WordPress rules as the king of the blogging platforms and content management systems! It’s the “most popular and fastest growing publishing platform on the web” confirms CrunchBase.
Of the world’s top 100 blogs in Technorati’s index, a mighty 50% use WordPress and no other platform is a close second. These were the findings of a study by Pingdom completed in 2012. Their graphic displays more of their results:
In case you aren’t aware, there is WordPress.com which is hosted and WordPress.org which is self-hosted. You definitely want to be self-hosting your website using WordPress.org.
The advantages of using WordPress.org as your publishing platform are many:
1. Easy to Use
It’s so easy to publish and update your content. (If you can use MS Word, you can use WordPress.) The dashboard and visual editor are very intuitive.
Your blog can be integrated into your site plus it’s the best blogging solution with an advanced CMS (Content Management System).
There’s no need to learn HTML or code.
If you think of “the olden” days when you had to master HTML or complex programs to publish websites online, like the olden days when all meals were prepared from scratch. (Hmm, childhood memories of whiffs of freshly baked shortbread!)
In those days you had to master many skills, like making your own pastry. Remember your mother or granny kneading the ingredients? Today you can buy ready-made pastry.
A white sauce was cleverly created from just the right amount of butter, flour and milk over just the right amount of heat. Chips came from potatoes, not a frozen packet.
Very few people make their own white sauce, chips or pastry today, we buy these foods pre-packaged to save time and to make our lives easier. That’s similar to WordPress, many of the ingredients that make up the functionality of this powerful system come pre-packaged in the form of themes, widgets, plugins to save you time and to make your online life easier. And WordPress updates bring more cool and time-saving features – like the couple of clicks to create the menu for your navigation bar or being able to re-size your images.
You don’t need to be a master cook or webmaster to run a WordPress website.
2. It’s Free
The free open source, vast worldwide community powering WordPress continually improves the software making it more secure, adding more functionality and coolness.
You’ll never be charged when you reach a certain size, it gives you access to its code and this massive open community project will continue to grow.
3. Good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search Engine Optimization is such a buzz word and rightly so – it’s vital that your website is found online. Many have tried to outsmart Google’s algorithms and Google keeps adding checks to stop the gaming of their system of selecting which posts or pages reach the top of the search.
There are multiple good strategies to improve your ranking in the search. One of the best practices is to post relevant and engaging content for your target market regularly. WordPress makes this very easy to do in many ways.
4. Flexible
You can update your website from any computer, anywhere in the world. Multiple users can work on your site simultaneously though not on the same post or page.
5. Complete Control
You have complete control of your website. As a business owner this is critically important.
Other blogging platforms may place adverts on your site, may not allow you to use your site for commercial purposes and could be terminated (or be taken over.)
6. Integrate with Social Media
Thanks to the ingenuity of many developers, it is very easy to integrate your Social Media with your WordPress website and spread your marketing message further than was ever possible previously. Plus engage and interact with your visitors, prospects, customers and clients.
7. Thriving Community
There’s a thriving community of WordPress developers creating themes, free or premium (paid for) which can be customized to enhance your branding.
8. Extensive Functionality
Your website is now your business center.
Plugins make your website work for you. The plugins, free or premium, add extensive functionality to your site. (There’s a plugin for that!) From increasing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), to adding security features, to adding audio, a poll, to making it simple to create slideshows or photo galleries, shopping carts, forums, maps, and more.
9. Internet Compliant
WordPress adheres to all the Web Standards and keeps your website Internet compliant. Do you use WordPress for your site? Love to hear your comments or questions.
Hi there! Do you know if they make any plugins to assist with
Search Engine Optimization? I’m trying to get my blog to rank for some targeted keywords but I’m
not seeing very good success. If you know of any please share.
Appreciate it!
Hi, yes there are many WordPress plugins designed to improve your SEO. Two of the most popular are: All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert and WordPress SEO by Yoast. Wishing you more success!
can wordpress be installed and operated on a computer with xp home sp3?
Hi Jake, yes you can as you don’t install WordPress on your computer, you install on your hosting. Does that make sense for you? That’s the big advantage of WordPress.
I use and recommend WordPress.
It’s also really well supported by that thriving community you mention. To me this is a massive advantage some people overlook.
Keeping plugins to a minimum can help performance and reduce upgrade issues.
I love WordPress. And like you said it was internet complaint and its always kept up to date with the latest security measures for any site. And there are always new releases which make it more awesome pack full of more awesome stuff
I highly agree. I studied also Joomla and Drupal but WordPress it’s much more versatile. They also have a lot of recommendation possibilities and they can also recommend related posts from within your site or tags on a widget. This it’s really awesome. Hardly to believe that they offer all of this for free. Great job and long live WordPress.
Thanks for the great information Tina.
Gave you a retweet, hope it helps.
Phil
Thanks Phil, glad you hear you found useful. Thanks for the retweet too!
Hi Tina,
I wrote recently wrote an article on the similar topic. The amount of information you’ve covered is very comprehensive. Thank you for such a wonderful article and also, it helped me reconcile my article because I now know I covered a great detail as well except that I didn’t have this awesome chart that you have included which makes world if an impact.
Thanks again.
Regards,
Kumar
You are most welcome Kumar, appreciate your feedback, thank you.
Great summary! Nice chart between self hosted and self published as well.
Thanks Carl, appreciate your feedback. I’m sure there are even more peeps using self-hosted WordPress now.
Hi, I’ve run a blog on Blogger for the past few years and I’m approaching 250k pageviews. Your feature here has made me seriously consider using WordPress instead. Is there anything to stop me running both in parallel until I build up a new readership on the new blog?
Hi Stuart, there’s nothing to stop you except having more hours in the day! -:) If you are considering posting the same exact same content on both sites, Google doesn’t like you doing that. So you may consider posting a variation of your posts on each site. Good move to switch to WordPress.org. I’m pretty sure there’s a way to import you posts from your Blogger site to your new WordPress site. Wishing you the best.
Thanks for that, Tina. I’ll bear it in mind for new posts! It’s a different way of working and I’m slowly getting used to it, but so far, so good.