What is WordPress?
WordPress is a complete web publishing software package you can use to create your own blog or website. Since 2003 after release, WordPress has become one of the most fashionable web publishing platforms. Today it powers nearly 35% of the entire web, starting from hobby bloggers to some of the biggest online news sites.
But a lot of people don’t realize that WordPress is much more than just a blogging tool. It’s, in reality, a highly flexible content management system (CMS) that enables you to develop and manage your own website by using your web browser.
Best Part of WordPress is, it’s completely FREE and an Open Source Project. This means that thousands of volunteers from all around the world are constantly contributing and improving the code for the WordPress application suit. Moreover, thousands of free and commercial plugins, widgets, and themes are available that you can use to design any type of website you can imagine.
How Does the WordPress Work?
Since the earliest days of the Internet, websites are being designed with programming languages like HTML, CSS, and PHP to format text, display images, create page layouts, and so on. And then your web browser reads and interprets those codes to display the content of a particular web page. WordPress does all these backend coding tasks for you, while you provide instruction to WordPress through the GUI.
WordPress software can be installed on your own web server within 5 minutes. Once installed, you would be able to login to the backend of your website using your favorite web browser, then using the simple built-in editor you can create web pages. And it would not require you to have any coding knowledge for creating a simple web page. You can also use any of the hosting companies like WordPress.com and others who have WordPress pre-installed for you, and enable you to build and publish your website in a few clicks.
Why You Should Use WordPress?
The most attractive part of WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough for creating virtually anything you need in your website. This is the primary reason WordPress has grown so much in popularity. According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 22.5% of all websites on the internet.
Due to its rich feature sets, many of the top brands use WordPress to run their websites including but not limited to: Time Magazine, Sony, Disney, The New York Times, CNN, and more.
Now let’s take a closer look at the reasons why you should use WordPress for running your website.
Reason 1- WordPress is Free & Open Source:
WordPress is a free application, which means you are free to download, install, use, and modify it anyway. You can create any kind of website using it. It is also open source software, which means the source code of WordPress can be downloaded by anyone to study, learn, modify and play with.
There are currently 2800+ WordPress themes and 50,000+ plugins available for free. You can download, install, and use any of them on any website. And being community driven, you can expect to get free support from volunteers or other community members.
Reason 2 - WordPress is Easy to Learn & Use:
WordPress is currently used by millions of people and the count is still increasing day-by-day. The reason why people are switching to WordPress is that it is very simple to learn & use.
At our website (CertGuidance.com) you would find lots of tutorials written specifically for beginner level WordPress users. We have tried to put detailed and step by step process in each of the tutorials. To make you started here is a guide on how to install WordPress and link to lots of other WordPress tutorials.
If you face any WordPress related issue, you can search the internet or search our archives, and I'm sure that you will find helpful articles right away.
Reason 3 - Easy to Administer and Manage:
WordPress has integrated built-in updater that enables you to update your themes and plugins from within your WordPress admin dashboard. It also notifies you when there's a newer version of WordPress is available, so you can update it just with a click of a button. You can also keep all your WordPress content safe by backing up your WordPress installation either manually or by installing a plugin for automating backups.
Reason 4 - WordPress is Extendable by Using Themes & Plugins:
Majority of people using WordPress are neither programmers nor web designers. In fact, most people start using WordPress with no prior knowledge of designing websites.
The reason why WordPress is such an attractive option because there are thousands of free and premium templates (themes) and add-ons available to choose from, so you can give your website any look and functionality you want. In fact, there is a perfect theme available for every type of websites such as a photography website, magazine website, portfolio website, general purpose website, or an e-commerce website.
WordPress themes are easily customizable as almost all of them come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, background, upload logo, create beautiful sliders, and do other cool things with your website without requiring you to write a single line of code.
WordPress is super flexible and functionality can be even extended by using various plugins. Just like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available for you to add custom functionalities to your website. See our beginner's guide to managing WordPress plugins.
Reason 5 - WordPress is Safe & Secure:
WordPress is developed and coded with security in mind, and being open source everyone contributes to coding & patching to make it safer. So it's considered to be quite safe and secure to run any website. Also, several free and commercial plugins are available in the market to tighten the security of WordPress installation more than the default. Moreover, some hosting companies and CDN companies provide free tools to secure your WordPress enabled website.
Reason 6 - WordPress Supports Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
WordPress is quite SEO friendly and includes everything needs to support Search Engine Optimization (SEO). WordPress is written using standard high-quality codes and produces semantic mark-ups which make your site ready to be indexed by search engines.
Though WordPress is very much SEO Friendly, you can Optimize it even more by using any of the available WordPress SEO plugins. This is required for increasing your sites visibility and online presence.
Reason 7 - WordPress Can Handle Different Media Types:
Using WordPress you are not just restricted to writing text. It comes with built-in support for handling different types of images, audio, and video contents. Not only that, WordPress also supports Embedding contents from other websites like YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, facebook etc.
Which Type of Website You Can Create With WordPress:
As told earlier you will find themes for every purpose you want, and That’s True!!
WordPress opens the door of unlimited possibilities and can be used in numerous different ways. Our site is not just a blog, it is more of a training resource website, and we are running it on WordPress. WordPress can be used to create any of the following:
- Arcade
- Blog
- Business Website.
- Gallery
- Portfolio
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Rating Website
- Shopping Store
- Video Collection Site
- Membership Site
And So On….
Note that above lists few of the categories among how you can use WordPress. To see how other top of the line businesses are using WordPress, visit the WordPress Showcase.
We hope this article answered your question about what is WordPress and why you should use WordPress. But the only way to experience the true power of WordPress is by using it.
We hope that you have enjoyed the above article. Be with us to explore free training on Leading Technologies and Certifications.
Leave us some comments if you have any question about WordPress. Also, Give WordPress a try, and let us know what you think.
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