket-loads of money to design a website for you. Thankfully, things have changed for the better now, thanks, in big part, to easily-available (and free!) tools such as WordPress.
With WordPress (and other content management platforms such as Drupal and Joomla, to name a few), it has become easier than ever to build a personal or a business website from the ground-up without paying a ton of money to someone else to do it for you. In addition, CMS like Wordpress also make it easy to manage your websites or blog.
However the advantages of doing so – i.e. opting for Wordpress – are numerous in number, especially from a business perspective.
Here’s why all businesses, big and small, should opt for Wordpress to power their websites or blogs:
1. Easy-to-build
One of the biggest advantages of Wordpress as a CMS is that Wordpress-based websites or blogs are very easy to build from scratch. All you need is a webhosting service that provides one of those super-easy ‘one-click’ script installation solutions (such as SimpleScripts).
Chances are you current host already provides such a feature, and it can be accessed through the web hosting control panel. This easy-installation means that all it takes to get a fully-functional Wordpress website/blog up for your business is a few clicks of the mouse, and less than a couple of minutes of your time!
2. Easy-to-manage
Not only are WordPress websites extremely easy-to-build and get up and running, they are also very easy to manage on a day-to-day basis. WordPress comes with a beautiful and simple yet powerful control panel (Dashboard) that even the non-tech-savvy and people with little to no website management experience will feel at home with.
For instance, it has a simple layout that nests everything according to categories and sub-categories on the left-hand side. It might take a bit of time to get accustomed with what’s what, but once you’re over the learning-curve, you’ll pretty much have full access to your site and the ability to change all aspects of your business website.
3. Themes
One of the best aspects of Wordpress is the fact that it provides users with a ton of great themes. Now the standard Wordpress interface is quite vanilla and plain –black text on a white background with a rather simplistic and minimal layout. If you want to customize your website/blog according to your exact needs, you’ll be happy to know that there are tons of Wordpress business themes that you can choose from and use for the purpose.
For starters, go through Wordpress’s own repository of themes, and look at some of the themes available on ThemeForest as well. Choose any theme, apply it on your website through the control panel, and you’ll end up with a stunning-looking blog in no time!
If you need some inspiration, here are some business websites you can model your own site after.
You can, of course, change and tweak some of the finer aspects of your theme in order to customize the interface according to your exact requirements – either through the theme’s control panel settings, or through HTML/CSS.
4. Scalability
Strictly from a business-perspective, Wordpress provides excellent scalability, if (or rather when) your business grows. Wordpress websites and blogs are expandable, which means that you can keep adding pages, posts, categories, sections, multimedia and other things on your website.
For instance there’s no limited to the number of pages you can have on your website. in addition, third-party plugins allow you to add certain enhancements to your website as well, should you need them – stuff like forms and questionnaires, shopping-cart solutions, and so on and so forth.
And you could also have plugins developed for you if you don’t find solutions off-the-shelf. Rest assured that Wordpress will have solutions for any and all your business needs!
5. SEO
Wordpress websites and blogs are SEO-optimized out-of-the-box. This means that if you choose Wordpress as your CMS-of-choice, you’ll have an optimized-for-search engines website/blog straight out-of-the-box – which of course means better search engine rankings, more visibility and more organic traffic for you! However the beauty of Wordpress is that it lets you take things up a notch here; there are plenty of great Wordpress SEO plugins available which truly unleash the power of search engine optimization (SEO), allow you to rank better for your keywords in the SERP effortlessly! One of these is Yoast’s infamous SEO for Wordpress plugin, worth checking out!
6. Plugins
Speaking of plugins, Wordpress’s own (official) repository contains almost 24,000 free plugins! And you can of course get all sorts of other plugins on websites like CodeCanyon. Plugins greatly enhance your business website/blog by enhancing and adding to its functionality, allowing you to set-up a powerful business website. For instance with the help of just a few, commonly-available and free plugins, you can set up your very own e-commerce website, and/or start selling your merchandise online as well!
7. Mobile-Friendly
Not only is Wordpress as a CMS mobile-friendly, most themes on the platform nowadays come with mobile/tablet-friendly versions as well. These are mobile-optimized, which means that when someone tries to access your website on a cellular device, a smartphone or a tablet PC, they are shown a version of it that is specifically optimized for the smaller screen, rather than showing the full-blown version that is meant for the desktops. This means that people viewing your website on such devices can browse through it seamlessly, and you won’t end up losing visitors or business that you probably would’ve if you didn’t have a mobile-friendly website. And with mobile-traffic expected to blow-up in the next couple of years, having a cellphone-optimized website, especially if it’s a business one, has become more important than ever!
8. User Control and Access
You can add an unlimited number of users to you Wordpress website. Wordpress allows you to define how much authority (if at all) you want to give each user, so you have different user classes that you can assign to people who you want to give access to the blog to, or people responsible for editing the blog or updating it, for instance. For instance you have admins, editors, users, authors, and subscribers, each with varying levels of authority. You can read all about the different user levels here.
9. Support
Wordpress comes with great support. Since it’s an open-source project, you won’t have access to a dedicated support-line, but what you will have access to is a ton of documentation available online, accessible through a simple Google search! There are many forums and resources available that will help you in every aspect of running a business Wordpress-based blog, help and assist you with setting up things precisely the way you want them, and even help you with getting access to tools, themes and plugins for your specific needs.
10. Free
And of course finally, Wordpress is free, which is amazing since it is such a powerful tool, and a brilliant solution for just about all kinds of businesses, companies and organizations and their websites!
Would you recommend Wordpress as a solution for business websites and blogs? Leave your thoughts in the comments!