WordPress, it’s the big dog on campus powering over 20% of the market. With so much support and so many themes, it is one of the most widely supported options for entrepreneurs and business owners to build their website. However, just like anything there are pros and cons to using WordPress and even thought it is the market leader, it has it’s cons too. We decided to ask some entrepreneurs and business owners what they love and/or hate about WordPress (software).
#1 – Easy to Train
WordPress websites for entrepreneurs (easy to train): We love our WordPress website because it is incredibly easy to train our staff to use the platform, so they can make updates and add content themselves. There are so many free resources online which will help people to learn how to use WordPress, all of which are presented in a way that is easy to understand, that anyone with an internet access could learn the basics of the platform in a matter of hours, even if they've never had any experiences with websites previously.
Thanks to Max Robinson, Turnbull & Scott Heating!
#2 – Deploy New Websites Quickly
I like using WordPress because it helps me to deploy new websites quickly. We recently moved a 21 page website from a traditional host to WordPress. New design, mobile friendly and responsive, done within about 4 days. This is the third one for the company I work for. In addition, there are so many theme options and plugins it's easy to get a website with all the bells and whistles for next to nothing. (Yes I have web development experience: html, php, css)
Thanks to Teajai Kimsey, Crystal Structures Glazing!
#3 – Flexibility & Simplicity
Great blog idea! I'm probably a bit biased since our team specializes in building sites on WordPress, but having built websites for dozens of clients on platforms ranging from Shopify to Squarespace, WordPress is our go-to platform for (almost) any business that comes our way. My preferences for WordPress are largely based on the flexibility and simplicity of incorporating any elements that will improve user experience, search rankings, and website conversions through a massive resource of free (and paid) plugins than rarely take more than 5 minutes to set up. A few quick examples: (1) caching and image compression plugins make it easy to significantly improve site speed, and thus, search rankings (2) signup forms make it easy to quickly design a contact us form to drive website conversions (3) social share plugins make it easy for your readers to share your articles with the click of a button. The only scenario where I would recommend a platform other than WordPress would be for those looking to create an e-commerce business, as I personally feel that Shopify is much more seamless than the WordPress' WooCommerce plugin. Shopify makes it easy to edit product details, manage inventory, and track orders, and thus, should be considered for any ecommerce business.
Thanks to David Freund, Junto!
#4 – Easy Wins
For my business, being able to split test content and calls-to-action is a must. Every review guide that I create has tons of links, complicated comparison tables, images, and calls-to-action, and all of these elements are split-tested over time to maximize conversions. Before I was on WordPress, these tests were difficult to run and even harder to implement. But now, I’m able to set up a split test with a service like Optimizely in a matter of minutes, and execute the changes after the test has run on my own without needing to pay a developer. This opens me up to more testing, better conversions and ultimately more money. Split-testing different parts of your website can increase conversions by several percentages points, and when you extrapolate that over large amounts of traffic, this can mean serious money which would otherwise be left on the table. With WordPress these are easy wins, while other CMS I have used in the past made this prohibitively difficult.
Thanks to Remy Bernard, Miss Mamie’s Cupcakes!
#5 – Control in the Hands of the Owner
I love using WordPress because it puts control of the website in the hands of the owner. There is no need to contact the website designer for every little change or addition to the website. With an hour or two of basic training in how WordPress works, the user has full control of design, colors, layout, and fonts. Compared to Joomla, another CMS (content management system), WordPress is much easier to get up and running quickly. It is more intuitive with fields to change just about every aspect of the website. With thousands of templates available from Theme Forest, an entrepreneur can get a professional looking website online in a day. There are hundreds of plugins available to add cool features to WordPress. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of a website, and the plugin, SEO Yoast, is great for creating title and meta description tags. If you pair WordPress with an easy-to-learn graphics program, such as Canva.com or Adobe Spark, an entrepreneur can have full control of creating and maintaining a professional and beautiful website.
