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Why WordPress? 6 Reasons It’s the Best Solution for Your Blog

Tags: wordpress

So, why WordPress?

Well before I answer that, are you considering starting a website or a blog?

Or perhaps you are also wondering if you should build your website with WordPress or use another content management system?

After all, you can pick from dozens of content management systems including Squarespace, Weebly, Drupal, Joomla! and even Medium.

Whatever type of website or blog you’re starting or building, WordPress is the ideal content management system to use, and you should almost always set up a self-hosted WordPress site.

It's ideal for starting a blog and author website.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system that was launched back in 2003. It powers 28.6% of all websites today, including some 80,000,000 blog posts (source).

Fifteen years is a long time in the software world, and WordPress works with all popular online services. It’s purpose-built for bloggers and businesses that want to start a website. Companies that use WordPress include Mashable and The New York Times.

Now, let’s cover the six reasons why WordPress is ideal for your small business or blog.

What is a Self-Hosted WordPress Website or Blog?

A self-hosted WordPress site allows you to control your hosting, domain name and WordPress itself.

Unlike sitting on the free WordPress.com platform, your self-hosted WordPress website or blog sits with a hosting provider of your choosing. You have complete control over the domain name, content and making changes yourself to the site itself.

With a self-hosted WordPress website or blog, you can sell books, courses and coaching, choose custom themes and so on.

1. WordPress is Fully Customizable

If you haven’t used WordPress before, you’re in for a treat.

You can choose from more than 5,000 free themes and 26,000 paid themes to change the look and feel of your blog or author website. Many of these WordPress themes are easy to use, professional looking and adaptable to your needs, as a creative professional.

What’s more, thanks to more than 50,000 plug-ins on WordPress, you can accomplish anything with your site from selling online courses or products and services to growing a popular blog.

The average premium theme costs just $59, which means you don’t need a stack of cash to build a professional website. And because WordPress and its themes and plug-ins are so easy to use, you can do all of this without knowing how to code.

2. You Control Your Site (Not Mark Zuckerberg)

Starting a page on a network like Facebook is a little like renting an apartment with a short-term lease.

At any moment, your landlord could change the terms and conditions of this lease, new people could move in beside you or your landlord could ask you to leave.

For example, Facebook displays advertising next to your posts or charges you money if you want to reach your audience.

On the other hand, with a self-hosted WordPress website, you have complete control over your site and what you want to do with it. You can communicate with readers in a way that suits you.

You don’t have to worry about advertising to communicate with your audience unless this is what you want.

3. WordPress is Easy to Use

I’m not a coder or developer, and I don’t like spending much time tinkering with HTML. Many owners of popular WordPress blogs feel the same.

After all, your time is probably better spent creating content or building relationships with your readers and customers than moving lines of code around .

The good news is you don’t need to know much with WordPress. It takes just five minutes or one click to install WordPress, depending on your hosting provider.

Then you can do almost everything with a plug-in or via the WordPress dashboard. And because WordPress has been around for so long, it’s gotten more reliable and intuitive over the years.

4. It’s Affordable

Let’s say you’re starting a restaurant.

You will need to figure out how much food to purchase (but not so much that your stock goes off or spoils), hire affordable staff, rent an attractive premise, advertise, work out your profit margins and so on.

Get any of this wrong, and there’s a good chance you will go out of business. . .quickly!

On the other hand, it’s quick, affordable and easy to start an online business with WordPress.

For less than $200, you can purchase a premium, fast WordPress hosting solution of your choosing. You can also buy a professional theme and get your business up and running.

You will have almost no overhead, at least at first. So, you have plenty of room to make mistakes and pivot the direction of your creative business.

5. WordPress Supports Great SEO Out of the Box

If you’re starting a new site and you don’t want to invest in paid or social media traffic, the best way to build your site is by optimising it for search engines like Google and Bing.

Let’s say you create a WordPress site that focuses on learning vipassana meditation.

Ideally, after you produce the right content, a customer or prospect will type “How to learn vipassana meditation” into a search engine, and content on your WordPress site will appear on page one.

Obviously it takes a bit of work to create great content, and you’ll need to promote your site too.

However, WordPress is built to rank highly in search engines, providing your content is good and you’ve optimized for search.

A WordPress SEO plug-in like Yoast! will guide you through many of the steps you need to take to improve the quality of your posts and rank highly in Google. It’s more difficult to rank highly on Google with other content management systems.

6. You Can Rely On a Large WordPress Community

Some of the boffins behind WordPress totalled up the development hours behind their system and came to 127 years.

What’s more, the company behind WordPress, Automattic, employs 940 people around the world.

They also run an event called WordCamp, which takes place in 70 cities in 65 countries. A large industry of theme developers and plug-in developers are behind WordPress via sites like Envato and Themeforest.

In short: if you have a problem with WordPress or a unique need, chances are  a solution is already available.

You can count on a large and helpful community to get support for WordPress.

WordPress is Ideal for Your Bog

I’ve built and managed several websites and blogs on WordPress.

By all means, write on Medium and connect with your audience. Or Facebook, Instagram and even Tumblr.

But you should still have a place or site you can call your own.

If you’re going to choose a content management system for your author website, creative business or blog, you might well choose the most popular content management system with a long tradition.

For those who ask “Why WordPress?”, my answer is, “It’s powerful, easy to use and can help you achieve your goals for your blog fast.

You can start a creative business and get your site up and running quickly without investing hours or thousands of dollars.”

I always recommend it as the ideal solution for starting a new website, coupled with a great hosting provider like Siteground.

The post Why WordPress? 6 Reasons It’s the Best Solution for Your Blog appeared first on Become a Writer Today.



This post first appeared on Become A Writer Today – A Blog About Writing, please read the originial post: here

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