First of all, to understand why WordPress is the CMS we recommended to all of our clients, we need to understand what CMS is. According to Wikipedia, it is a system in-placed for your website to manage your website’s content. In other words, CMS simplified how you make changes to your website. So for example, in your main navigation instead of “Contact”, you want it to say “Contact Us”. The old HTML editing way, you need to change its main navigation label in every single page of your website.

For a company profile that consists only of 5-8 pages, it may take several minutes and not as much work. But how does it compare to a website like cnn.com or amazon.com? These websites have millions of pages. Therefore, it is inefficient to change every single page of that website. This where CMS shines, it allows you to have a managerial back-end to make your website updating faster and simpler.

So, Why WordPress?

There are at least hundreds of CMS available today, but only selected few that is popularly known. According to websetup.org’s article, WordPress is the most popular CMS used today (about 60% of the market share). The closes second (Joomla) has only 1/10 of the active websites compare to WordPress.

Due to the fact of WordPress being the most popular, it has numerous advantages because of it. Let’s discuss some of them here.

1. It is Open Source, Free, and Developers All Around the World is Contributing

WordPress is an open source platform, this means it is free to be used and modified. It is absolutely legal to make custom edits to the WordPress platform. If you happened to know some basic PHP and HTML coding, it is possible to create your own CMS using WordPress. But, that’s not what we will be discussing in this article.

Open source also means whoever has the capability to contribute and make WordPress a better platform are welcome to do so. For example, WordPress may already be translated into your native language, you can check the translation progression here, and you will be able to contribute today! WordPress uses the user base to empower back the platform.

In addition to that, the advantage of an open source and the most popular platform is developers from all corners of the world are contributing to making WordPress a better CMS. One of the benefits having countless developers to WordPress, it is constantly pushing updates and unlocking it to unlimited possibilities.

2. There are Over 50.000 Plugins Available

Being an open source platform allows WordPress to grow and evolve at a tremendous pace. In a daily basis, there are new plugins being listed at WordPress plugins page. So what’s is the advantage of having this plenty of plugins options?

Well, think of plugins like the software you used on your computer. So for example, you are using Windows as your Operating System, a vanilla Windows (the term we used to describe of default settings software without any modifications or software involved) will only have limited capabilities. You will still need to install Google Chrome, iTunes, Steam, PowerPoint, Excel and so on to really make your computer to be useable.

Same with WordPress, plugins are like the software you can install to the platform. Though, if you master programming languages for websites (PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML), you will be able to make any kind of expansion to your website. However, learning to code may not be in your bucket list, or you simply do not possess the time for it.

Not to worry, WordPress plugins are freely available and able to minimize the coding process for your website. Plugins are really useful if you want to add a feature such as; adding your Google Analytics Tracking Code, Website Backups, Chat, Contact Form, SEO and so on. With plugins, you simply just download and install, the feature will be live within seconds. Many of them eliminate the coding process for your convenience.

Almost any feature you can think of is available at WordPress plugins. Some developers also decide to make their plugins under the “Premium” categorization, this means you may need to pay to get that particular plugin.

Check out our article 7 Free & Essentials WordPress Plugins to learn more about what Plugins you should add in your WordPress.

3. It’s Community Driven, Any Troubleshooting Problem You Encounter, You Will Find It with a Simple Google Search

Having the perks of being the most popular open source CMS, WordPress has active users and developers out there. Their forum is very active. Most likely any problem you encounter may have been resolved by someone else. Try to Google something like “How Do You Install Chat in WordPress”, guaranteed you will have different solutions to choose from.



4. Many Other Third Party Application Supports

WordPress has received tremendous support all around in developers’ community. Including from Google. For instance, you want to monetize your WordPress blog, in the official help of Google AdSense, there is a handy guide on how to install it on a WordPress website.

WordPress Google AdSense

Even at Google’s AdSense guide section, Google wrote a help guide how to integrate their service with WordPress

We also find WordPress is supported in many third party payment gateways (especially in Indonesia) such as Doku, Duitku, and Midtrans. WordPress has plenty of room to grow, this means you can transform your website to handle your blogging and commercial transactions. Though, you will need Woocommerce plugins to handle your eCommerce.

5. It is Easy to Find Video Tutorials on Youtube

Being the popular kid on the block means this platform is well-known to the public. Therefore, if browsing around the forum is not your thing, Youtube will give you a great alternative to find your WordPress’  tutorial videos. Having several years providing website services in WordPress based, we still use resources such as Youtube to troubleshoot some of our WordPress problems.

6. It is SEO Friendly

As of writing this article, WordPress has reached 16 years of age. This means there has been 16 years worth of improvement by developers all around the world to perfected the WordPress coding. WordPress coding is clean and simple, which makes the website is easy to be indexed with Google Search Engine.

The recommended plugins to make your website even more SEO friendly is Yoast. Yoast has the capability to make your website even more search friendly. As mentioned in our previous article, it is a must-have plugin for your WordPress website.

