8th of August, 2019
Uses and Advantages of WordPress

What is Wordpress?

WordPress began as a blogging tool, it has evolved throughout the years to a very powerful site builder and also a strong content management system (CMS).

Going direct to the point, it is simply a content management system. This was not the case though some 10 (ten) years ago when WordPress was just a platform for blogging. Today, besides blogging, wordpress development company use WordPress to create and run powerful sites of all demeanor.

If you will permit me to play the tech card, WordPress is a software script built on MySQL and PHP. Wordpress is a fork of the b2/cafelog software for blogging. The hell is a fork?

A fork happens when WordPress development company take a copy of source code from a software package and start independent WordPress development on it, building a separate and distinct piece of software.

Since then, WordPress has grown in a very huge amount, and today, it is very used and loved blogging platform/CMS on more than 70(seventy) million websites. That is a whopping twenty-three (23) percent of the internet!

And all this because WordPress is simple to learn and use, super powerful and full of functions and features that endear it to pros and beginners alike. WordPress embodies elegance, simple to use and the best website standards. Matt’s vision was to create a platform for blogging, so simple it would eliminate challenges authors faced with website publishing.

Has WordPress lived up to this vision? You bet it has 10 times over just 10 years later. In the process, it has earned great rewards and made many number of people millions in good profits. Still, the WordPress platform is growing bigger, better and stronger with each and every new and latest update.

Contributors from all over the world continue creating upon WordPress, so you can expect the WordPress platform to grow in utility, functionality, and popularity. It is not a prototype, it is a stable product and it is going nowhere, so jump on the bandwagon already.

Why is WordPress “Free”?

Why is WordPress Free?

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of working with a really amazing client from the UK. After consulting and writing him reviews for their service, I earned myself a package of hosting. For a while, I had no idea what to do with that package, and boy did it come with amazing functions.

After wracking my brains for one week or so, I decided to go into business offering WordPress hosting to some of my cronies. I set up the best WordPress site and posted some of the ads on Facebook among other places. I would charge for hosting among other tasks of administrative. I would make a killing; oh you know a huge excitement.

After one or two days, one of my advertisements got a response. It went something like this: Stop fooling people, it is free and people should not pay…blah blah…[amd so many more other words.]

I can not remember most of the response or even the same and exact words but you get the point. The most surprising part is even after explaining I was not selling WordPress but charging for hosting (admin tasks like setting up, installing plugins and themes, etc), she created it looks like I was not getting through to her.

Perhaps my promoting sucked huge time because the few people who made contact did not understand why I might charge for an “open source software”.

I have since place that project on the rear burner, well, because I sold the hosting package for rent cash, and there is simply too much you can manage and handle at any given time. What? It is life.

Another example:

Just the next day, a friend, who wants to be a website designer, set up a WordPress site for the first time. He went all out, got his own personal domain and also the works. He picked one of the themes which is free at the WordPress repository, however, the functions just did not cut it.

So he combed the website, found a second theme that was ok and sent me the link. Suffice to say, it was a paid or premium Wordpress Theme & Plugins. Long story short, I had to clarify why we could not use that particular theme without paying for it initially.

“It is a WordPress theme. Should not it be free?”

Take note, I am not complaining but anybody got shine some light on this animal known as Open Source, or free software.

It is free, firstly, in terms of freedom, and secondly, you do not pay a cent to download the WordPress script.

What the hell do you mean?

You can download WordPress right this minute and install it on your personal computer. You will be able to create your site and even add posts, however, the world can never see the website since it is on your computer, not on the web. To put your site out there, you require to purchase a rent server space (cheap) or web server (expensive).

In terms of freedom, you are free to distribute, run, change, copy, and/or improve custom WordPress development services without first seeking permission from any authority. It is an open source project. It is free software created by a community.

Confusing much? Let me explain:

WordPress qualifies as a free software as it respects the users' freedoms and those of the community at large. Run, copy, modify, redistribute, etc freely without seeking permission. You do not approach any company to purchase the WordPress script – it is free to download, install and recustomize. You will however require a website hosting account and a domain name to have your WordPress site on the web.

There are some companies that make millions providing handled WordPress hosting, support, premium plugins and themes. No one company creates money selling WordPress, the script.

WordPress.com versus WordPress.org

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

WordPress.org is a website where anybody can download WordPress and many free plugins and themes.

On the other side, WordPress.com is a service that gets you started with a free wordPress-based blog in quick time. Yes, you get a free blog but the functions are limited and less flexible than what you had to get with the flavor of WordPress at WordPress.org. WordPress.com will give you a wordpress.com subdomain but you have to pay for a personalized domain should you require one.

