When building a new website, one of the most critical early decisions you need to make is what platform to build it on. Each platform will have their own merits, with a significant number of advantages, and disadvantages to run through. There is however, despite the overwhelming number of options, a pretty clear industry leader. WordPress.
WordPress has evolved into one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) available. So, what is it that makes WordPress so widely adopted within so many business sectors, and within B2B professional services in particular.
Let’s take a look!
WordPress Accommodates Everyone
You don’t need several degrees and years of experience in web design to use WordPress. The barriers to entry are very low, such that anyone with a bit of common sense, and a bit of patience, can use WordPress and create a pretty damn good website.
There are so many themes, templates, and plugins that are seamlessly integrated into their platform, which make it so easy to find something that meets your business needs. Templates help you to find your style, themes can help you showcase your brand, and plugins will get into the nitty gritty of SEO, readability, or analytics tracking.
WordPress is also, however, a big favourite amongst specialist web design experts too. There are so many advanced tools that feature to create amazing custom website builds, which again can be setup to be extremely user friendly to the beginner.
SEO Is Prioritised
As is the case with anything on your website, SEO needs to be a high priority. Your website CMS has to have this priority too. WordPress is one of the best site builders you can use in the eyes of Google, as it has very simple, and very clean backend coding best practice.
Not only that, but there are countless integrated SEO plugins that come pre-installed, or that are available for free, that can help you nail the basics!
Extensive File Type Support
Being able to upload a huge array of file types to your website is a huge bonus. Isn’t it such a pain when you go to upload a video or image somewhere for it only to tell you the image type isn’t supported. WordPress has one of the longest lists of any CMS platform of supported file types.
And once again, there are countless plugins you can use to ensure that any files you’re uploading that perhaps aren’t well optimised, can be optimised automatically within the platform.
WordPress Is Super Scalable
Due to WordPress’s huge user base the platform is incredibly scalable. Let’s say you’re brand new in the accountancy space, and are a company of 1. You can build a website that can be easily managed and added too by yourself with basic templates and plugins.
After a few years your business has grown to 25 people, and you have the resources to bring in a web development expert to help to create and manage content for you. WordPress is so widely used there’s bound to be limitless options of who that person is, so you get a supremely competitive list of experts.
After several more years, you need to hire a bigger team to tackle your growing business demands. Once again you have the luxury of choice of more expert web developers who use WordPress, because it’s used by small, medium, and large agents alike. The platform is hugely friendly to all types of business demands, and is infinitely scalable because of its usage across the industry.
Whether it’s just you, or a group of 5000 people, WordPress can deliver a suitable platform to which your website can sit on.
WordPress Is Free and Open Source
WordPress can be downloaded and used for free. You will have to pay a web hosting fee, as you will with any website, which can range from a few £s to many hundreds of £s, but the CMS software itself is free.
It is also open source, which means anyone can contribute to it. The source code is built and contributed too by anyone and everyone. The result is that WordPress is constantly being developed and updated for every day use.
Let’s say a day arises where you require a certain functionality within your site. Unlike with many other platforms, which might not be open source, you have to wait for the CMS software developers themselves to find a solution to your problem. On WordPress you can create this new functionality entirely within your own remit. The same applies for everyone who uses WordPress, which means there are so many niche tools and functions that might already exist. Does that create security concerns though?
Security!
WordPress is a very secure CMS platform. Yes, there’s an argument to be made that closed source software is better protected than open source software. However, WordPress was built with security in mind.
Because of its wide adoption, there is a serious peer review scrutiny in place across WordPress’s open source code, and anything that doesn’t pass this intense scrutiny will be dealt with. Developers worldwide are constantly hunting out gaps in software where security breaches could occur, and ironing them out! If you’re majorly concerned about security, consider that the London and New York stock exchange both trade on open source software.
There are very advanced security protections in place, and it is very easy to acquire secure SSL certification to prevent cyber security threats. The main protection advice for WordPress specifically though, is to consistently update your software whenever there is an update available!
Final Thoughts
If you’d like to find out more about WordPress, and how Boss Digital can help with WordPress functionality for your business, please contact us here for a free consultation!
