WordPress has come a long way since its early days as a blogging platform. It is now a super-sophisticated Content Management System (CMS) powering millions of websites.
It is Open Source, which means that at any one time, literally hundreds of programmers are contributing their time and expertise towards growing the system.
Until WordPress the only downside to such a comprehensive system was that a degree of web competence was required to set it up. WordPress has resolved all those issues and stunning, world-class websites can be published with a few clicks of the mouse. Set-up and hosting are all taken care of allowing users to simply get on with building great websites at a fraction of the price charged by web agencies.
Here’s another 44 reasons to use WordPress
1. Ease of Use WordPress is very easy to use and has an intuitive interface. Adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly. Because the technology is so simple, time spent on formatting is greatly reduced.
2. Manage Your Website from Any Computer WordPress is browser-based. You can login from any Internet connected computer and manage your site.
3. No HTML Editing or FTP Software Required WordPress is a self-contained system and does not require HTML editing software (such as Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver). You can create a new page or blog post, format text, upload images (and edit them), upload documents, video files, image galleries, etc. all without the need for additional HTML or FTP software.
4. Search Engines Love WordPress Sites The code behind WordPress is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a sites content. In addition, each page, post, and image can have its own meta tag keywords, description, and title, and be optimized for specific keywords, allowing for very precise search engine optimization. You can also use tags to further enhance your search engine optimization efforts.
5. You Have Control of Your Site No more waiting for your web designer to make simple updates to your site. With WordPress, you have control of nearly every aspect of your site and can easily make those simple updates yourself.
6. The Design of Your Website is 100% Customizable WordPress acts as the engine for your website. The look and feel of the site can be 100% customized so your brand can shine through on your site and provide a unique experience to your visitors.
7. A Blog is Built-in and Ready to Go Since WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform, blogging capabilities are built-in and are easy to integrate, if desired. Setting up RSS / email subscriptions to your blog, commenting capabilities, and automatically adding the most recent blog posts to other pages of the site (your home page, for example) are also very simple to set-up, and help to extend your companys reach and make your site more dynamic and interactive.
8. Extend the Functionality of Your Site with Plugins Want to add an event calendar, video gallery, Twitter Feed, Facebook Fan Box, and more to your site? WordPress makes this possible with plugins, most of which are free or very reasonably priced.
9. Your Site Can Grow as Your Business Grows WordPress sites are very scalable. You can have hundreds of thousands of pages or blog posts on your site and the performance of the site will not be compromised in the least.
10. Have Multiple Users As an administrator of a WordPress site, you can set-up multiple users for the website and assign access levels and capabilities to each user.
11. Speed of Communication Since you dont have to wait a few days for your designer to make those basic changes, the content on your Web site and be altered immediately by you, thereby giving your Web site visitors the most timely and current details possible.
12. Consistency No matter how many pages you add in page template format makes visitors less confused
13. Better Time Management Add content and then schedule those posts to publish on your site on whatever day and time you want. You could write an entire 12-week e-course, for example, break it up into 12 pieces and have each automatically post to the site at the same day and time each week for 12 weeks.
14. Ease of Membership Site Rollout With the addition of a few plugins, a WordPress blog can evolve into a full service membership site with as many levels as you would like.
15. Social Networking Friendly Automatically integrate your blog posts with social media like Twitter, facebook, Linkedin instead of having to go to each one, login, and make a post that youve just added something new to your website.
16. Engage with Current Media Easily add audio and video to posts and pages.
17. Creative Welcoming Integrate any design within an hour or two in comparison to other CMS (Content Management System) tools that all look alike because of their stringent design constraints.
18. Ultimate in SEO Friendliness The construction of WordPress blog code is consistent and streamlined without excessive HTML code that Google finds very inviting for indexing. Plus, with the right setup, youre able to customize every page or post you make to give you the highest possible probability of getting your pages in high search results positions.