Wordpress.org-info

If you are looking to start a business site the smart way, you want to go with WordPress.org as opposed to WordPress.com. Of course, you can choose the latter if you are ready to cough up about $3k a month.

Most web hosts give one-click WordPress installs, so you only require to buy a web hosting package, and a domain name. You can always get the domain name from the same web host as well. It is all easy. And you can always find a ton of WordPress tutorials and how it works on the website.

WordPress is Easily Extensible

With many premium and free plugins, themes, widgets, and add-ons at your disposal, there is nothing stopping you from creating a site straight out of your dreams.

For instance, using plugins such as BuddyPress, you can build a powerful social network on WordPress in no time. With e-commerce plugins like Cart66 and Woocommerce Cloud among others, you can launch an e-commerce store in the time it takes to chomp on a sandwich.

advantages of wordpress

WordPress is Search Engine Friendly

Wordpress is created with proper web standards. The source code is clean and valid HTML, meaning search engines will pine for your website. Other than that, WordPress supports tags, metadata, categories, SEO-friendly URLs, and many more including SEO plugins.

WordPress is Easy To Manage

WordPress includes a built-in updates management system. This permits you to upgrade your themes and plugins from within your WordPress admin dashboard.

WordPress also informs you if there's the latest version of WordPress available, which means that you can update your website by simply clicking on a button.

To secure your information from any hacking or accident, you can simply use a WordPress backup plugin to automatic build backups and store them securely in a remote location.

WordPress is SEO Friendly

WordPress is written using standard compliance best-quality code and also generates semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes all the search engines love WordPress.

That is the reason WordPress websites tend to rank higher than many others in search engines.

By design, WordPress is SEO friendly. You can even use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your site.

WordPress is Free as in Freedom

WordPress is free software. It means you're free to download, install, use and customize it to suit your requirements. You can use it to make any type of site.

Though the WordPress software itself is free of cost, you require a web hosting and domain name to install it.

A domain name is the address of a site on the internet. This is exactly what your users search in their browser address bar to access your site.

Web hosting is the site’s home where all of your site files are stored and saved. We recommend using Bluehost. They're among the biggest hosting companies in the world and also an officially recommended WordPress hosting supplier.

WordPress is Fast & Secure

WordPress is safe and secure

While hackers will always to find loopholes to exploit, WordPress build their job the harder. The CMS is made with the best code standards to make it fast in terms of security.

The wordpress platform receives daily updates aimed at improving the code as well as seal security holes.

WordPress is Easy to Customize with Plugins and Themes

A huge part of people using WordPress are neither web programmers nor web designers. As a matter of fact, most people start using WordPress with no previous knowledge of designing and developing sites.

For non-tech savvy people, WordPress is the best solution because there are hundreds of free site templates that you can select from. There's an ideal WordPress theme for almost every type of site.

WordPress themes are very simple to personalize because lots of them come with the panel of their own choice letting you change colors, change the background, upload a logo, make amazing sliders, and truly customize it to your requirements without writing any kind of code at all.

You can even add custom functionality to your WordPress website by using plugins. WordPress plugins are like applications for your site that you can use to add features like contact forms, analytics, membership area, and much more.

Exactly like themes, there are thousands of premium and free plugins available for you to utilize.

WordPress is Safe and Secure

WordPress is designed with safety in mind, and it's considered to be a very secure and safe platform to run a site. However, same as the real world, the internet can be an uncertain location.

There are intruders around who wish to get their hands on as many websites as they can. To protect your WordPress website, there are a number of simple things that you can do to make them more protected.

WordPress Can Handle Various Media Types

WordPress isn't only limited to writing text. It includes a built-in media uploader to handle pictures, video, and audio files.

WordPress supports oEmbed enabled sites which means you can embed Instagram photos, Tweets, YouTube videos, and Soundcloud audio by simply pasting the URL in the WordPress post editor.

WordPress is Scalable

What cannot you possibly throw at good WordPress web development? You can create an easy blog, launch a multi-million dollar e-store, make a news website such as the Time or create a famous social network, and WordPress won’t give in. Even if your site grows ten times more!

There are some Wordpress development services, which are formulated to help you set up a site that is in synchronization with how you envisage it to look and function.

I am yet to encounter a person who dropped WordPress because scalability became a problem. WordPress is highly scalable and flexible, and do not let anyone convince you otherwise.

Yashraj Singh Shaktawat
Yashraj Singh Shaktawat Guest Author

Yashraj serves as a digital marketer in the leading IT Service Provider Company named Techno Softwares and there he handles all works related to SEO, SMO, PPC, SME, Content Writing and E-mail Marketing Works. He use to publish his articles on Medium.com.

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