Many years ago the team decided to choose one CMS -content management system- to manage our clients’ websites instead of using multiple CMSs or custom developed CMS for each website project. Our clients in Egypt sometimes ask for a particular CMS, or they ask for custom features that no CMS was able to afford.
The two main options were between using an open source content management system or using a commercial CMS, and after many trials, we decided to go with the liberty of the open source community. The options of the open-source CMS were between WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, and we chose WordPress for the following reasons:
1- Easy to Use
WordPress is the most comfortable dashboard to control your website if you are a webmaster. Drupal or Joomla maybe they were enough from a development point of view, but their dashboard panels weren’t fun and easy like WordPress. Webmasters and editors are having fun controlling their website without a steep learning curve. WordPress runs 30% of the websites on the Internet, with this fact in mind you always find tutorials and how-to videos all over YouTube, to boost your skills as a webmaster.
2- Search Engine Friendly
Search engines، like Google، love WordPress because of its simple and clean code, and the organized structure of the HTML components. Wordpress takes care to ideally locate your digital content in the right HTML tags, this way your webpage is eligible to be indexed by Google crawler.
SEO specialists prefer to use popular SEO plugins, like Yoast, to optimize their web pages for search engines, this kind of plugins help them to rank their website on the first page of Google.
3- The World of Plugins
Developers and webmasters can extend the functionality of their websites with the power of WordPress plugins. WordPress.org plugins received 1.2 billion total downloads so far. There are lots of plugins on the Internet, some of them are doing incredible tasks and functionality on the backend, and some of them add excellent features to the frontend. There is almost a plugin for everything, starting with security plugins, to SEO tools, editing tools, payment methods, e-commerce, marketing tools, and travel booking systems, you will find plenty of free plugins on WordPress.org and tons of premium plugins on marketplaces like Code Canyon.
4- Content Marketing
In minutes you can edit your content, website editors can easily write text paragraphs, and authors can upload new articles as many as they can. These days content marketing is a huge thing, 17 posts are published every second on WordPress sites around the world. Brands that don’t publish valuable content online, they won’t reach their targeted customers, and can’t drive much awareness to their marketing funnel. WordPress gives you control over your dynamic content, allows you to manage your images, videos and documents, empowering your visitors to know more about your brand and the services/products you sell, through freshly updated content.
5- Multiple Admins
Users management was one of the main reasons; why we chose to go with an open-source CMS instead of developing our own custom CMS, it was that WordPress could handle all kinds of role permissions and admin privileges for as many users you want to control your website. It is happening in a few minutes without writing any extra code or investing time worrying who manages what.
6- WordPress is Extremely Popular
The keyword “WordPress” gets googled around 2.8 million times every month. Approximately 19,500,000 websites on the entire web use WordPress. In the US (2014 data), WordPress is preferred by 50% of the users, with Drupal scooping up 17% and Joomla getting 6.44%. WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web. These numbers won’t make you worry to migrate your website from a developer to another, there are plenty of WP developers everywhere, and they won’t be stuck because there are a lot of learning materials online about WordPress and its plugins.
7- Security
WordPress as software needs to be updated regularly to avoid keeping old versions that could be vulnerable to threats. Using unauthorized plugins can hurt your website terrible. Always ask your developers to install security plugins, like WordFence, and UpDraft to secure and backup your content. Tech people may debate for hours if WordPress is the best secure CMS or not, I see differently, I know any software is vulnerable if the developers behind it didn’t take security and safety procedures.
WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web, many of them tun on old versions of WordPress that has no maintenance or support, that’s why hackers can easily spot these and attack. Always, keep your WordPress up to date.
8- Cost-effective
The backbone modules of a content management system are already well-developed with WordPress. Each new version the CMS is getting better, and for free! Developers don’t have to develop from scratch features like user management tools, editing tool, publishing tools, media libraries, SEO tools, and more, most of these features are already developed. Designers and developers are more concerned with the theme design and structure. They spend the time to establish a smooth user experience on mobile and desktop that perhaps needs some coding in the core features.
Finding ways to reduce the development time is always cost-effective, we achieve this by building our websites on WordPress.
9- Quick Launch / Lean Start
WordPress is an excellent tool to publish a quick business website to increase the chances for your customers to find you online. The sooner you launch, the more you will learn about and from your visitors. With WordPress, you can immediately create web pages and posts generating rich content to educate your customers about your services.
Since most of the core features are already developed with WordPress, the development time is getting less and less; this helps you to lean your business and proof concepts online.
Let’s Talk
We design elegant corporate websites every day with WordPress. Our team masters its core features and the power of its premium plugins. Let’s talk today if you are considering building your company's website with WordPress.