19. Inspiring Participating by adding posts and pages and managing your own content becomes fun. When you see the results from your OWN efforts instead of farming out everything, you become fueled even more to add more content.
20. Search Engine Magnetism As a result of your inspiration to post content more often, your frequency of contribution will attract Google robots and other search engines like magnets. The robots will search your entire site every day looking for new content and new pages and changes they can index. New pages get indexed in hours or even MINUTES when you commit to adding new content over time. Many of our HereNextYear posts and WebsiteWaves.com pages have been published and displayed on Googles organic search in under 30 minutes! Try that with a traditional Web site!
21. Growth potential No need to update navigation when you add pages; links to new pages will be added automatically based on what category or categories you assign your posts and pages to. This all happens in the admin area instead of manually editing javascript menus and complex PHP include files.
22. Insanely Fast Learning Curve Learning to edit content, post new pages, add photos and images is as easy (maybe even easier) than using MS Word. Figuring out these simple procedures on your own would only take a novice a few hours. With initial one-on-one training by phone from an expert WordPress trainer like we offer at HereNextYear, all of these functions can be performed by YOU in under an hour even if you have no design or programming experience. There are two and three FULL-day classes just to learn the BASICS of Dreamweaver or FrontPage. WordPress blog software is by far, the easiest tool to learn how to maintain content on your Web site.
23. Improved Security One of the subjects against WordPress or other blog software that use plugins (plugins are small add-on programs to enhance the capability of the blog software) is that hackers can break in to your Web site. But, the exact opposite is in fact true: If you have the right people involved in the setup of your WordPress installation, your blog site can be hacker-proofed even more securely than a traditional Web site. How can that be true? Because there is an actual process to hardening a WordPress installation. But, you just dont hear designers or developers hacker-proofing traditional Web sites. See the difference?
24. Inspires Repeat Visitors The fact that you are inspired to add new content frequently will also encourage and increase your repeat visitor numbers. When people like what you contribute to the Web, they want to know when you add more. Thats where RSS feeds (Real Simple Syndication) come into play along with automated notices by email that new posts have been made. These announcements trigger former visitors to come back to read the rest of the article, or in the case of RSS, visitors can subscribe to receive the entire post through their RSS reader or mobile device. This is not just the future of how communication will evolve in a few years, but this is NOW, TODAY. If you are not experienced with how RSS works, having a blog site will introduce you to its importance for sure.
25. Two-Way Communication with Visitors Through the use of blog comments, you are no longer restricted to one-way outbound communication with visitors like you would be with a traditional Web site. Sure, you can always have a contact us page on your traditional Web site, but blog comments allow for anonymous two-way discussion between you and your readers. And, every time someone makes a comment to one of your posts, the inclusion of their content full of keyword phrases helps you to build better search positioning. Its like getting free SEO help from the general public!
26. Increase Your Perceived Industry Authority Making frequent posts and sharing your opinion on whats happening in your industry offers so much more potential for establishing rapport with your audience than a traditional Web site could offer. Why such a difference? Because traditional Web sites just take too darn long to format. Even if you open Dreamweaver and copy an existing page to create a new one, you still have to format all that content, upload it to the right directory, assign page permissions, add the page manually to navigation .UGGG! A WordPress blog will allow you to add new pages in as little as five seconds! Period! And, that page can be set to appear in navigation on every other page on on your entire Web site in the click of a button. You just cant afford to spend that much time to make that many additions of content pages in such a short amount of time with a traditional Web site. And, when youre reporting on industry happenings, and giving your opinions, speed is of the essence. Thats the difference.
27. More Brand Awareness Since the common approach with a blog site is to build out the site into an industry-specific authority resource with hundreds or even thousands of pages of content, the number of opportunities for the general public to see your brand identity is multiplied exponentially over and above the traditional 10 to 30 page Web site.
