In the past, building your own website was seen as too technical for the average user to handle on their own. You had to go out to expensive web designers who spoke an arcane language of abbreviations and tacked on exorbitant fees for technical jargon. Then you usually spent weeks waiting for the first pixel of progress to appear.
Demand for a better system drove a supply of software options and site builder tools geared to help laymen, small business owners, and entrepreneurs to try to develop their own websites. In time, WordPress emerged as one of the top contenders for website design.
It has continued to grow in popularity with people who want their own DIY website, as well as professional web designers who want to be able to offer their clients the best platform for website success.
To better understand why you should use WordPress for website design, we’ll need to take a granular look at some of its strengths and most popular features.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source web design platform that is free to use. It’s a great place to get started in designing your own website without having to sink a ton of money into overhead web design costs. It’s also a customizable content management system (CMS) with a very user-friendly interface.
Today it’s estimated that around 30% of all professional websites on the internet use WordPress as their primary web design platform. Not only does this encourage the development of extensions, and streamline support options, but it also means that there is a vast community of people with WordPress experience that you can connect with.
WordPress Is Incredibly Versatile
The versatility of WordPress and its intuitive interface mean that you can use it in a staggering variety of ways. WordPress can be used to design sites for:
- Small businesses
- Startups
- Bloggers
- Affiliate marketers
- Online classrooms
- Online stores
- Forums
- Social media outlets
- Non-Profit organizations
- And more
WordPress Has an Intuitive Interface
WordPress’ intuitive easy-to-use interface is arguably one of the things that have helped propel its success. Older web design software suites had a knack for letting you get only so far before you hit some sort of technical wall. Then you had to go out in search of an expert somewhere to help you.
WordPress was engineered to be easy to learn, and as your skills with it grow, you gain access to an increasing amount of customizable options. If you do run into an issue where you are beyond your technical depth, they offer great customer support. A large number of users, also makes it easy for you to tap into the experience of others to help you maximize your web design process.
WordPress Is Scalable
One of the great things about WordPress is its scalability. If you’re just getting your feet wet in the world of web design WordPress gets you off to a good start. Then as your site needs grow, it can easily scale with you to keep up with even high-volume content creators. It’s a content platform that can grow with you as your business grows. Start with 5 pages, grow to 5000 pages. WordPress can handle it.
A Vast Array of Plug-ins & Themes
WordPress expands its versatility and scalability by offering a vast array of themes and plug-ins for a truly custom-designed website. Their themes are template-based, which maintains their user-friendliness. You can set them up with your company’s colors and graphics to perfectly match your brand image.
These customizable templates also make it easy for you to create a wide array of test pages, landing pages, and unique product or service pages. It’s also great for times when you want to generate a specific event, generate new product awareness, or specifically target one demographic group for a specific promotion. There is virtually nothing that can’t be done with a proper plugin and theme combination.
WordPress offers an equally staggering array of plug-ins to optimize website performance as well as lets you customize your site’s functionality to meet your evolving needs. There are thousands of them available in the free version of WordPress, which gives you access without necessarily having to upgrade to the pay-for-premium WordPress service.
SEO Friendliness
WordPress came of age with state-of-the-art search engine optimization strategies. WordPress was specifically engineered to make best practices SEO easy. This includes a variety of popular SEO-enhancing plug-ins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and The SEO Framework, which popular search engines like Google and Bing prioritize. This makes it easier for WordPress-designed websites to organically rank higher than their competitors.
Their layout tools and content suggestions, with readability metrics, also make it easy for novice copywriters to develop high-quality content. This also lends toward the kind of easy indexing that crawlers prioritize.
Enhanced Security
One of the other great things about WordPress is that they might site security a priority at every level. Even if you are using their free level of service, you can trust that WordPress makes security a priority. This starts with enforcing strong passwords as well as implementing Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).
Of course, security threats on the internet are constantly evolving with more and more sophisticated forms of Malware, Ransomware, phishing schemes, and viruses. Fortunately, WordPress makes a proactive approach to keep up with the times, evolving its security protocols as new website security threats emerge.
WordPress Is Self-Hosting
WordPress is a self-hosting content management system. This means that you can host the site anywhere that you choose, without having to worry about some anonymous website host blocking your access for their own arcane reasons. Ultimately, it means that you own all your content free and clear, and you can choose to host it where you choose.
WordPress Is Blogger Friendly
One of the major strengths that propelled WordPress to being one of the world’s most popular web design platforms is its blogger-friendliness. They started out as a popular starting point for bloggers but didn’t sit on their laurels.
Their 2019 block editor update streamlines and empowers bloggers. It gives you total control over your blog pages, post layouts, and content. Along with visually stunning templates and design features to create user-friendly engaging blogs that rank well on organic searches.