If WordPress is good enough for Beyoncé it’s good enough for us, right? Some of the biggest brands in the world (yes, the world) build their sites on WordPress. Facebook, Sony Music, MTV news, Beyoncé, PlayStation.blog, Microsoft news centre, Sweden, The Walt Disney Company, Time inc., NYT, M&S for business, the Mozilla blog, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Gazette online (we could go on and on). I mean, 29.4% of all websites use WordPress: popular much! It’s used for communication, selling online and as we mentioned the biggest brands online. Here’s the technical side though…
Open Source
So we’re all clear, open source means the code that a website is built on is freely available to everyone and can be redistributed and modified. So, that’s the technical stuff out the way but why is this a good thing? More than a billion of us use Facebook and it means they can’t just delete our content when they don’t like something! Facebook is a little different being a bit of a community but there are procedures in place so we can control our content on our pages at least, but we’ll come back to social media in a bit! It means whatever the site is if you’re posting content on there, you own it. The best part? WordPress is open source, this means you own your site at no extra licence cost and gives you freedom in being able to be super creative with your site.
Your Language
Did you know WordPress can be translated into more than 60 languages even though over 70% of WordPress sites are in English? It means your site can reach a truly global audience with WordPress’ mission of making publishing available to everyone a reality! Admittedly, you can’t do it automatically but it’s not complicated! Head to Settings » General and scroll to choose your site language. Currently, there are 62 languages fully translated and if you need the admin page still in English, we recommend English WordPress Admin to make life a little easier. There are hundreds of ways though to be able to translate text into your desired language and there isn’t a one way fits all either.
Customisable
Traditionally, most people probably think of WordPress as a blogging platform but, as we’ve mentioned, some of the world’s biggest brands build their platforms on it and it’s used to create a ton of different websites. It’s fully customisable, being open source and having a whole host of plugins means it can be tailored to fit a range of needs. It’s also uncomplicated to get started on which has helped make it super popular. You can change anything (yes really!) on your WordPress site, get traffic analytics, backups, be visible on Google and create user accounts. This last point is particularly useful to us because we can make our whole team a member so we can all work on our site. And not forgetting, all the plugins and themes that can be added on…
Plugins and themes
Think of a theme like a template that WordPress is providing. The layout of your site and where you find things are handed to you on a plate which is great to get started but with so many plugins available, it means you can tweak and personalise to your heart’s content. With the popularity of WordPress, it isn’t just them who are creating great plugins to make sure you get the most out of your site, but other companies and developers have produced premium themes professionally. When you install a plugin, we recommend spending a little time getting used to it and learning the available functions on this so you can add all your images and customise colours to fit your brand. And you don’t need to worry about it becoming outdated because WordPress automatically searches for updates so everything you install is as up to date as possible and is performing its best.
Yoast
We figured Yoast needed its own section because (for us at least!) it’s one of, if not the best WordPress plugin we can add to optimise our sites for search engines. You put all the hard work into creating a great site with design and development on WordPress so you want to make sure that it does well, gets found and you can reach your target audience. It helps us to see whether pages we have created and content we have worked hard on is good enough to publish and put into the public domain. We don’t need to count whether our keyword is mentioned enough, or it has high readability and helps us to optimise so it’s as good as it can be (check it out, you can thank us later!)
Social Media
These days everyone has at least one social network. And most of us have more than one. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest… I’m sure there are plenty I’ve missed and as individual platforms, they all provide different things and their own niche. Sometimes it can be difficult to connect your own site with your social media platforms, I mean who has the time to mention social media sites over and over again to help build your online profile right? These days, it almost seems second nature to look for social media icons on a web page so we can get a feel for who they really are and when we login in daily (it’s ok we do it too!) we can be reminded of our favourite brands which means we will inevitably end up scrolling through their site, it’s the circle of our online lives!
Scalability & performance
What does WordPress scalability mean? It means your site can work well with an increasing or expanding workload. It means when there’s more going on, your site can cope and still function how you need it to and load as quickly as possible. Not only do your users want a quick loading page (we can all have a tendency to be a little impatient when waiting for things to load!) but as designers, developers, coders and marketers we want/need it too! We can minimise code and clean up code to help make it super fast as this is something affects how the pages we work so hard on rank on Google. Having sites that are able to grow and cope with business growth is great because it means that your site will be able to run on many servers so you accommodate the amount of resources you have. It means when you have a spike in traffic there’s always a computer on standby to look after it!
Marketing automation
So content marketing automaton is going to help you get more traffic to your website, which in turns means you’re probably going to get more business. We all have a whole host of tools we use that help to make our lives a little easier, and being able to integrate CRM systems with your WordPress site so everything can be streamlined into one place is one of the most useful reasons WordPress has become so successful and popular. The client side of marketing automation and being able to have email list management from your WordPress site by embedding a signup so you can have easy access to any subscribers to your email! (don’t worry, we’ve got more information on this here!)
Security
WordPress sites are easy to protect. Quickly, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your WordPress site is as secure as possible. Making sure everything is updated, deleting things that aren’t used, creating unique passwords, managing administrator access and taking regular backups. Don’t worry though, security is a big thing and we protect ourselves as much as possible to avoid any data breaches but in case you need a little more information, you can grab this ebook!