WordPress is software designed for everyone. It emphasizes accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use.
WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. WordPress powers over 39.6% of all the websites on the Internet in 2021. There are an estimated 64 million websites currently using WordPress. Over 400 million people visit WordPress websites every month. Yes, more than one in four websites that you visit are powered by WordPress. More than 660 new WordPress sites go live each and every day.
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WordPress Is Free and Open Source
It has a simple content management system. One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is that it’s free, open-source software. When it comes to software, open-source refers to a type of license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone for any purpose. On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. Just you will need to pay a little bit for hosting, you will never have to pay just to use the WordPress software. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website.
There is no need to have technical knowledge. Everyone can create an impressive website with the help of WordPress. Beyond that, you can also find lots of plugins and themes to change how your website looks and functions.
- WordPress is available in 57 languages.
- WordPress is the fastest-growing web publishing software.
- It also offers powerful features for growth and success.
Also read: Bluehost Vs Hostgator
The Power of WordPress
The goal of WordPress is to empower people, no matter where or who they are, to publish content online in whatever form they like. Want a simple website that displays a collection of blog posts next to a sidebar showing an author bio and a few pictures from your Instagram feed? Or maybe you need a more complicated state-of-the-art eCommerce store selling homemade artifacts with a payment solution that allows people to buy your products from anywhere in the world? Or perhaps you’re after a website for a service-based business, with a way for customers to make restaurant or railway ticket bookings online. No problem! With WordPress, you can put together almost any type of website you like!
WordPress plays a crucial role in the online business environment. The platform’s capabilities have encouraged companies of all sizes to move to it, leveling the playing field. The prime determiner of how effective your WordPress site is your creativity, not the money you have. This makes it possible even for small businesses to compete with large, global companies that enjoy massive marketing budgets.
Best of all, WordPress gives you the means to do all of this on your own: without having to hire a professional, and potentially very expensive — web designer.
WordPress Is Everywhere
WordPress is currently used to create and manage more than 39% of all websites.
Not only does WordPress now power over one in every four websites, it’s also used by many popular brands, including The New York Times, TED, Etsy, Whitehouse.gov, Reuters, Yelp, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, People, Forbes, UPS, eBay, Sony, and many. 34% of the world’s 10,000 most popular websites use WordPress. WordPress 4.9 is one of the most downloaded pieces of software in the world.
WordPress isn’t just for the do-it-yourself types, it is far from it. WordPress-powered websites span a range of sizes, from personal blogs that get just a few hundred visitors a week to multinational corporations boasting weekly traffic in the tens of millions.
What Kinds Of Websites Can WordPress Make?
Many years ago, WordPress was primarily a tool to create a blog, rather than more traditional websites. That hasn’t been true for a long time, though. Nowadays, there are changes to the core code, as well as WordPress’ massive ecosystem of plugins and themes, you can create any type of website with WordPress.
For example: not only does WordPress power a huge number of business sites and blogs, but it’s also the most popular way to create an eCommerce store as well!
With WordPress, you can create:
- Forums
- Blogs
- News sites
- Review sites
- Magazines
- Resumes
- Portfolios
- Membership sites
- Social networks
- Business websites
- eCommerce stores
Who Uses WordPress?
- WordPress is a very versatile platform. So, it is an ideal choice for businesses both large and small as well as individual bloggers.
- On an immediate note, we use WordPress! So the very site that you’re looking at right now is powered by WordPress.
Also read: Domain name
Why Use WordPress
Here are some points why use WordPress. Let’s go one by one.
♦ WordPress Is Extensible
The popularity of WordPress comes, in part, from how user-friendly it is! It enables everyday people to create their own websites. Once installed, you’ll find a dashboard that’s not only beautifully designed but also straightforward to use. However, the real power of WordPress isn’t its ease-of-use, its real power isn’t actually within it at all. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the true power of WordPress is in its incredible extendability. You see, WordPress is a system that’s been built to have all kinds of additional functionality added to it via themes and plugins.
Even if you aren’t a developer, you can easily modify your website thanks to WordPress’ huge community providing themes and plugins.
- Themes– are for a beautiful look of your website.
- Plugins– are for your website functions. Plugins can be something small, like a contact form, or huge, like creating an eCommerce store.
Currently, there are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins and 5,000 free WordPress themes, as well as tons of premium options to enhance your WordPress website. That is, we can say – we have plenty of choices!
Some of the plugins protect the site against spam. Akismet is one of the most popular WordPress plugins amongst WordPress bloggers which saves user’s time spent dealing with spam, one of the major nuisances on the internet today. Akismet stops spam every single hour!
Using plugins such as woo-commerce, you can launch an online store and grow your business. Using plugins such as BuddyPress, you can create a powerful social network on WordPress in no time.
♦ WordPress Is Easy To Install
You don’t need to be a tech genius to create your own website. Click a few buttons, and you can install WordPress on your site.
Nowadays, most web hosts either:
- Offer to preinstall WordPress for you so that your site is ready to go right away.
