Why Use WordPress? 9 Best Reasons To Choose It For Your Site

500+ sites are built each day using WordPress. We recognize its popularity and some time ago, we passed another milestone on our path as a web development agency by hiring WordPress developers into our team. After having had some experience with it, we can now confidently offer our WordPress development services and use its benefits to help promote brands and grow businesses. But why is WordPress so popular?
There are two major advantages that outshine them all: with WordPress, you can get your website built much faster and at a much lower cost than with custom web development. Sounds good? There’s more. If you’re here then you must be interested in finding out why do people use WordPress for their websites and what makes it so special. We’ve made a list of reasons why WordPress is so attractive.

#1 WordPress is free

WordPress is free as it goes, it’s not owned by any entity or even a definable group of people. No need to pay for the license to use it. It’s also open-source software, which means that it’s free to download, install, and change for any person and for any use, including commercially. 
What’s more, the popularity of open-source software like WordPress usually goes hand in hand with a big and active community of contributors which means that thousands of people actively support WordPress and make it more usable for everyone every day.

Again, I am impressed by the Spanish #WordPress community: look at the number of people willing to contribute to the project at this local #WordCamp! And a lot of first time contributors. Well done @WCBCN 👏👌🎉 #WCBCN pic.twitter.com/Gv5kMANC5x

— Carole Olinger 🤘 (@CaroleOlinger) October 5, 2018

Yet, note that although WordPress is free out of the box, you, all the same, have to pay for the hosting and are most likely to spend some money on themes and plugins also (more on those below). Still, an extra opportunity to save on some costs is always welcome and gives you a little bit of extra freedom.  

#2 WordPress means websites built in minutes

That’s right, with WordPress, you can literally get your website running within minutes. All you have to do is to place the unpacked installation version on the hosting, specify the name of the database where the CMS data is stored, and the password for the database. And that’s it, your WordPress site is installed and ready to go.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that it is ready to sell, promote, inform and do whatever you want it to do, you still have to add content to the website and make some changes to its design and functionality, but the speed of installation is still one of its biggest advantages of WordPress — something that is unattainable with custom websites. In a situation, when timing becomes one of the most important aspects ensuring the success of a new startup, additional plus points on speed is something you can’t ignore.

#3 WordPress is very versatile

What can you do with WordPress and what types of websites can you build with it? It was — and sometimes still is — associated with blogs. And true enough, our own blog runs on WordPress. But many years passed since it was justified to wonder whether it’s a good idea to use it for e-commerce, for example. Any WordPress developer of today would say that the truth is that you can make any kind of website with it. The beauty of WordPress is exactly that it is suitable for the most common and popular types of web resources: online stores, small and large business websites, company and corporate websites, small promotional pages, landing pages, galleries, personal websites, educational resources, etc. Take widespread remote learning. WordPress is a great choice for virtual classrooms and courses.

The catch is that although you can create any type of website with WordPress, it’s not technologically and economically beneficial in some cases. Specialized websites that need unique and complex functionality are likely to benefit more from custom development. There’s no straight line that separates projects that are better done with WordPress from those that are better suited for custom web development. But it is there and it depends on your current and future goals. 
Not sure whether your website is better to be done with WordPress or not? We have experienced project managers and developers that can make an estimate for you, free of charge. Contact us and we’ll be sure to find the best possible solution for you.

#4 WordPress has many themes and plugins

What makes WordPress so versatile? Themes and plugins. 
A WordPress theme is a collection of files that work together to create the design of your site. Many of them are developed to suit a particular type of website, but you are free to choose any one of them. A theme is like a book cover that you can change without changing the contents. Themes can be free or paid-for. For instance, there are over 8000 free themes in the WordPress theme directory alone.

You can get much more of them (over 52 000) for a fee on Envato Market (previously known as ThemeForest), and that’s only one of the most popular markets.
A WordPress plugin is a bit of code that adds new functionality to your website. It can be of any kind and purpose. Imagine a task or a feature and there’s a plugin for that. Want to set up analytics? Or add multi-factor authentication? Or maybe just check your website for 404 links? There are plugins for that and more, much more. There are over 58 000 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, and you can get more from third parties. 

Like themes, some there are free and paid-for plugins, with some of them having both options.

• You can find plugins right in the CMS repository.
• If there are no suitable extensions in the WordPress database, you can search the directories of independent developers.
• You can also get WordPress developers to create completely unique plugins for you.

Let’s imagine that you want to get an online store. The most common type of plugin would be WooCommerce. It’s a customizable, open-source, and most popular e-commerce platform built for WordPress. It can cope with the large product bases, process and send notifications, track orders, manage inventory, apply discounts and different shipping options, etc. It drives almost all online stores made with WordPress and 7% of all the e-commerce sites on the internet. However, there are also other tools for e-commerce websites.