7. There is a Sea of WordPress Templates to Choose for

One of the systems implemented by WordPress to customized your aesthetic is through templates. By default, you will be given a free template upon installing WordPress. However, if you want to your website stands out, you should consider a premium template instead of the free ones. With a premium template, your template has been pre-designed by a group of developers to reach a certain aesthetic standard. It is also most likely to be bug-free, due to the intensive testing they have gone through.

Usually, a premium template comes with basic customization such as color changes, font, and options layout for your website. These templates are aimed toward the non-coding WordPress users, therefore it will minimalize the coding needed.

Themeforest WordPress Tempalte

You have many selections of WordPress template available – photo credit to ThemeForest

And your website is not restricted with just one design, using the template system you can always change the template whenever you want. By just changing the template you will be maintaining your settings, pages, and blog posts. This is made possible with WordPress

You may choose your premium template in a website such as ThemeForest. However, if you really want to really stand out in the crowd and you may also able to create your own custom WordPress template. WordPress provided a dedicated and well-documented support whats called WordPress codex that you can always refer to when needed during the template development.

8.Managing Admin Users Inside the Website

When you are website is using WordPress, in order for you to enter and make changes to your website, you will need your WordPress credentials. We call this the admin user, he/she will have the full control of the website. WordPress can handle an unlimited number of admin users.  This means you can collaborate with other developers, share your account with your clients and assign as a webmaster using a custom made login details.

WordPress User Page

In WordPress user page you edit, add and delete your users.

Having a separate admin account details will allow you to manage users for your purposes. For instance, this is particularly useful when you need to suspend an admin user, you can always demote a particular user to restrict their access to the website.

WordPress also records any activity happening inside the website. For example, if a user made changes to a particular article in your blog section, it is recorded and gives you the ability to revert back those changes. So you will know if other users are making changes to your website and prevent it if it making bad changes.

9. You Can Setup an Automatic Backup

Just like files in your computers, a website also needs a regular backup for your rainy days. You will never know when you need your older version of the website, this can be caused by hacking, outdated plugins, or even human errors. A website is made of many files, database SQL, images, text and coding, one element did not synchronize correctly can cause the website to break. This also makes backing up a website more complicated.

Through plugins in WordPress, you can easily set up an automatic backup. This means your website is automatically generating backup as you sleep. You can set up a weekly, monthly or even yearly backup this one is fully customizable to your preference.



10. One-click Install from Your Hosting Service

The modern way to put WordPress inside your hosting service is very simple to compare to the old days. In the past, you will need to have a basic understanding of adding SQL database and make a couple of setup routine to run your website on WordPress. But today, many modern hosting have integrated one-click install WordPress service due to the popularity of WordPress. It is hassle-free, within minutes you can have a website up and running (an empty website, you will still need to populate the content.

cPanel Look for One Click Install

Inside your cPanel it is fairly easy to add WordPress installation nowadays.

11. Options to Make Your Website to be Secure

Notice we didn’t say WordPress is secure? Because by default, it is possible to hack a WordPress website and it has commonly happened. However, the developers at WordPress has been diligently pushing updates to address these vulnerabilities. In addition to that, there is a 3rd party plugin that can make your WordPress extra secure, and it is free.

The recommended plugins for security is WordFence.

12. Capability to Transform Your Website to an eCommerce Website

Say for example you already have a blogging and company profile capabilities in your WordPress website. But your business has expanded and now you want to sell products on your website. Well with WordPress there’s no need for you to scrap your old website. WordPress is able to handle it.

The known plugins for eCommerce is WooCommerce (also developed by the same team who brought WordPress). Basically, it is a free plugin to transform your blogging website to an eCommerce website. WooCommerce is known among the developers’ communities, same as WordPress it also has an active community.

13. You’ll Find Many Resources to Learn WordPress CMS

Another great thing working with an open platform CMS, everybody can learn it, because the resources are available for free on the internet. You do not need to get a bachelor or a master degree or any formal education to master it, after all, all of the resources you need are available for free.

As a web consultant service provider, we are still also learning WordPress. Because the more we understand about the system the more questions and discovery we have, and the resources are pretty easy to find through a Google search.

Conclusion

WordPress is a versatile platform, whether it is for a company profile, eCommerce or blogging needs with WordPress it would be able to handle it.

As a website consultant, we will face a diversity of website needs from our clients, with WordPress capability we can ensure whatever the needs of their website can be handled with WordPress.

And some of our clients also do not like to keep in the dark, they wanted to understand what is happening behind-the-scenes to their website. And perhaps they want to understand how to make small changes to their website. Sometimes teaching them a full course on how to program may be impossible. But with WordPress, we would be able to provide all of the learning resources for our clients.

One final reason why we love WordPress is it allows your future improvements to your website. A particular problem most of our clients have, they do not like to swap from system to system. Or particularly re-train their employees and re-familiarize their people to a new system. Plus, most of the time it will require more budget and effort to swap to a new system. Therefore WordPress would make it be a wise choice for our clients and the most effective choice business-wise.

We have shared 13 reasons why we always recommend WordPress to our clients, we would like to hear from you. Do you agree or disagree with our statement? Let us know and comment below.