Since its introduction in 2003 WordPress has evolved into a versatile content management system (CMS). Although you can still use the platform to create a simple blog, nowadays it also allows you to create a fully functional WordPress website and mobile applications too.
The platform’s immense and ever-increasing popularity can be attributed to its ease of adoption for businesses and professionals, as well as its simple user experience for website visitors.
Technology is best when it brings people together.
Matt Mullenweg
Features That Make WordPress The Best Choice For You
Although there are a number of compelling reasons to use the platform personally and professionally, in my mind there are three features that make WordPress the best choice for you:
- Themes
- Plugins
- Multimedia Integration
1. WordPress Themes
One of the greatest benefits of working with WordPress is that it’s “open source.” This means that the software’s source code is available for anyone to study, modify, and develop. It is because of the WordPress community’s constant contributions to improving the platform, that it is so simple to use for the development of a website or mobile application.
One of the most brilliant aspects of WordPress’ open source is that it allows website designers and developers to create what is known as Themes. Essentially, these are templates that make your website look and function the way you want it to.
Making the platform even more appealing, WordPress and its themes are able to be further customized. In most instances, an easy-to-use customization panel allows users to change colors, upload a logo, change the background image, create header sliders, and more. You can have a fully customized website that exceeds your expectations, and it can all be accomplished without knowing anything about coding or website design.
If you were to include basic graphic design and elementary coding skills, the possibilities with WordPress become infinite.
2. WordPress Plugins
Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. At the time this article was written, there were 42,538 plugins available for WordPress users. And, that’s just within the WordPress repository; which is regarded as the official market for free WordPress plugins.
If you stop to consider the tens of thousands of premium plugins listed in the official repository, you will get a better understanding of why the platform appeals to so many people. If there’s something you would like to accomplish with your website, it is very likely there’s a WordPress plugin to do it.
Aside from social sharing and SEO plugins, WordPress plugin developers also offer many other assets to improve the WordPress experience. These include: eCommerce solutions to sell online, performance additions to maintain website speed or monitor analytics, and security options to perform backups and prevent hacking and malware attacks.
WordPress is extremely flexible and, just like the easy-to-use themes mentioned above, there are thousands of free and premium WP plugins available for you to implement.
3. Multimedia in WordPress
Using WordPress you are not just limited to writing text. The platform comes equipped with built-in support to accommodate images, audio, and video content.
WordPress also supports oEmbed enabled websites. This allows you to embed YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio, by pasting the URL into your post where you’d like the content to appear.
A BONUS to Using WordPress
In addition to the three compelling reasons for using WordPress for website development mentioned above, it is important to highlight the fact that the community of WordPress developers at are continuously making meaningful contributions to improve WordPress’ mobile user experience.
Mobile Load Speed
In the past, mobile users’ experience with web pages has been frustrating. This prompted Google to launch the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project to “dramatically improve” the performance of the mobile web.
To date, there are approximately 30 content publishers taking part in the AMP project, including Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and [drum roll] WordPress.
Since Google has added mobile-friendly to its list of ranking signals, it has become extremely important for your website to be responsive for search engines and mobile users too. WordPress is making great efforts to help website developers achieve this.
A Final Thought About Using WordPress
Although initially regarded as a blogging platform, WordPress has surpassed all expectations for widespread acceptance and user adoption. In fact, according to a survey performed in November of 2015, WordPress powers an estimated 22.5 percent of all websites on the Internet.
Whether your goal is to produce a landing page, a multi-page website, eCommerce solution, or a personal blog to share your words with the world, WordPress grants you access to the human (WP communities/forums) and digital resources you need to be successful.
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