WordPress is a content management system (CMS), which means it’s designed to help you organize and display the content on your site.
What counts as content? Everything that appears on your site, from the header with your business name to your contact information to your blog posts and tutorial videos. If it’s on your site, it’s content.
7 Reasons to Choose WordPress for Your Business Website
It may help to think of your website as an empty retail space. Your CMS is the shelving and racks you set up to make sure the contents of your store are organized logically, easy to reach, and displayed attractively.
When you’re choosing a CMS, just as when you pick out store fixtures, you have lots of options—and they’re not all equal in terms of cost, function, and aesthetics.
Here’s why WordPress is the busy, non-techie, small-business owner’s friend.
1. WordPress is free.
Free is good when you’re operating on a small business budget. You’ll still have to pay for web hosting, and you may want to buy a theme instead of using a free one to change the way your site looks (more about that in a moment), but the WordPress CMS costs nothing to download.
2. WordPress is easy to use.
WordPress prides itself on its five-minute installation and support guides to walk you through the process.
3. WordPress has a vast support community.
Thirty percent of all websites run on WordPress, and it has a 60% share of the CMS market. The number of people using WordPress means that if you have a problem or a question, odds are there’s an answer waiting for you in one of the WordPress support or developer forums.
It also means that if you ever want to outsource your site maintenance, content, or design, there are plenty of developers, writers, editors, and designers who know how your site’s CMS works.
4. It’s easy to make your WordPress site look unique.
Because WordPress’s code is open source, hobby, and professional developers are always finding ways to improve it. There are thousands of free and paid themes you can choose from to make your site look the way you want it to.
5. Create your dream functionality with WordPress plugins.
Once you’ve chosen a web host and a theme and set up your basic site, there are thousands of plugins you can use to make the site work exactly the way you want it to. Whether you want it to load faster, back up automatically, or optimize your blog posts for search results, there’s a plugin (or five) for that.
6. WordPress takes security seriously.
WordPress also makes it easy to keep your site’s software up to date, which is critical to keeping hackers and data thieves out of your site. Some WordPress software updates are automatic, to prevent security vulnerabilities, and you can choose whether you want your plugins to update automatically or whether you’ll handle those updates yourself.
7. WordPress plays well with others.
Even the coolest-looking website needs to interact seamlessly with other platforms and with people, so you can get found and make sales.
First, getting found: WordPress is structured to be easy for search engine crawlers to navigate, which means your site will perform better in search results, especially if you add an SEO plugin like Yoast. You can make your site easier for mobile users to navigate by choosing a mobile-optimized or responsive theme from the start, or by installing a plugin to make your site work better on mobile devices.
And if you ever want to change web hosting services, you can migrate your entire WordPress site to a new host easily, with fewer steps, and in less time than it would take you to migrate a free site builder-hosted site.
