Why You Should Build Your Website in WordPress
By Grant Gegorski
One of the top questions we receive from new clients is “Why should I use WordPress as our website’s CMS (Content Management System)?” There is a very simple answer to this question because it is better. Our goal here today is to show you why WordPress is the world-wide leader in CMS technology.
One misconception about WordPress is that it is “just a blogging platform.” Though WordPress did begin as an option for blogging, it has grown since its inception in 2003 to a full-fledged content management system. With over 35.2% of websites worldwide running on WordPress, they have developed themselves into one of the top CMSs in the world.
What Is a CMS?
But before we talk about the benefits of using WordPress, let’s discuss exactly what a CMS is. Like how a Customer Relationship Management system manages all of your customer data, sales, and reports for your business pipeline, a CMS does the same thing for all of the content and data pertaining to your website.
A CMS is essentially a graphical interface where you can manage your website, build new pages for your site, and extract contact form data.
The Importance of Choosing the Right CMS
Choosing the right CMS system is like buying a new car; everyone has their own specific taste and wants to make sure they get certain features. There may be options that are absolutely needed, while others are just ones that you find cool. But in the end, everyone wants something that is reliable and that is going to last them a long time. With their flexibility, simplicity, and developer community, a website built within WordPress is GUARANTEED to be more reliable and last you longer than a website built in any other CMS.
The Benefits of a WordPress Site
Let’s look a little deeper into some of the benefits of a website built within WordPress…
- Flexibility – WordPress allows you the freedom to build any type of website. From an online store that sells custom handbags and purses, to a corporate website for a large-scale moving company, WordPress has everything needed to build the site easily.
- Simplicity – There is virtually no coding experience or technical knowledge needed to build your own WordPress site. Simple sites can be easily created on your own, or you can work with digital marketing companies, like ChoiceLocal, to build out a more robust user experience to drive business to you.
- Community – There is a massive support community for WordPress, as well as thousands of custom WordPress themes and plugins. Developers are constantly creating new plugins that will help you with things like photo galleries, contact forms, and social media integration. And due to this large development community, there are always answers available for any questions, documentation, and fixes to any issues that you may run into along the way.
The Cons of Using Another CMS
- Custom Coding – Some CMSs are proprietary systems that were specially built for your company and your website’s needs. Though this type of CMS has its advantages, they also have many disadvantages. The largest disadvantage of proprietary content management systems is their flexibility. Many of the options that would be pre-built within a WordPress plugin would need to be custom programmed by a developer within a proprietary system. This leads to a lot of additional expenses as time goes on and new features need to be custom-built.
- Updates – Ensuring that your website is up to date with general website standards is extremely important. Doing this makes sure that certain features work properly and that your website is also secure. Within other CMSs, updates may need to be done manually from a programmer, while WordPress has free updates for their CMS itself and all of their plugins as well too.
- Not User Friendly – CMSs are built differently to serve individual purposes. Due to this, some CMSs may not be the most user-friendly. Even making a simple change adding a new page can be a bigger hassle than it needs to be. WordPress has a very simple user interface that even the most novice the user could easily figure out.
At the end of the day, the most important feature that you should look for in any CMS is reliability. WordPress has proved to be the most reliable CMS system in the world over the past 17 years. Major corporations like TechCrunch, The Walt Disney Company, and The New York Times have all trusted their websites to WordPress.
Contact ChoiceLocal
For more information on how WordPress can help you and your company’s website efforts, contact ChoiceLocal today. We would be happy to give you all the information needed about how to move your current website into WordPress.
About the Autor
Grant Gegorski is a Digital Marketing Specialist at ChoiceLocal, working primarily with our moving and storage clients. In his free time, Grant enjoys spending time with his wife and his four-year-old son. He also enjoys drawing, writing, reading, and playing bass and guitar in his cover bands.