November 1, 2022

Why WordPress?

IT Tips & Insights: WordPress has been the fastest growing content management system for 12 consecutive years for a reason. Learn why.

By Lucas Garcia, Software Engineer

WordPress started in 2003 out of a desire to build an elegant, well-architected, personal publishing system. It was originally built as a web publishing system (commonly called a content managing system, or CMS) based on posts that can be categorized and sorted by date. Developed in PHP, MySQL and GPL licensed, WordPress pays special attention to aesthetics, web standards and usability.

Initially used for the creation of blogs, which had their golden age in the last years of the last century, WordPress allowed anyone to have a way to share their thoughts, notes or news with the world through the Internet. Over the years, it has gained popularity not only because of its use in blogs, but due to its non-chronological static page manager that helps people and companies participate in the global web market.

WordPress is the most popular and used content management system in the world, supporting more than 43.3% of the websites on the Internet.

Main Features

WordPress is free and open source. This means that the source code is available to everyone. People from all over the world can study, modify and test WordPress. They can also contribute by reporting bugs and fixing problems if they wish. WordPress has a very active community that works hard to improve the platform with each new version, and this is undoubtedly one of the strongest points of the project.

Installation is super easy. WordPress is very friendly for beginners, with its famous five-minute installation wizard. Setup is easy and requires no technical skills. Also, most hosting providers offer a one-click installation.

It’s extremely versatile. WordPress was initially presented as a blogging platform that has evolved over the years, currently allowing it to be used to create any type of website: blogs, portfolios, educational websites, business websites or virtual stores.

It can be easily customized. WordPress contains over 50,000 plugins with different features or function lists to install and use. Among the most outstanding are those that allow you to add a photo gallery, convert a site into an e-commerce system, integrate a website with all social networks, improve positioning in Google, and many others.

WordPress is SEO ready. If you want to get a good ranking in search engines, you should pay attention to the SEO of your site. WordPress offers several plugins and features to help you improve the SEO of your website. Whether you have a blog or a business, your goal should always be to reach as many people as possible. Ignoring SEO will result in little traffic.

A strong focus on security. WordPress was built with security in mind. Your team works hard to keep the platform secure. But if you’re looking for extra security, on top of what’s built in, there are great plugins with more advanced features you can add. Keep in mind that keeping WordPress up to date is always the best idea. The security of the platform is constantly improving, so each new version is more secure than the previous one.

Facilitates e-commerce. E-commerce is a sale-purchase transaction that is carried out by digital means, on the internet. This is one of the industries that has grown the most in recent years, so having an online store has become a priority for many brands. However, certain specialized elements are needed (and security) that make it a bit complicated to carry out. WordPress has specific templates to create virtual stores without any problem or previous experience. There are also special plugins for this purpose, which can help the success of your store with little effort. 

Statistics

  • WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet. (W3Techs, 2022)
  • WordPress usage has increased an average of 12% per year since 2011. (W3Techs, 2022)
  • WordPress is used by 65.2% of all websites using a content management system. (W3Techs, 2022)
  • WordPress powers 36.28% of the top 1 million websites. (BuiltWith, 2022)
  • Roughly every two minutes, another top 10 million site starts using WordPress. (W3Techs, 2021)
  • WordPress has been the fastest growing content management system every year since 2010. (W3Techs, 2022)
  • In 2021, WordPress gained the most websites, adding 9.3% to its already impressive user base.
  • 20.4% of WordPress websites use WooCommerce. (W3Techs, 2022)

BIO

Hey, I’m Lucas Garcia. I live in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and I’ve been a frontend developer specialized in WordPress for more than 15 years. I currently work as a WordPress developer at Softensity, constantly learning from the team and the challenging projects I find myself collaborating on. Thank you for your time to read this entry. I am open to any comments or questions.

Join Softensity’s Team

BACK TO MAIN PAGE

Let’s Talk