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Posted By imartens
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Why You Might Use Alternative Website Platforms
For all sorts of reasons – say, a special offer came along, or someone gave you the platform ready-baked, or it was a bespoke tool jerry-rigged into the belly of your existing business systems (eg, a particular kind of ‘CRM’) – you might have found yourself with something other than a WordPress website.
All valid reasons perhaps, but WordPress is such a flexible and controllable platform, offering so much more than the above situations.
Furthermore, there might be niche needs – such as pre-configured shopping carts that have all the widgets that you need and will interact to complete your chores with a single button.
The Ubiquity of WordPress
Wordpress stands as the leading content management system (CMS) globally, powering over 43% of websites, which makes it the most used content-management system in the world.
In the world of website development and wordpress web design, it is a choice that offers wordpress website designers a lot of choices in terms of plugins and widget function extendability.
This extensive usage spans small personal blogs, intricate e-commerce sites, and significant corporate websites.
The widespread adoption of WordPress architecture signifies its robustness and versatility on a wide variety of websites, ranging from simple content sites and personal blogs to online stores and large-scale corporate sites.
For example, Google, Facebook, Disney, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and many others use WordPress to design and manage their sites. There are a number of reasons why WordPress is so popular and widely used.
WordPress vs. Other Platforms
Wix and Shopify are two of the most frequently used CMS (Content Management System) dashboards for site-building across all CMS platforms, as is WordPress. Joomla and Drupal require a higher degree of familiarity and comfort with HTML, CSS and PHP.
On the other hand, Shopify and Magento are more costly overall because of their monthly subscription and ongoing development expenses.
WordPress, conversely, enables you to have just as much functionality without needing to know even basic coding or programming. It’s possible as both a novice and an experienced user.
Key Statistics About WordPress
These statistics highlight why WordPress remains the top choice for web development services in Canada and globally.
This level of control is crucial for businesses aiming to maximize their web presence through web development services in Canada.
- WordPress holds 63.3% of the CMS market share.
- 43.2% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
- WordPress sites receive 20 billion views each month.
- The WordPress economy is projected to exceed $650 billion in growth by 2024.
10 Key Benefits of WordPress
1. Full Control with a Comprehensive Back-end Dashboard
If you are looking for a truly open solution – that is, one where you can control and manipulate the full development of your site’s content in order to make it work well for SEO, as well as for other purposes – WordPress provides an unmatched opportunity and access to all site functionality and integration possibilities.
This granular control is what set WordPress apart at the time of its inception, and still helps deliver the most powerful web content management system available today.
2. Google-friendly By Design
As long as you stay away from the templates exclusively, this essentially guaranteed that the back-end ‘dashboard’ and control panel of your WordPress site would be accessible by search engines such as Google.
This deliberate design fosters the deepest possible associations between site elements, content and the people who authored them, which has a singular effect on your site’s SEO.
While this might seem obvious, it’s important to make sure your hosting is optimized for WordPress (a.k.a ‘WordPress hosting’), and sure to interface with the WordPress dashboard.
3. Flexible and Adaptable to Changing Needs
And although it was created as a blogging tool – and for related forms of online publishing – WordPress is now used to run many different types of sites of much different scale and purpose, such as large multinational corporations and small businesses, as well as for personal blogs.
WordPress can serve as a full-service eCommerce store, a portfolio, or a social network, group or podcast. Whatever you need a company website to do, the ‘mobile out of the box’ core WordPress package plus an array of basic and premium plugins can satisfy.
What’s more, with an extensive supply of themes and access to source files, WordPress can be customized ad infinitum, to suit a company’s changing needs.
4. User-friendly—Even for Beginners
Another reason is that WordPress is user-friendly. It is designed in a way that next to no training is required to use it. You don’t need any knowledge of coding or other specialist skills because everything can be done visually. Using its visual editor, you can make content, edit it and publish it with ease.
It pretty much takes minutes to install a single-user WordPress site. All you need is a domain name and web hosting. Even if you aren’t technically savvy.
You can download it for free through your hosting provider, or directly from WordPress itself. From then on, it’s a matter of a very intuitive and easy-to-manage Admin dashboard where you learn, on the spot, to customize your site’s header and theme and begin to publish your pages and posts.
5. Themes Offer Multiple Options
Choose a WordPress theme, and the user can rapidly customize an individual blog site so that it looks distinctive, offering a complex and flexible functionality based on a wide range of themes: hundreds of completely free ones, and thousands more for sale in a thriving marketplace for premium themes.
Most of those themes are available for free from the WordPress theme directory, and thousands more can be bought from design marketplaces and third-party designers all over the world. You can even live-preview and install a theme at any time, meaning you can change the design and layout of your website with WordPress at any time you like.
6. Plugins Extend Functionality
Although WordPress comes equipped with all the features you need to create a default site, it is more likely that most users need very specific code done that specialized with your site’s needs.
This also allows a wordpress site to stay current with the latest trends in site design and functionalities.
The plugin directory for WordPress has hundreds of small bits of code – plugins – that can be downloaded and installed on any WordPress-compatible website to let you add everything from shopping carts to gallery displays, contact forms and more.
7. WordPress Sites Rank High
Searchability is important because sites with higher rankings on Google and other search engines are more easily found by those sites’ search algorithms.
WordPress sites tend to rank high for their chosen keywords for a couple of reasons: one is that they’re updated more frequently; another is that WordPress has a range of tools and plugins for SEO, or search engine optimization.
