What is WordPress?
WordPress started as a simple blogging site, and yet it has developed into one of the largest platforms on the internet. With its first introduction back in 2003, WordPress has changed over the years. New features, such as plugins and themes, allow users to change content across the entire website with a single update. This dynamic functionality is what makes WordPress an effective content management system (CMS).
If you’re thinking of building a website for your small business, keep reading. I’ll lay out 5 ways having a WordPress website is the easiest and most dynamic way to interact with your audience. We’ll start with the obvious.
WordPress is Free
Yes, that’s right. It’s totally free, but it does require a domain name and a hosting account, both of which they provide through their platform. WordPress even offers premium themes and plugins to extend the functionality of your website. No matter what industry you’re in, you’ll find e-commerce plugins and extensions that will work for your business. You can always start with a blank canvas and build one for free with the Gutenberg editor; however, for the affordable price WordPress offers, there’s no reason why you can’t dive right into the exciting parts and customize your site with free and premium plugins.
Setup Is Quick and Easy
Setting up your WordPress website is faster than ever. When you purchase a website through the platform, it will walk you through a simple setup wizard where you’ll pick the domain name and hosting plan. Keeping it free is always an option, but you’ll receive a subdomain, which can be extra hard to rank for SEO. It’s always best to have your own domain. You’ll have complete control over the optimization and customization, and it’s really affordable with the monthly plan.
Nice, Clean User Interfaces
WordPress comes default with a nice, clean blog-style theme. The menus are minimal. The color palettes and basic. It can actually serve to build most websites, because it’s designed to showcase the features available in WordPress. But what about customization? Themes are pre-built templates that serve different industries and can be customized to fit any business. Each theme offers different features so make sure to play around with different themes before building out the rest of your website. You may find hidden features you didn’t know about simply by testing different themes.
SEO Customization
Search Engine Optimization is a term you will hear throughout 2021. Google’s coming update in June will be focusing more on user experience and relevancy. WordPress offers many plugins that can help you understand your website’s current SEO and ways to improve it. Things like key phrases and keywords are important for getting your website ranked, so hiring an expert in this field would be recommended for getting the most out of page ranking.
Plugins and Extensions
As we talked about before, plugins and extensions offer a way to extend the functionality of your website. Chat messengers allow your customers to chat with you in real-time. Pop-ups give you a way to grab the visitor’s attention with a discount, call-to-action, or minimal viable offer. Some plugins are free, and some are paid. WordPress has an extensive library of plugins, and if that’s not enough, you can always import your own custom plugin. However, unless you’re an expert I’d recommend sticking to WordPress for compatibility and support.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, WordPress offers the easiest CMS platform to host your business website. I, personally, host a website on WordPress (www.design48.studio), and it’s by far the easiest and cheapest solution I’ve found so far. Their pricing plans are affordable and their support is first-class. I’ll touch more on WordPress in future articles. If you have any questions, comment down below. We’d love to hear your thoughts!