So, in essence, WordPress gives you basic tools with which you can create a unique website in a short time, even without much knowledge about web development. You choose a theme to act as a foundation, adjust the design, install plugins necessary for your website type and you are ready to go.
In some cases, unwise use of plugins and themes can result in slow website performance. The trick is to choose just a handful of tools suitable for your purposes. WordPress is like a Swiss army knife. It’s simple and universal. But sometimes a CSS/JS template in the WordPress library may contain up to 70% of the code that a particular site owner doesn’t actually use. And too many plugins can lead to poor performance. The way out may be to make use of a WordPress development company’s services to help you make your (future) WordPress website faster and get rid of the unnecessary features from the start. We’ll handle all the installation, maintenance, security, and backups for you.

#5 WordPress is very easy to manage

Many of not the majority of WordPress users are people without any kind of technical or designer background. WordPress is exactly so popular not least because of how easy it is to use it right within your admin dashboard. You don’t need to have any kind of special web development skills to tweak the dashboard and change the way your content is displayed, including changes to design to some extent. You’ll find text editors, formatting tools, and ways to upload various types of media files. There are also free page builders like Elementor. It’s a multifunctional page builder used for creating layouts of landing pages, and whatever else you want by simple drag and drop of the necessary settings through a convenient admin panel.

There are also support forums on the official WordPress website, a large community, and a huge number of reference materials and training courses on WordPress web development and even courses about some of the most common plugins. 

#6 WordPress is SEO-friendly

The list of WordPress advantages would be incomplete without this point. WordPress is made using standard compliance high-quality code and is famous for having built-in SEO features that help search engines crawl your website. 

WordPress just can’t be beat if your focus is SEO

— Nat Miletic (@natmiletic) February 20, 2021

There are also plenty of plugins for SEO use like Yoast and RankMath. They contain tools for content optimization, meta-tagging, keyword embedding, and markup embedding from schema.org. In general, they do everything to make search engines loyal to the WordPress-based resource, showing it in the SERP more often and higher.
The important thing is that, in other words, Google loves WordPress from the start and you still can make it better.

#7 WordPress lets you have fuller control of your website

If you take web development, then building a website with the help of WordPress is somewhere between custom development and using website builders like Wix. WordPress is not a website builder, it’s a CMS with open-source code. It’s true that with constructors it’s even easier to build a website, but it’s a more DIY approach that has its pros and cons. For example, managing plugins, hosting, adjusting code, handling integrations become more difficult. 
WordPress development is still that, website development that has a multi-stage production process including working on design, code, optimization, and testing. DIY website builders remove all stages of professional website development. True, these stages are nowhere near so complex as in custom development, but the point is that you have everything open to you. Unlike WordPress, site builders are not open-source. Each of these platforms is developed, operated, and updated by its own development teams, you do not have access to their code. For example, with website builders, you don’t have an opportunity to install just any plugin or extension you want, you will have to make do with whatever developers give you.
And with the advent of Elementor, you can now effortlessly drag and drop the parts of your website’s layout, same as with builders.

#8 WordPress is the choice of big brands

Do professionals use WordPress? Absolutely. It powers 40% of all websites. This level of popularity speaks for itself.
Here are just some of the websites using WordPress as CMS:

#9 WordPress is secure

The internet is an uncertain place in general but WordPress is considered safe. Thanks to the fruitful work of WordPress developers and regular updates, it is sufficiently protected and the gaps that appear in its defense are promptly corrected.
When WordPress websites get hacked, the main reasons usually are either choosing questionable plugins and themes, using unreliable hosting providers, or they lie in the lack of basic password literacy, not in the platform itself.
With WordPress powering over 40% of all existing sites in the world, it’s only a matter of statistics that WordPress-based websites seem to be attacked more often than others.

In short: Why choose WordPress for your website

Having started in 2003, WordPress is the most popular CMS of today. The benefits of WordPress make web development happen easier and quicker.
For many business owners, the choice between custom web development and one of the ready-made solutions (with WordPress being one of the available options) is not an easy task. 
We know from experience that the overwhelming majority of websites are created for medium-sized and small businesses and WordPress is great for this mass segment of the digital economy because:

• It lets businesses minimize the time needed to enter the market. 
• It’s inexpensive. 
• It’s very popular so the website owner will never be left without support.

This is not to polarize WordPress and custom web development. Every approach has its own set of drawbacks, advantages, and cases. Wonder if your website should be done with WordPress or not? We can help. Don’t hesitate to turn to us for advice and consultation about WordPress website development services and we’ll tell you what approach seems to be the most beneficial in your case.

40% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online.

Do you use WordPress?#100daysofcode
— Edan Ben-Atar 🐒 (@edanbenatar) March 27, 2021