So you’ve decided to create a website. You read an article or two, you’ve learned all the names – Magento, Drupal, WordPress, whatever – and you have a rather clear idea of what purposes your website should have and an outline for how it should look like. You need to face one of the most technologically important questions, right now: what CMS should I choose? With that many solutions the current market has to offer, in this article, we’ll take a closer look and focus on what makes WordPress stand out and what earned it the title of an unquestionable CMS leader of the past decade.

The Type of Your Website

First things first – it’s flexibility. With it’s open-source code and a thriving community of hundreds of thousands of people scattered around the world, I guarantee that any obstacle or a high requirement you could imagine was already faced and overcome by someone’s plugin or a piece of Stack Overflow-shared code. Whatever needs or expectations you might have, due to the high flexibility of this software, they probably already been met by someone in the past, which means you can use self-hosted WordPress for anything your heart desires. Is your website as simple as a portfolio or as elaborate as a store selling thousands of products – WordPress’s got you covered. Although some of the most complex goals might be met with the use of plugins (either free or paid), it is really difficult to find something WordPress won’t be able to handle, and successfully at that.

Cost efficiency

Due to the unfading popularity of WordPress (over half of the CMS-driven websites, over a third of all websites online indexed by Google), there are masses and masses of WordPress developers available on the market, which results in a very high competition. Thanks to that, it is easy to find an agency who is solid and reasonably-priced, as supply and demand drive each other here. Many people choose to develop themselves (and all of their websites) in specifically this technology. Since it’s one of the easiest to learn, working with it is quick and cost effective, making WordPress really stand out from its competition.

Ease of Use

The highly customizable user interfaces, limitless flexibility provided by the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, the translatability of management skills from one WordPress installation to the other, are all definite upsides of WordPress. You can integrate it with virtually all CMS-compatible software to achieve whatever you may please. WordPress works with multiple file types and you can tailor it in a way that will help you achieve your web development goals with grace and uncomparable ease. Powerful, easy, manageable – all that you should require from your website’s Content Management System. Since its code is open-source, you can customize it down to every single line of code, making sure it is directly tailored to your needs and used in the exact way you want to manage it. Most plugins need just a couple of clicks to install, while WordPress itself may be configured and set up in as little as 5 minutes. You can make it update its software automatically in the background and each change you introduce you can preview right away, before saving it permanently.

Security/SEO Features

Thanks to the countless plugins and other third-party code the vibrant community of WordPress provides, this software is also a leader in many important aspects such as Search Engine Optimisation or security. Constantly updated and developed, well-acclaimed plugins such as WordFence and Yoast SEO that are in constant development for the better part of the decade, make WordPress the most secure and the most SEO-friendly CMS available on the market. If you manage it properly, Google Bots will fall in love with your WordPress, while hackers will hate you as all their tricks and attempts will be as successful as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. If you are really SEO-savvy and positioning is one of your top priorities, you might consider using a plugin such as all-in-one SEO that can influence virtually everything that search engines take into consideration – with that sort of precision, and perhaps with a touch of appropriate guidance, you can position your business like with no other CMS.

What to Avoid

There are two things you need to pay attention to and avoid thoroughly whenever you work with WordPress. 

  1. First of all – do not ever consider using a third-party, neatly packaged, premium theme or a pagebuilder. They might seem cheaper at first, when comparing their prices with a customly-written theme, but they tend to be overpacked with unnecessary features you will never use that will slow down your website, and generate many costs when you invest in modifying them or maintenance. They can also be pretty restrictive, if you have a different vision in mind from what the theme author had years ago, when their code was written. 
  2. Secondly, you need to always avoid all unnecessary plugins, and use only the most popular and trusted ones. There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins available, many of them abandoned by their creators, which can cause a potential security vulnerability, unnecessary subscription fees, and simply slow down your website. 

WordPress Drawbacks?

Frankly, it is very difficult to think of any drawbacks that choosing WordPress could have. You can customize it to a really severe degree, all while enjoying the lowest development and maintenance cost, great ease of use, impressive SEO and security. As long as you don’t fall into any third-party code pitfalls, such as unnecessary plugins, paid themes or page builders, you should be fine. You just need to find a Web Development agency you can trust – and we will be here for you. WordPress remains the best CMS available still in 2019, after one and a half decade since its creation.

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