I’ve got several websites in various stages of completion at the moment, all of them using the WordPress content management system (CMS). A couple are moving from other “site builder” tools, such as Weebly and Wix, and I thought I’d share some of the reasons why I recommend WordPress to these site owners.

The 800 lb. website tool

Since its creation in 2003, WordPress has grown to be the most popular website creation tool on the web, powering fully 31% of all websites (as measured by W3Techs). While WordPress has a fair amount of name recognition, many people don’t realize that there are two very different “flavors” of WordPress. These are known informally as “WordPress.com” and “WordPress.org”. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, and only one (spoiler alert, it’s .org) is used by website developers such as myself.

So, what’s the diff?

WordPress.com is a site that will host your website for free or low cost, using WordPress software. It’s a good choice for someone who needs to get an informational site online quickly. As a hosted service, they provide a selection of themes (templates). They also take care of all maintenance, backups and updates, as well as providing very good performance and reliability.

WordPress.org is not a hosting site. Rather, it is a repository for the open source (free) WordPress software, themes and plugins, which can be downloaded for use on a self-hosted WordPress site. As the term implies, self-hosted means that you must provide a web hosting environment on which to install WordPress and then build a website. These hosting services are widely available and most have automated the process of installing WordPress. Once the software is installed, it operates much like WordPress.com (it’s the same software) but with many more capabilities.

Help me choose

The big advantage of WordPress.com is that it’s free and fast (also cheap and cheerful). The tools provided are best suited to informational sites and blogs. However, it’s only free if you don’t use your own domain name. Free sites will have an address like mysite.wordpress.com. You’ll need at minimum a Personal account (currently $48/year) to use a custom domain name. A Personal account also gets you email and chat support, basic themes and design customization, and removes ads from the interface.

A self-hosted WordPress site can support almost any type of website you can imagine. Software modules called plugins allow sites to perform tasks such as e-commerce, subscription memberships, file uploads and downloads, event calendars, etc. There are currently over 45,000 of these plugins listed in the WordPress.org plugin repository, most of which can be used for free. There are also thousands of themes available, both free and paid, that control the design of the site.

With the extreme flexibility of self-hosted WordPress sites, there necessarily comes added complexity. Even though installing WordPress on most hosts is a one-click process, many people need help getting an entire site up and running. There are also ongoing maintenance tasks, such as backups, site monitoring and keeping the software itself up to date. That said, WordPress provides capabilities that in the past would have taken hundreds of hours of web development time to implement on a single site. Being able to pick and choose modular features to plug into a common platform has revolutionized website development.

Top 5 reasons to use WordPress

1. Flexibility. WordPress is “open source software.” This means that the software – including the underlying programming code – is free for anyone to use, copy and modify in any way they choose. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright and the source code is usually hidden. From slideshows to document management to e-commerce, WordPress can do it all.
2. Content maintenance. When WordPress was released in 2003, most websites were programmed by hand, using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). WordPress eliminates the need for any kind of programming to maintain your site’s content. If you can use a word processor, you can manage a WordPress website – it’s that easy!
3. Themes. Themes control the overall look of your site, including its layout, colors and fonts. All Webdancers websites utilize responsive design themes, allowing the page elements to resize and realign themselves to look good on any screen size. Your visitor sees everything that they need to, with no horizontal scrolling. There is no need to build and maintain a separate “mobile” site.
4. Blogging. A powerful blog engine is available to promote information that is valuable to your site visitors. Regular and relevant updates to your site (whether you call it a blog or not) are key to capturing the attention of both human visitors and search engines.
5. Search Engine Optimization. WordPress websites are extremely attractive to search engines, increasing the ability of your customers to find you quickly. They make it easy to manage keyword placement in page titles, links, descriptions and meta-tags, as well as utilizing other behind-the-scenes optimization techniques.

Selly McSellface

Webdancers has been building WordPress sites for many years and recommends them for nearly all of our clients. We are happy to provide a free consultation to businesses and organizations who are looking to build a new site, update an existing site or convert a site from WordPress.com. We also provide web hosting and a full complement of support services.

Until next week.