Why choose WordPress as a platform for your website?

Here at Stride, we love designing and building full-featured web sites for our clients. In the past few years we’ve created nearly 70 web sites for clients from Vermont to Alaska. We created the majority of those sites using the WordPress platform, and we’re now starting to convert some of our clients’ older HTML sites over to WordPress. Wondering why we prefer WordPress over other platforms? Read on to find out!

What exactly is WordPress?

WordPress.org and it’s parent company Automattic, have offered a free and open source blogging and content management system (CMS) since 2003. It’s a set of downloadable files that can be uploaded to your web host to form the backbone of your website.  There is, however, a lot more to WordPress than just files.

The open source nature of WordPress is key to its strength.

While there are somewhere around 550 employees at WordPress, there are thousands of people all over the world working to make it better every day. What’s more, there is a community of millions of web developers, designers, business owners, and bloggers using the tools, sharing their knowledge, and offering ideas to the people who are actively developing the platform. This results in a level of refinement and sophistication that was previously unobtainable within the budgets of small- and medium-sized businesses. The vast community is a wealth of knowledge for WordPress developers around the world, and as a result there is a robust community of capable developers worldwide. Gone are the days of struggling to find a developer to work on your website’s obscure framework.

A huge assortment of free and low-cost add-ons available

This same group of users and developers has also contributed to WordPress by developing apps — called ‘plugins’ — that run on the WordPress platform. There are many (currently 49,860) plugins available on WordpPess.org that can add all sorts of features to your web site, from simple Facebook integration to a full-fledged eCommerce shopping cart.

Easier maintenance

One of WordPress’s key features from a business owner’s perspective is how easy it is to create and edit the pages and posts of their site without needing to pay a web developer to do it for them. For the most part, if you can use a word processor, you can edit the pages of your site!

Better for SEO

WordPress sites in general have a very high level of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here at Stride, we build all of our sites so that the code is clean and easy for search-engines to crawl, and we make sure that non-technical users can maintain up-to-date SEO information like keyword-rich title tags, headlines, links, meta information and more. We also integrate Google Analytics into every site, so you can tell what keywords and content are driving the most traffic to your site and fine-tune your SEO based on real traffic data!

In addition, Google and other search engines prefer regularly-updated, “fresh” content. WordPress makes it as easy as pie to add new articles, company news, links to relevant industry articles, and other timely content to your site. Gone are the days where a site sits stagnant because it’s too difficult or costly to add content quickly and easily. WordPress empowers you to be a publishing powerhouse!

WordPress by the numbers:

WordPress is now the most popular platform for building web sites. Here are just a few of the statistics that demonstrate how dominant it is:
•    WordPress powers more than 27% of the web and it’s growing every day.
•    WordPress is over 14 years old, and has been constantly evolving since its inception
•    Among content management systems, WordPress has a marketshare of nearly 60%; the next closest CMS holds less than 7% marketshare!
•    50,000 WordPress.com websites are being launched daily
•    WordPress 4.6 has been downloaded 21.7 million times
•    74,652,825 sites use WordPress
•    WordPress sites around the world publish 24 posts per second
•    WordPress sites receive 22.17 billion monthly pageviews

Prominent companies using the WordPress platform for some of their web projects:

Sources:
    •    http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/wordpress-now-powers-22-percent-of-new-active-websites-in-the-us/
    •    http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
    •    http://leaderswest.com/2013/05/28/infographic-wordpress-has-66-of-the-cms-market/
    •    http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/29/wordpress-cms-crown-drupal-joomla/
    •    https://en.wordpress.com/notable-users/
    •    http://www.wpexplorer.com/name-brands-use-wordpress/
    •    https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/
    •    https://torquemag.io/2016/10/13-surprising-wordpress-statistics-updated-2016/