Did you know that over 455 million websites are powered by WordPress in 2020? This means that over 35 percent of all websites are on WordPress. This is no surprise as WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) around the globe. Aside from being a free, open-source, and self-hosted software, WordPress.org can be easily downloaded and offers complete customization regarding everything from hosting providers and site themes to SEO functionality, site structure, and much more. While WordPress does require some initial learning, this platform is a great, sustainable choice for businesses to continue to grow and stay competitive in today’s ever evolving digital market. In this post, we will discuss the power of WordPress that allows millions of site owners to build everything from complex e-commerce stores and informational business sites to niche blogs and non-profit sites.

Site Freedom Is a Must

You Choose Your Hosting Provider

Unlike other major site building platforms, WordPress.org is a self-hosted platform. Thus, site owners can choose which hosting provider meets their site needs and budget best. For example, you can research and select the hosting provider that has the best services and prices for your business, such as fast performance, top-notch security for site visitors, ample site storage, and excellent customer support. To illustrate the saving opportunities, consider that the monthly cost to host your site on a website building platform, such as Wix.com could be the same price you pay for hosting a WordPress site for an entire year. Indeed, the savings would be significant, which is something everyone can appreciate.

Themes

Some of the biggest benefits of using WordPress is having the freedom to fully customize your site to meet your specific needs and build and design a unique site that doesn’t look just like someone else’s site. Indeed, users can choose from over 7,800 WordPress themes or hire a WordPress expert to build a custom theme. If you would like to change or improve your site design, it is easy to switch out themes without having to start over from scratch like other website platforms, such as Wix.com.

Plugins

Aside from themes, WordPress also offers an extensive library of 57,951 plugins, widgets, and applications (free and premium options) to further enhance your site’s functionality and usability. Compared to other site building platforms, this library allows you to do everything from add a live chat support to an e-commerce store to implement a newsletter plugin for a food blog. For businesses that need to scale and expand their sites, this type of site freedom will ensure that their target audience’s needs are met and they can continue providing useful, relevant information to both their users and search engines.

Types of Websites Made with WordPress

This is just a general list, but it gives you an idea of how much you can do with this vast open-source platform:

  • Art galleries
  • Auction sites
  • Blogs
  • Business sites
  • Coupon sites
  • E-Commerce sites
  • Event sites
  • Forums
  • Health and Wellness sites
  • Job board sites
  • Knowledge base sites
  • Marketing sites
  • Media sites
  • Membership sites
  • Non-profit sites
  • Online chat rooms
  • Personal sites
  • Portfolios
  • Q&A sites
  • Real-estate sites
  • Virtual learning platforms

SEO Functionality

If you want your site to rank highly on search engines and reach your target audience, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. SEO is the process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keywords or phrases related to your site and ensuring that this helps your site rank highly in search engines. When a user searches for specific keywords or phrases, search engines return your site as a hopefully top listed website. This optimization approach combines a variety of steps, such as optimizing your site content, the HTML code, meta tags, and implementing appropriate link building.

Fortunately, WordPress knows how crucial SEO is for websites, so this is built into the platform. For example, WordPress automatically generates title tags and meta descriptions for your site’s pages and posts. In turn, this allows search engines to learn about your site content, index the site, and help increase your site’s rankings on major search engines. If your site needs even more optimization, there are numerous opportunities to boost your SEO with plugins and other online tools, as well as hiring SEO experts to take your site to the next level of optimization.

Speed Optimization

Since site owners have the freedom to choose their hosting provider, they have the opportunity to have lightning-fast site speeds. This is important, especially when studies show that site visitors spend an average time of 15 seconds or less on a page. Indeed, this is a short amount of time to capture visitors’ interest, which may not be possible for a site that loads slowly. To increase the likelihood that users stay on your site longer, having a fast site is essential.

Site Customization

Aside from having access to a vast library of themes and plugins, WordPress site owners can fully customize their site to meet their specific site needs. For example, a large-scale business with dozens of content pages can set up a complex navigation menu that is organized and user-friendly. This site structure flexibility is not possible on more limited site building platforms, such as Wix as users can only build a simple site structure with one sub-level. Indeed, businesses need a CMS that will help their site grow and seamlessly manage their site content and storage needs.

While website builders, such as Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly may be faster to learn, they are geared more towards users that only need a simple site without the customization and flexibility that WordPress offers its users. Indeed, one major disadvantage to using these non-open source platforms is that you usually don’t fully own your own site and content. Instead, you rent your site from these companies. If you stop paying for these sites on their premium plans, your site and content is either lost or held by the company. This significantly makes it harder to expand a business site if you choose to upgrade your hosting provider, which is not possible with most site builder platforms. Luckily, WordPress sites are fully owned by its users and can be moved to different hosting providers. This type of complete control over your site is imperative for scaling your business site and ensuring you aren’t limited in how your site looks, feels, and operates.

The power of WordPress is that users have complete freedom and flexibility to decide everything about their site from the hosting provider and theme to the color scheme, site structure, SEO optimization, and site features that ensure users have a positive experience and tell all their friends. We hope you enjoyed this overview of just how powerful WordPress is and why you should use this open-source, free platform for all your website needs. If you are looking for the perfect affordable website solution, consider hiring WordPress experts to build and design your next website. If you’re looking for a small business or restaurant web design company suitable for your brand, check out DesignRush today.