Here at Evenbound, we use WordPress for our own website and blog, and we almost always recommend our clients do so as well. For the purposes of digital marketing, WordPress really can't be beat, and as an all-around website building tool, most of the world agrees. More than 74 million sites on the internet are built through WordPress, making it by far the most popular content management system (CMS) available to anyone.
In case you're still not buying it, think about your favorite big-name websites: CNN, The New York Times, Ebay, BBC America, Bloomberg America, and even Facebook Newsroom. They all use WordPress. Oh and we forgot one: Beyoncé. That's right, Queen Bey herself uses WordPress to host her content, post recent updates, and keep her millions of fans informed.
All of these major players didn't just choose WordPress willy-nilly, either, they chose it for a reason. WordPress is easy to use, affordable, and already optimized for SEO, making it an obvious choice for a number of businesses, celebrities, and news stations looking for a comprehensive CMS that's totally customizable. But we don't want you to just pick up WordPress because it's what Beyoncé uses.
We're going to give you all the reasons why, as a firm who works heavily with website design, WordPress is the right choice for us and for our digital marketing clients:
It's Free
One of the most obvious benefits of WordPress is that it's free. While there are costs and fees associated with using WordPress if you choose to host with them, or upgrade to a higher-level template, anyone can create a WordPress site for free if they want to.
What's more, WordPress offers two versions of their services: WordPress.com for those of us who need something that's easy and functional for a personal blog or something that's relatively small, and WordPress.org for people who plan on hosting their website, purchasing a domain name, and running a business through their website. Either way, a WordPress site can be designed and built for little to no money at all.
Simple, Easy Hosting
Another benefit of WordPress is total hosting flexibility. Almost every hosting service out there supports WordPress, and if you have your own server space, you can self-host easily. There's no trouble with finding a compatible server or host, because it's built on free, open-source code that's easily hosted anywhere.
Optimized for Search Engines
One really attractive benefit that's made WordPress the obvious choice for us is that Google loves WordPress sites. WordPress uses exceptionally clean, easy-to-read code, which makes it simple for Google to index and crawl their sites.
WordPress also features a number of plugins that help you optimize your site yourself. The Yoast SEO Plugin is sort of the gold standard for search engine optimization. It allows you to customize your site title, meta description, title tag, and keyword, and then gives you an indication of how well that page will rank. Best of all, it's free too.
Easy to Maintain and Update
WordPress is a foolproof CMS that anyone can handle. We often have clients who would like to have control of their sites to be able to post their own company updates and make changes to content when it's necessary, and WordPress makes it easy for them to do so. It's easy to pick up and understand, and you don't need to know any code to make updates or post new content.
WordPress offers us a great option to hand over to our clients, as it's not intimidating, and empowers them to be able to use their own websites however they see fit. You can also set security updates and maintenance updates to occur automatically, so you know your site is always well-protected and technologically up-to-date.
Tons of Beautiful Design Options
More than just functionality, WordPress offers a ton of beautiful, clean design options. In a world where appearance and design can make the difference between you and the competition, WordPress makes it easy to stand out. They offer a number of customizable templates to best display your content, whether it's a weekly blog or an e-commerce site.
Fully Responsive Themes and Mobile Support
WordPress is up on each and every one of the Google Algorithm's preferences, which is why they offer a number of responsive themes that scale to fit the size of any screen. What's more, all WordPress sites are supported on mobile devices, meaning you won't miss out on traffic anywhere.
Flexibility and Customization
WordPress offers more than 50,000 free plugins, which means if there's anything you want your site to do, that you can't do as-is, there's probably a plugin to help you along. Whether you're looking to embed PDFs or add in another feature, like landing pages or calls to action, WordPress plugins are the solution, ensuring you can always shift or change your site's capabilities to fit your unique needs. Again, no coding necessary.
Supports Blogs
WordPress actually started out as a blogging platform, which means content marketing is in the CMS's blood. It's one of the best content management systems for blogging out there, which is why you'll see a ton of big-name news sites using it for their content development.
WordPress not only supports blogs, but makes it easy for you to update and change them, schedule them into the future, and share your blog posts to your social media accounts and regular followers.
Easily Connects to Social Media
When it comes to content marketing, promotion is equally as important as development, and WordPress knows that. They make it easy to link each of your company's social media accounts to your WordPress site, so you can easily share content and updates, and your site visitors can share, comment, like and otherwise engage with anything they really like on your site.
Analytics and Tracking
As digital marketers, analytics and tracking are our end-all-be-all. Analytics tell us where we're doing things right, and where we need to improve, so we love that WordPress offers those numbers freely and easily. Any WordPress site comes with an analytics panel that will tell you how many people have visited your site, and how often.
With the addition of one or two easy plugins, you can also track the success of your calls-to-action and landing pages, to see which of those are performing best, and which need a few tweaks. If you're looking to optimize the traffic to your site, WordPress is a powerful, free tool to take advantage of.
Easy Migration
While working on websites, WordPress makes our lives easier by making site migration a breeze. A number of our clients come to us with a clunky, older website that has content they'd like to preserve, but isn't updated, user-friendly or built in a modern CMS. WordPress makes it really easy to migrate that old site onto their framework, and give it an immediate facelift and boost in usability, without losing any of the content or authority of the old site.
Offers Familiarity for Consumers
Consumers love a website they don't have to think about. Since WordPress has been around for so long and is so prolific, most internet users intuitively know how a WordPress site functions, even if they don't know the site is built in WordPress. The menu placement is familiar, it's easy to navigate, it loads quickly, and consumers will find content where they expect it to be, which means people will be at ease on your WordPress site. They'll be comfortable there, and more likely to remain on the page if they already know how the site works.
Longevity
The ultimate benefit of WordPress is its longevity. It's already shown that it can adapt to changing consumer and internet demands, and with more than 74 million sites, WordPress has asserted itself as a CMS that's here to stay. You don't have to worry about it going out of style, or becoming irrelevant. WordPress regularly updates to maintain current code standards and will continue to do so, making it a safe, long-term investment for your website. It's easily customized for any new thing you'd like to do with your website, and best of all, it's Google-approved.
In the end, when we talk about WordPress, the first description that comes to mind is easy. It's easy to use, easy to implement, easy to change, easy to track, and easy to update. And if you're considering digital marketing at all, WordPress is definitely the first CMS to consider. It comes with a ton of SEO benefits built-in, and you'll be able to integrate any and all content marketing best practices with the touch of a button.
If you think WordPress might be the right CMS for you, but you're not quite sure how to get started, get in touch. We manage our own website on WordPress, as well as most of our clients' WordPress websites, so we can give you the help you need. Check out the case study below for more information about how a great website can help you move to the top of the market.
