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No prizes for guessing that WordPress is one of the world’s most popular CMS platforms and recent estimates suggest that a massive 33% of websites across the world, run on WordPress. Think CMS and people think of WordPress. There is a reason for this or to put it more specifically, many reasons why WordPress towers over other website development platforms.
WordPress programmers are in love with this platform because it makes it easier for them to build small, as well as, large websites. They can become more productive by developing websites faster and more accurately than ever before.
But purely from a business perspective, what are the WordPress benefits that can help your business grow? Because you aren’t really interested in why developers love WordPress or why it is the most popular CMS in the world. What you are interested in is how will WordPress bring more value to your business.
Fair question.
Let’s find out some answers:
1. Flexible and Scalable to Meet Growing Business Needs
WordPress earned its stripes as a blogging platform in the good ol’ days when blogging fever (personal blogs) had taken hold of the public. Since then, it has evolved to support a range of online publishing use cases and is satisfying the website needs of diverse businesses irrespective of size, scale or scope.
One of its biggest benefits is that it can be used to build a small online store and can be scaled to meet the needs of huge, full-service ecommerce stores as well. It has very few limitations from the flexibility perspective and the people behind WordPress have taken cognizance of the fact that a business’ needs change and its website must be flexible and adaptable enough to walk hand-in-hand with these changes.
WordPress scalability can be appreciated by taking a look at some of the sites that are built on this platform. Names like MIT Sloan Management Review, Georgia State University, Rolling Stone, The Walt Disney Company, Vogue, and The Obama Foundation stand out but we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. If you take a closer look at these names, you will see that these websites need to be configured for growth.
Let’s look at WordPress scalability through an example:
If you have a website that delivers outsourcing services, and you see this website growing rapidly after a given point of time, your first to-do item will be to get a plan hosting plan with horizontal scaling. Something else you must do after your website traffic really takes off is make use of performance-enhancing plugins such as caching and optimization plugins. These include WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, and more along the same lines. The whole idea behind scalability is to get rid of traffic bottlenecks so that your website is able to deliver optimum performance 24×7, 365 days a year.
2. Themes, Themes and Even More Themes
A huge benefit for businesses is the never-ending themes that are available for WordPress. The sheer popularity of WordPress, has resulted in designers and design companies churning out themes that suit the needs of businesses irrespective of their domain, interest, preferences or expectations. This is a big plus, moreover these themes are designed by experts who are extremely proficient in producing the right kind of graphical interface that empowers the website
A WordPress theme defines the look and feel of your site, this includes design, layout, colors, navigation and other website elements that come together to offer an impressive user experience. There are themes available for technology sites, personal sites, culture-specific sites and so on and so forth.
Typically, the right theme is one that has the ideal feature set for a website belonging to your domain. Let’s take the example of a small business website. The right theme, in this particular case, should have the following features:
- WooCommerce integration
- Responsiveness
- Custom Widgets
- Image Sliders
- Header Layouts
- Active Customer Support
…… And anything else that ties in with your business website needs.
As a business owner, you might have a set of ideas around how the website should look like and the overall website experience it needs to deliver. You convey these thoughts to the WordPress developer. All a WordPress developer must do is go through the plethora of themes available on the market and show these to you. You pick the theme that suits you best.
You will have the option of choosing from free and premium WordPress themes.
No prizes for guessing that a free theme will have a limited set of features, while a premium theme will go the distance. Now, you might think, why should you pay more money when the theme is available for free.
Not a bad thought to have.
But consider this – many free themes are not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Also, most free themes offer really basic SEO, which is not good for any business website. And lastly, as we mentioned before, premium themes come with all the latest features, which will help your website stay ahead of its competitors.
3. Extend Functionality through Plugins
All WordPress sites that show superior functionality are empowered by plugins that deliver the features the website needs. Plugins offer specific functionality that website owners want their website to deliver.
Considering the ever-growing WordPress community, there is no dearth of plugins and there is one for every need. What’s more, any WordPress website is immediately compatible with any plugin; so, as a business owner, if you think you need a particular feature, all you need to do is go to WordPress or the plugin site, pick the plugin, install and enable it. There is no need to code it in, and hope that it performs seamlessly. It will do so, effortlessly, because that’s what WordPress is all about. And that’s not all – if you don’t need that functionality, all you must do is deactivate that plugin.
Here are some plugins that enable extended functionalities:
PushEngage
This is an ecommerce plugin that helps businesses leverage the power of push notifications and analytics tracking to drive sales.
OptinMonster
This is a marketing toolkit that can help you build your email list and reduce your website abandonment rate. The focus is on showing the right popup message to website visitors at the right time, to drive more conversions.
WPForms
Your website needs contact forms so that your prospects can get in touch with your business. With this WordPress forms builder creating a customer form is as easy as a simple drag and drop.
Remember, a website will evolve over time. This means you will activate/deactivate plugins throughout this lifecycle.
4. Built-in Content Centricity
A huge reason for migrating to WordPress is that it is a content management system and you therefore don’t have to worry one bit about ease of content publishing. All WordPress websites come with a blog feature that is easily accessible from all devices and which can be used at the back end to publish the blogs you want. Also, updating website copy and images is a breeze and website owners don’t really have to make any effort to make any change as they deem fit.
This ease of use from the content perspective means business owners are not developer-dependant when it comes to updating the website. They can take control of the site and optimize its use.
5. Ever Growing WordPress Community
This is one of the benefits that is unbeatable and incomparable. WordPress is a free and open source platform supported by a growing community of WordPress-loving developers and designers. They keep ensuring that the WordPress source files are up to date and secure. Also, if at any given point of time, they face any issue with WordPress, the larger community is always there to help. As a website owner, this will give you kind of confidence you need to make an investment in a WordPress site.
Website management is a complex task at the best of times and becomes all the more difficult when you are facing certain problems. As a business owner, you have a choice. You can go back to your website developer to sort out the problem or look through the free support, tips and advice available through the WordPress community. Choosing the latter (first) makes sense, as you might be able to sort out your problem free of cost.
As a business owner, you can go through the WordPress Codex and document pages to look for helpful tips on how to further improve website performance. You also get confidence in your WordPress website knowing there are so many people whose advice you can use if anything goes wrong.
Conclusion
If you already have a WordPress website, congratulations, you have made a wise decision, but if you don’t, you must use WordPress migration services and move your website to its new WordPress home.
