How do you know when WordPress is the right choice for your needs? First of all, don’t get confused by all the different types of platforms available. If your needs are small in scale, WordPress is likely a viable option for your business, personal website, blog, or other endeavor. Themes look and function better than ever before, most of the time exceeding the needs of the average website user. That means it’s no longer complicated or expensive to have your own site.

 

Advantages

So, what are the advantages of WordPress that will let you know if this platform is the right choice for you?

 

● User-Friendly: This is easily the best-known feature of WordPress because much of its operation can be figured out through trial and error. With the help of tutorials this platform is simple to get up and running and change as needed. Adding pages to a website, updating a blog post, tweaking a product description -- website owners can easily make these content changes themselves without having to spend money or time hiring a specialist.

 

● Popular: Popularity is important when it comes to content management systems because you want your CMS to be around for the long haul, instead of getting stuck down the road with limited options just because your CMS was discontinued.

 

● Themes & Plugins Galore: Themes and plugins make it easy to fit your WordPress site to your needs, but some platforms don’t have enough variety for all users. With WordPress that’s hardly the case because the selection is virtually endless. Major customizations to a theme can be costly, however, so keep that in mind.

 

● Easy eCommerce: Adding ecommerce to your WordPress website, or managing elements like sales, pricing and products, is simple with various plugins such as Woocommerce.

 

● Simple SEO: Although SEO gets a lot more complicated than the breadth of plugins, those like Yoast provide a simple and solid foundation for website optimization.

 

 

Wordpress v. Other CMSs

When it comes to other content management systems, you should be looking to decrease update frequency, increase cost-effective major customization and limit the occurrence of wonky-looking content. These are the downsides of WordPress, through your web developer likely has the knowledge to eliminate them at little cost to you. Wordpress remains the most popular CMS by far with over 140 million downloads, followed by Joomla and Drupal.

 

● Joomla: Drupal is the right choice if you want a blend of WordPress and Drupal. It’s more powerful than WordPress without being as difficult to manage as Drupal. It’s also free like Drupal, has a great help portal, and supports the simple setup of ecommerce; however, it’s arguably most well-known for being the easiest CMS with which to set up a social network for your website.

 

● Drupal: Drupal has stronger security than WordPress, hands down, which is why the White House uses it. Both WordPress and Drupal, on the other hand, have good starter themes for quick mobile development and responsive design, and both offer image regeneration via modules and plugins for example. SEO can be a problem with Drupal if your developer doesn’t know how to optimize your site, while WordPress is more foolproof. The other type of proofing you should be thinking about -- future-proofing -- is better supported by WordPress because updating is a simple process every three-to-four months, rather than the re-design-centric process of Drupal.

 

● Django: Django is actually a framework, not a CMS, the difference between the two being the audience: developers versus end-users. Still, Django is considered to have the tendencies of a CMS. It works best with websites that have complex needs such as non-standard data models, and with the right developer it can be much faster, maintainable and scalable than WordPress. When WordPress, Joomla or Drupal do not contain what your website or app needs -- such as support for major traffic -- it’s time to seek out the power and pragmatic, clean design of Django.

 

Well-Known Wordpress Websites

It’s easier to ask who isn’t using WordPress rather than who is … the list of big names truly is that long. Below are just a few of the key users.

 

● Jay Z

● UPS

● Sony

● eBay

● New York Times

● Rolling Stones

● Best Buy

● Reuters

● CNN

● GM

● Samsung

 

Contact us now to see how WordPress can take your online goals further.