Benefits of using WordPress to build your website
WordPress is a website content management system (CMS). i.e. it manages your web page text, images, navigation menus, and more, through a website administration dashboard, which after about 2 weeks of use, will become quite easy to use.
There are quite a few different kinds of benefits to using WordPress to build your website.
- Speed of setup: It’s easy to install WordPress (once you know how), so if you’re going to be managing more than one website, WordPress may very easily be your choice for each website, once you’ve gotten hold of how to install and manage WordPress yourself.
- Choice of designs: there are literally 50000+ different page layouts (called WordPress “Themes”) to choose from, both free, paid, or custom-built.
- Flexible in functionality: there are 42000+ WordPress “Plugins”, that plugin to WordPress, and extend the features and functionality of your WordPress website. e.g. WooCommerce (for e-commerce).
- Choice of professional help: almost every man, woman, cat, and dog website professional has at least some experience with WordPress. Your choices will range from very cheap (beware!), to very expensive (good if you’re very rich), and from an expert, down to a novice.
Here are some additional stats from my friends @ WPMUDev:
1. WordPress Powers 25.5% of the Web
WordPress’ remarkable growth isn’t slowing down any time soon. WordPress hit 20% usage just two years ago and if that trend is set to continue, we could see WordPress reach its next milestone, 30%, in 2017.
In October 2015, 29.7% of all new sites used WordPress.
2. WordPress is the Most Popular CMS
Among the 300+ content management systems that web technology survey service W3Techs routinely monitors, WordPress dominates with a whopping 58.7% market share.
It’s worth noting that 57% of websites don’t use any identifiable CMS, so there’s still a lot of room for WordPress to further make its mark.
3. WordPress is the Fastest Growing CMS
Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which gains a new site every 22 minutes.
4. WordPress Powers Some of the World’s Biggest Brands and Names
These include Sony, Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Coca-Cola, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Star Wars, PlayStation, General Motors, NFL, Bloomberg, MTV, Facebook, eBay, Google, LinkedIn, Flickr, NASA, and TED.
Then there’s Jay Z, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, Kobe Bryant, The Rolling Stones, Malala Yousafzai, and Sylvester Stallone, just to name a few.
WordPress.com’s VIP service hosts many of these brands and names. WordPress.org also showcases some of the Fortune 500 companies that use the CMS.
5. There Have Been 143 versions of WordPress to Date
This figure includes both major and minor (security, maintenance etc.) releases.
Volunteers all over the world contribute to the WordPress project, ensuring it is regularly and continually updated to improve both its functionality and security. WordPress 4.4 alone had 471 contributors.
The latest version has been downloaded more than 6.5 million times since it was released just three weeks ago.
6. WordPress is Available to Download in 57 Languages
WordPress can deliver your content to visitors worldwide in a variety of languages. If English isn’t your native tongue, you can download WordPress in Bengali, Danish, Esperanto, and Icelandic, just to name a few of the translations on offer.
If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.
According to W3Techs, 37.3% of English language websites use WordPress, while usage numbers are between 38% and 40% for Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish sites, and they reach 51.3% for Bengali and 54.4% for Bosnian.
7. There Are 42,000+ Plugins for WordPress
And that’s just the plugins you can download for free. There are more than 100 premium plugins on our site, another 4000+ hosted over at CodeCanyon, any many developers release their own plugins for free on GitHub or on their personal websites.
With many thousands of plugins available, there’s no end to how you can extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.
8. WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Google’s Crawling Issues
According to Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team, sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.
That’s most of the hard work done so you don’t have to worry about the small things and you can get on with creating quality content for your site.