Thanks to Risa Borsykowsky, Jewish Gift Place!
#6 – Level of Customization
For the past few years, DIY platforms have been all the craze. Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc. They have the funding to promote themselves on television, trains and billboards. By doing so, they've become the poster child for web design, while true website development platforms such as WordPress take a backseat. When comparing WordPress to DIY platforms like SquareSpace or Wix, it's comparing apples to oranges. The flexibility of an open source platform such as WordPress allows for a level of customization that just is not possible with DIY websites. Sure, to DIY is cheaper, but it comes with a bigger price…limitations.
Thanks to Joe Jensen, SmartNet Solutions!
#7 – It's The Only Choice
WordPress is not just the best CMS option out there. We consider it to be the ONLY valid option out there for a variety of reasons, mainly: (1) Popularity – WordPress runs 27% of the Internet!. But we don’t just care about WordPress being the coolest CMS on the block. The fact that it’s the most popular CMS means: (2) Expertise: Need help designing/building/marketing a website? Hop on to Fiverr or Upwork and get the job done for $5 (3) Selection: You don’t need to be a web developer to build a website. Simply choose from the thousands of free or paid available WordPress themes or plugins out there. (4) Authority: WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform”. WordPress is used by brands like: The New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch and many other giants. (5) Plug & Play – With WordPress you can literally have a website up and running in 5 minutes (with their famous 5 minute install guide). (6) Open Source – WordPress is an open source platform, which means you can develop your own themes or plugins. Whether you need to customize your company’s website or upload a plugin to the WordPress marketplace, you can easily go about it. (7) Security – With such a huge ecosystem, you can bet that WordPress is a secure platform. Websites these days are constantly being targeted and hacked, so it’s best to rely on a proven platform, rather than taking matters to your own hands, which is where many websites fail. (8) SEO Optimized – Your website doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t show up on the major search engines (Google). WordPress is SEO optimized out of the box and has many excellent SEO plugins, which removes a lot of the manual SEO optimization and housekeeping required by search engines. (9)Automation – Because WordPress is Open Source, it makes your marketing & exposure much easier. With platforms such as IFTTT, you can easily make your latest website posts and updates show up on your biggest social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest…) automatically. I can go on and on, but you’re starting to get an idea why WordPress is the ONLY option as far as I (and 27% of the internet) are concerned.
Thanks to Rafael Hope, Amen V Amen!
# 8 – Out of the Box Plugins
As an owner of a small web development agency, I think that the biggest advantage that WordPress has is the number of out of the box plugins for every conceivable feature. Not only can you find these solutions, but they have already been tried and tested and bugs have been worked out. When I work with clients that insist on custom coding, time and cost overruns, and problems with bugs can really cause stress all round.
Thanks to Jason Lavis, Out of the Box Innovations Ltd.!
#9 – Accessibility
It is no secret that WordPress is highly versatile, very lightweight, and extremely scalable. These are all great reasons to choose the platform when selecting a CMS. However, the number one reason that we work with WordPress on more than 50% of our client's projects is *accessibility*. WordPress is a very user-friendly CMS. We love that once a project is complete, we are able to quickly and easily train anyone at the client's organization to effectively utilize WordPress for their needs. That includes the marketing and content department, the finance team, sales force, straight on up to the CEO. Any individual who must make use of the platform in their workflow can quickly and easily pick it up. In this way, we are able to equip the client to be very self-sufficient in regards to their online presence, and this is important to us because we believe in equipping our client's to succeed in the best way that we are able, rather than positioning ourselves as the gatekeepers to the online presence.
Thanks to Brendan Binger, Quarry Design Group!
#10 – Huge Community
What I love about using WordPress is that there is a huge community behind it. This is especially nice for entrepreneurs who aren't developers. There are thousands of professional themes that are simple to install and customize. Because WordPress is open source, I don't have to worry about not being able to accomplish a certain functionality or layout whereas on other hosted services you often hit limitations.
