7 Reasons to Use WordPress for your Website

WordPress is currently the world’s leading content management system (CMS) for a whole lot of reasons. Whether you’re setting up a website for your business or a personal site or blog, here are some of the top reasons to use WordPress to create and/or host your site.

  1. The Cost

WordPress is free to download and use, if you’re happy with basic features. There are costs for optional premium features, but in most cases these are superfluous. You can host your site indefinitely as yoursite.wordpress.com, but if you want to register a domain name you can buy one through WordPress for $18. This is definitely preferable to paying to register your domain, and still having to fork out a lot more for web design and hosting, unless you need very specific features that you can’t get through wordpress.

  1. Flexibility

The range of templates offered is massive, around 3000 at the moment, accommodating everything from personal blogs to e-commerce sites. Each theme isn’t fixed though, you can add or remove features depending on what you need.

  1. Open Source

This factors hugely into the flexibility side of things. Aside from the range of extensions and plugins available to users, you can edit the actual source code of your site. This allows users with a little more know-how a bit more freedom to customize their site. A lot of web designers use this to their advantage when creating a non-WordPress site because they can get the basic outline without having to buy code and edit it to suit their client’s needs.

  1. Integration

Another reason this is such popular host site is WordPress integration. You can integrate your Google Drive, Calendar and Gmail, as well as bulk mailing services like MailChimp, payment services for e-commerce sites and many others.

  1. Multiple Users

Some of the built in features of a typical WordPress site include facilitating multiple users. A single, or multiple admins with different access levels, editors, who can create and manage their own posts, as well as those of other users. Authors, who can create, manage and publish their own posts. Contributors who can create and manage, but not publish posts. Subscribers have minimal access, only editing their own profile.

  1. Scheduled publishing

Rather than having to log on and publish or upload posts, you can schedule them. This allows a lot more freedom for otherwise busy content creators, as they can create post ahead of schedule when they have the time, and set them to publish when needed.

  1. Customizable

A wide range of themes and open source code means you can customize your site however you like. It also means you’re not stuck with a single theme once your site is set up. If you feel people aren’t responding to the look or layout, you can change it. If you want to change it temporarily for an event or holiday, you can, then go back to your previous saved theme.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced designer, WordPress is a great option.