- Give you dedicated tools that make the install process very beginner-friendly.
- WordPress needs less than five minutes to install manually.
♦ WordPress is Flexible
WordPress is great because it lets you create pretty much any type of website. Better yet, your website can also evolve with you.
Want to add a forum to your existing WordPress site? Just install the bbPress plugin! Want to add a social network? No worries! Just use the BuddyPress plugin.
You’re never locked into a specific set of functions – you can always adapt and evolve.
When it was created in 2003, WordPress was simple, focused almost entirely on just one type of website: blogs. Everything has to start somewhere, but it wasn’t long before its horizons began to broaden. Nowadays, WordPress is far from just a blogging platform. It is combined with the added power of plugins, it’s now an extremely flexible piece of software that’s capable of powering almost any type of website.
Because of how easily it can be extended, many would argue it has become one of the most flexible content management systems ever created.
♦WordPress is Search Engine Friendly
WordPress is built with the best web standards. The source code is clean and valid HTML. Search engines consider your site important. Other than that, it supports metadata, tags, categories, SEO-friendly URLs. We can change permalinks as we want to show. It has SEO plugins that make the work easy. WordPress sites can be ranked easily.
♦ WordPress is Fast & Secure
To make the website fast and secure, its CMS is built with the best code standards. Hackers always find out the loopholes of the site to hack it. WordPress makes the job of hackers harder so we can rely on WordPress for security. There are regular updates.
♦ It’s Easy to Find WordPress Help
Because WordPress is so popular, it’s easy to find help if you ever run into any issues. There are so many-
- Blogs
- Forums
- Developers
- Tutorials
- Facebook Groups
that you can turn to for free and paid help if needed.
Who Develops WordPress
By now, you’re perhaps wondering who makes WordPress. Is WordPress a company? To explain, we need to cover the term ‘open source’. As we have seen above, open-source refers to a type of license. This means nobody really ‘owns’ WordPress.
It is developed and maintained by a number of developers. Many of whom are paid to work for WordPress by companies with interests in seeing it continue growing. Because of its open-source nature, thousands of people contribute to it every day, in all manner of ways.
Being open-source and having so many people working to make it better not only raises the WordPress experience of people across the board but also makes it a high-quality piece of software.
A Great Community
Every day, so many people join around the world to WordPress projects. Among them, some are developers, bloggers, basic users, and other contributors. WordPress has become home to all who are interested in WordPress. Like-minded people join the project and help develop it. It has become a huge community.
Because of this, WordPress receives good features, bug fixes, regular updates, and awesome support. At the WordPress support forums, you can ask a question and get so many answers that you need to resolve an issue of your site.
Here are some of the benefits that stem from having such a strong community:
- There are thousands of free themes for anybody to choose from.
- There are tens of thousands of free plugins.
- There is an ever-growing number of high-quality premium themes and plugins boasting all manner of features and great support.
- There are secure, stable, and frequent new developments and releases.
- It has a particularly active community forum.
- WordPress is available in all major languages.
How Much Does WordPress Cost?
Because of its open-source nature, WordPress itself, the software, is free to use.
However, there are other costs associated with creating a website that you should consider before starting. You’ll need to pay for some space on a server. Services that provide this space are called ‘website hosting services‘. Similarly, the address for your website, known as the domain name (such as thebestuknow.com), will also need to be paid for. These usually cost about $10 a year. Great places to buy these include Bluehost and Hostgator, or, better still, whichever web host you choose should be able to sell you one in addition to the necessary server space.
You may choose to buy a premium WordPress theme, which will cost around $50 to $70 or you may choose from free themes from WordPress.org.
Difference between WordPress.org and wordpress.com
For people new to WordPress, the two versions can be confusing. WordPress.org is meant for the WordPress software, which is a free, open-source CMS. You install it and host it on your own server. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a blogging platform based on the WordPress.org software. You can sign up for an account on it and have a working blog/website right away.
WordPress Is the Best and Easy Way to Build a Website
WordPress is the most popular way to build a website. If you want to build any type of website, from a blog to an eCommerce store, WordPress is a great option.
Just remember that self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com are not the same things. And, in most situations, self-hosted WordPress.org is what you want to build a website. Self-hosted WordPress.org gives you more ownership as well as access to all the perks and benefits of the WordPress community.
WordPress can be hosted on any server. But there are three officially recommended web host providers: Dreamhost, Bluehost, and SiteGround.
Conclusion
It’s no exaggeration to say that WordPress is an extremely powerful platform to launch almost any website with. It is used to power both small and large websites. It’s easy to use, flexible, with the added power of themes and plugins. You can create any type of website with the help of WordPress. It has a thriving community and is both free and open source. You can sell anything by creating an e-commerce website and collect the payments.
Anyone can create a website or blog easily. To create a website with WordPress, there is no need to learn technology, no need to be rich, only you should have dedication. That is, WordPress is all about putting the power to publish things online to help people.