At the core of WordPress is the fact that every element within it is optimized for search engines. The code it generates is very clean and readable; it offers options for header tags, and meta titles and descriptions and URL slugs; and it has hundreds of plugins that relate specifically to search engine optimization.
This also makes it easier for search engines to find your site and index your pages, in turn leading to a better ranking on search engines.
8. WordPress Sites Are Mobile Responsive
As the use of mobile devices increases, so does the need for mobile responsive websites. A WordPress theme is designed to be mobile-friendly, which means that your site will render beautifully on all devices and dimensions of screens.
Equally, mobile-responsiveness – another factor recently introduced into Google rankings, meaning a site that can be browsed and performs well regardless of the end device is another consideration.
As well, WordPress has a compelling number of responsive themes to choose from or, if not, plenty of plugins between which to choose, plus a little editing of theme files to convert a static site.
9. WordPress Sites Have a Built-In Blog
WordPress being a content management system has many features added by the core team to make the publishing of content easier. One of them is an inbuilt blog module where you can create and manage blogs from anywhere, anytime, without having to create a blog extension registrar.
This embedded blog feature means that even those sites that are not primarily blogs can use it to provide updates, announcements or other content that might not fit so easily elsewhere, thus enhancing the flexibility and life of the site.
10. The WordPress Community Offers Support
I am including your own wordpress website designer and web developers in this group. They have been so conditioned to work with this platform that they can suggest additional site functionalities that you often won’t even think about to adapt into the general functionalities.
The content management system (CMS), which is both free and open source, benefits from a global enthusiast community to update the source files on a daily basis, keeping WordPress safe and in good condition.
User outreach is a key part of the WordPress community, too, with WordPress camps held all over the world and a growing list of localized WordPress user groups providing resources and help to users across the board.
More Benefits
Multilingual Capability
The WordPress framework natively supports the ability to build multilingual websites. This is especially useful if your organization has a global presence or catering for a multilingual community, allowing you to reach more users in wider audiences by having your content available in their native languages.
Cost-Effective
WordPress (the software) is open-source and free, which means you don’t have to pay for the software itself. Also, thousands of free themes and plugins are available to help you build and customize your site.
Ownership Control
This was the deciding factor for me. When you decide to use WordPress, ESPECIALLY THE BACKEND. This also means that you control your website’s SEO – regardless of who hosts it, what server it’s running on, or what services you’ve employed to assist you.
If you choose to have your website hosted by a hosting company, you have the power of changing to another host that suits your needs and preferences if things change. With WordPress, your site is truly yours.
This flexibility and control is even more than Wix or Shopify, for example, where your website can be held only on their servers. With WordPress, you can have it just the way you want to control it – not the other way around.
This flexibility and control is even more than Wix or Shopify, for example, where your website can be held only on their servers. With WordPress, you can have it just the way you want to control it – not the other way around.
E-commerce Functionality:
Although there are pure e-commerce solutions, you can create e-commerce sites easily by using the WordPress plugins like WooCommerce.
As suggested by the name, they provide a good deal of functionality so that you can sell just about anything and customize the whole experience to your tastes.
Scalability:
WordPress scales with your business, meaning your website can grow as your business grows. WordPress can handle a large amount of traffic, a huge database of content, and complex functionality without slowing down.
After all, this scalability means that WordPress can be used for everything from personal blogs to custom sites to mighty enterprise sites and also multi-user communities.
Integratability:
WordPress seamlessly works with dozens of external services, tools and platforms. It integrates with a host of popular marketing tools, analytics platforms, email marketing solutions, social media platforms and payment gateways.
This enables you to extend your website’s functionality and connect it to other tools and services that you use and prefer, improving its functionality and flexibility.
Multi-User Framework:
In terms of scalability, I mentioned that you can build a community within one framework. The ‘Multi-user’ admin framework in WordPress allows you to create entire online communities consisting of limitless websites, each with their own individual menus, navigation and sidebars.
This functionality is geared more towards larger-scale endeavors such as multiple sites but tied together by the same brand or organization or project.
It’s an expansion to a standard WordPress setup – an additional layer for greater flexibility and finer control over large networks of sites. You could build an online virtual mall for a group of similar purposed professionals.
Conclusion
WordPress’s versatility, ease of use, and extensive community support make it an excellent choice for small businesses looking to establish a strong online presence through web development services in Canada.
WordPress provides users with comprehensive control over their site’s content and SEO optimization, granting unparalleled access to all functionalities and connection options.
This level of control is crucial for businesses aiming to maximize their web presence through web development services in Canada.
Unless your business has some reason to go elsewhere, WordPress should be your default for locations, languages, websites of any size and for all your online needs. Yes, it’s that good.
Next Steps
Are you ready to give WordPress a try for your site? Here’s how you get started:
1. Pick a website name: Pick a unique and memorable domain name for your site that is reflective of your services.
2. Select a Hosting Provider: Pick a reliable hosting provider that offers WordPress hosting.
3. Install WordPress (Single Site or Multi-Site): Through your hosting provider’s CPanel one-click WordPress installation option or by downloading it from wordpress.org.
4. Customize your site: Pick a theme that fits your brand and add plugins to extend your site’s functionality.
5. Publish Awesome Stuff: Now, you need to add pages, posts, graphics and multimedia content – fantastic content that will pull people in and keep your plugins humming.
6. SEO-Friendly: Use SEO plugins and best practices to improve rankings on search engines.
Note: Multi-user sites take a little more work to configure, so contact an advisor or WordPress Support if you are having issues installing it and setting it up.
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