Thanks to Brandon Hassler, Market Campus!
#11 – A Number of Reasons
(1) Free: It's a great tool that you can use for any purpose for free. (2 ) Community: there's a huge community around WordPress and a massive usage. People are very demanding. That's why there's always updates, improvements, new features, etc. (3) Simplicity: Literally anyone can use WordPress, whether they have technical background or not. (4) Design: There's a lot of themes out there. You can find great ones for very low prices, or even for free. Most of them are responsive. It can help you to save tons a money and time. (5)Plugins: A lot of plugins to do almost everything: from SEO to emails collection, from landing pages to e-commerce, there's always a big chance to find a plugin. And most of the time, there's a free version. (6) API: WordPress has an API that you can use to read or write from/in. This makes it powerful, where you can use it for dynamic content to do almost anything you want, without a lot of effort. You can build a job board, a local search engine, an e-commerce website, etc. (7)Easy hosting: literally, with a click of a button, you can have your WordPress website up and running for a few dollars per month. No technical skills required. A lot of hosting providers have managed WordPress. You can even have one free account on Amazon for one year. The only thing that I don't like about WordPress is the fact that they don't support multilingualism natively. You have to use external plugins. I tried most of them. The only one that is good is WPML, but it's very heavy to customize and run.
Thanks to Saïd Radhouani, Nextal!
#12 – The Most Robust CMS
WordPress is the most robust content management system (CMS) out there. There's a bit of a learning curve but there are no other platforms that give you the level of customization that WordPress does. There are thousands of themes and plugins you can pick from that can help you achieve what you need to without writing a single line of code.
Thanks to Victor Kung, The Remote Lifestyle!
#13 – Intuitive & Pretty Easy
I love WordPress! I’m not a pro by any means and I built my company website myself which I think looks pretty smart and many of our clients ask who built it. I find it quite intuitive and pretty easy to get to grips with – much easier to use than other platforms like Joomla that just left me confused. Yes, there is a learning curve but there are so many themes (or templates) out there that you can buy or use for free that make structuring a page to look good really easy.
Thanks to Ben Doyle, Pet Checkers!
#14 – Perfect for the Non-Tech Savvy
WordPress is the perfect platform for people who aren’t overly tech savvy; it is remarkably simple to use, yet gives you the opportunity to create the website of your dreams. We love the look of our website – it is professional and on-brand, but is also incredibly easy to update and maintain. Our creative team is able to compose blogs on WordPress and schedule them to go live at any time in the future, and have no trouble in editing the post at a later date if they choose to.
Thanks to Murat Evin, The London School of Make-Up!
#15 – Silent Love Affair Between WordPress & Google
The first benefit of using WordPress that comes to my mind is the silent “love affair” between WordPress and Google. The well-structured content and the fact that WordPress based websites get updated regularly mean that you can rather easily get a good ranking in searches. Another benefit is that plugins allow users to keep the websites well optimized with plugins without having to actually know much about programming. Chances are that if you want to pull of something on WordPress but are not quite sure how, someone from the community will tell you “Oh, you can have a plugin for that.”
Thanks to Alex Bar, Third Temple Digital!
#16 – Time Being Sucked Away
As an SEO expert & Marketing Manager, I noticed my time being sucked away when creating and modifying static html pages for just testing strategies. I just wanted to build a website quickly, with low maintenance, and be able to optimize with the Search Engine's. The number one thing I loved about WordPress as a CMS versus all others is arsenal of themes and plugins. With more than 12,000+ WordPress themes & plugins on Envato's market alone; I was able to build Aquatic Magazine for less than $100 and 40 hours of my time. After 3 years of owning this domain, I was able to focus my strategies and change my business model from ad revenue to affiliate marketing to e-commerce; without having to do a complete restructure of the website. It now brings in a substantial amount of passive income while my content writers and vendors update through the backend without my help. So why would I choose any other CMS?
Thanks to Jesse Matz, Aquatic Magazine!