When it comes to building a website, you want to make sure that it’s built on a solid foundation. For a wide range of site owners, content management systems offer that foundation, enabling users to easily upload, update, and manage multiple pages. However, in the realm of CMS alone, there are many different competing platforms, such as Wix and Squarespace and of course WordPress.
Here, we’re going to look at why one of the most established and widely used of them all is still king. Here, we’re going to look at why you should choose WordPress for your website.
WordPress is easy to use
When it comes to building a website, you might instantly imagine writing lines upon lines of HTML code. WordPress is effectively a tool that helps you skip that step to some degree. A lot of the steps of creating navigation menus, creating new content, and choosing visual themes and elements is done from a very accessible back-end interface. Compared to other platforms, minimal prior knowledge is needed to navigate it, though some does help.
WordPress is incredibly flexible
While WordPress is built to be accessible to those without knowledge of CSS or HTML, it’s also built in a way that rewards those are willing to dive into the web building process. This is where professional help can come into play. With a WordPress developer who knows how to modify template codes, they can help you create slick and modern visuals, excellent user interfaces, and fully responsive websites. You’re not just limited to a few dozen, or even a few hundred different themes and layouts.
As such, while WordPress is often used for blogs, it’s also used by huge brand names like Vogue, Mercedes-Benz, Reuters, Sony Music, and even the official White House website. There are few limits to what you can create through the platform.
It’s built with SEO in mind
Search engine optimisation has become one of the most important terms in digital marketing. The more we learn about how much Google and other search engines influence the success of our website, the more important it is to work with those search engines. WordPress already lends itself to search engine optimisation, allowing you to include metadata, meta descriptions, keywords, and navigation segmentation that makes it easier for Google bots to index and highlight the relevant pages to different users.
Some plugins can make your WordPress site even more search engine friendly, too, such as Yoast SEO. This can help you highlight which pages are well optimised and offer detailed indications on problems that could be stopping those pages, and your site in general, from ranking on Google.
It’s endlessly customisable
WordPress is open source, which means that anyone can use, change, and redistribute it as they wish. Not only does this make it entirely free, but it also means that savvy developers have been doing all sorts with the code. As such, a huge host of features, apps, and widgets have been designed to work with WordPress, making it much, much more customisable than closed source platforms like Squarespace.
While all the tools are there for the average user to build a website, this customisability means that professional developers can get a lot more creative with their work. As such, if you work with a developer when building your website, they can help you create practically any kind of website you want with it.
WordPress is easy to maintain
Content management systems are excellent for those site owners who want to continue to update and iterate on their site after it’s initially built. This is essential for blogs, information resources, new publication sites, online service providers, and much more. As such, being able to maintain the website easily is crucial.
WordPress’s easy-to-use backend makes this maintenance as easy as it can be. There is little-to-no technical expertise needed to maintain a WordPress site. It allows you to navigate through pages, sort them, edit them, delete them, and publish them at will. You don’t need a developer to stick around to make every single little change for you as a result.
What about the other options?
In large part, WordPress’s success is thanks to the fact that it was the only really competitive CMS out there for a long time. Competitors have come and gone and it’s only recently that some have really started to gain a lot more attention, specifically Wix and Squarespace.
To say that these platforms have no advantages isn’t accurate, however. Wix is incredibly accessible, with drag and drop design elements that enable users to create a new website extremely easily, but it’s not as effective for large websites due to limited navigation options. It’s also harder to give Wix the bespoke touch due to limited design element customisation.
Squarespace, on the other hand, is a more viable solution for many. It’s massively customisable, easy to use pre-existing or create your own visual themes and helps create sites with a slick Web 2.0 aesthetic. However, making or even maintaining a Squarespace can be difficult for a non-technically inclined user.
Choosing the right website building tools is about understanding both your business and your capacity to work with those platforms. By those standards, WordPress is still objectively the more appealing choice for a majority of site owners.
Make the best of your new website with help from Dan King Digital
WordPress can help even non-technical users build and customise a website with relative ease. However, to make the best of its bespoke features, widget options, and navigation customisation, a professional can offer a lot of help.
At Dan King Digital, I can get to know your business, your needs, and what you want to offer through your site. With that information in mind, I can help create a website built with your aims in mind. WordPress can help you build a site easily at no cost, but when it comes to web design, you always get what you pay for. By using WordPress, I can help you save on the cost of website development while ensuring that its design meets true professional standards.