28. Immediate Identification of Hot Topics Among Your Audience If you make 10 posts and get one or two or even no comments at all, and then all of a sudden you post a topic that brings 20 comments, you learn immediately of an interest. This is a highly valuable opportunity that you normally dont see with a traditional Web site, unless you pay for a bunch of custom programming to create some forms and surveys. The utility to allow blog comments is included with every Blog installation automatically with no custom programming required.
29. Better Anchor for Original Articles When you publish articles to directories and blog networks, you first want to post it to your blog site. Why is a blog site better for this than a traditional Web site? Because of the automatic archiving feature within every blog setup.
30. Automated Syndication Blog posts can be automatically converted to RSS feeds and syndicated to blog directories and other peoples websites.
31. Backdoor FREE Entry to Yahoo! Search Addition When you submit your RSS feed manually to Yahoo! you dont have to pay their $299 listing fee as your site will be indexed for free.
32 24-Hour Listing in Bing/MSN Adding the RSS feed to Bing/MSN is the fastest way to have your site indexed and it is common for even new sites to appear in Bing/MSN within 24 hours using this method.
33. One-Step Posting It might sound like Im repeating myself with ease of use or ease of learning already listed as a benefit, but this one is different. How many ways are there to add content to a Web site where you truly only click a single button to make the content appear live online? Only one that Ive found and its through blog software. There are no 10, 5 or even 3-step processes to publish content live. Its one single step.
34. You Control the Discussions With traditional Web sites, the old school way of communicating with visitors was to add a forum or chat room. The problem with those was the need for maintaining the posts from spammers and removing discussions and predatory accounts that could threaten the integrity of your business. Blog sites changed all of that. You begin the topic of discussion. Your visitors make comments to the discussion you started. But, the comments people make are approved by you before anyone ever sees them on your Web site. Its the best of all worlds without the worry of defaming your business with unacceptable posts.
35. Re-Ignite Your Ideas By having the ability to add content to your Web site in a way that is easy, fast, and requires no technical skill, you will be amazed how ideas for what to add will no longer be a problem. In fact, youll be more worried about what to write about .first! Create content about industry happenings, product reviews, or educational steps. The limits are truly endless. Youll never run out of things to add to your blog.
36. Increased Functionality with Lower Cost Thousands of pre-written programs called plugins can increase the functionality of your out-of-the-box blog software. Traditional websites require everything to be programmed. Even if you find an available PHP or ASP script to work with a traditional website, there is usually significant integration work and customizing required, whereas WordPress plugins are usually a 3-click install process.
37. Multi-User Capable WordPress offers multi-user capability so that larger companies with marketing departments, for example, can offer editing power exclusivity or even read-only mode to others.
38. Free Upgrades Unlike traditional Web site software like Dreamweaver, PhotoShop or Flash, upgrades to WordPress blog software is free.
39. Universal Platform With the economy the way it is, designers and Internet marketing service providers are closing their doors and disappearing even more quickly than when I got started in this business in 1996. Youve got to be careful these days. With traditional Web sites, very rarely will a new service provider agree to pick up where the old designer or developer left off. The result is that the new provider will want to charge you for starting from scratch. Conversely, almost anyone with basic PHP and MySQL experience can jump into your WordPress blog site project in a moments notice if something was to happen to the helper(s) that got your blog site setup for you in the first place.
40. Safety Add images and media by uploading to server from within your secret admin area instead of through traditional ftp and risking deleting important files or uploading to the wrong directories
41. Freshness Easily change your site layout and appearance by swapping themes. Great for temporary changes for holidays or seasons.
42. Reduced Loss of Work Your work is automatically saved as you type even if you havent published your blog posts live to the web yet.
43. Mobile Readiness No need to produce a second Web site just for mobile users. WordPress automatically recognizes if a person is viewing the site through a Web browser or mobile device and configures the content to be viewed appropriately on either.
44. Ease of Printing Designers are notorious for creating Web sites that are too wide to print. With a simple plugin, all your WordPress blog site content can be easily printed in easy-to-read format without creating duplicate printable versions of pages. No need for sacrificing screen view design just so that people can print the pages
