Creating a website for your business can be a daunting task. Whether it’s your first-ever website as a new business, or you’re rebranding and your site could use a refresh. If you’re stuck at the beginning stages, you might be scouring the internet to learn how to actually build your website and stumble across WordPress. At Lion Spirit Media we love WordPress, and use it exclusively in all of our informational website builds, so today we’re going to tell you what it is, and why you should consider using it for your website.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source content management system, meaning anyone can use it. It was originally designed as a tool for building blogs, but over the years it’s expanded to a full website builder. Now, you can use WordPress to create any type of website, and using a variety of pre-built templates or custom coding they can look exactly as you want them to.
WordPress also has its own plugin store, which allows you to add functionality to the website in any way you want, from SEO plugins to security measures, social media integrations to payment options, so you really can do anything with it. WordPress prides itself on being intuitive and easy to use by anyone of any skill level – so much so that 43.3% of all the websites on the internet are built using WordPress.
What Are The Benefits Of WordPress?
There are quite literally hundreds of positive things we could say about WordPress. But since we don’t want to take up your entire day, here are some of the top benefits of using WordPress to build your website.
It’s Free
This is one of the big reasons, so many people initially choose WordPress, before they discover the other benefits. Unlike many other website builders that require subscriptions, WordPress is free to download, install, use and modify. You will never need to pay to use WordPress to build a website. However, you will need a domain name and web hosting, and these will cost you a small amount.
It’s Adaptable
One of the things we love most about WordPress is how customisable it is. Despite powering over 43% of the world’s websites, you’ll almost never find two that look the same. That’s thanks to the wide variety of themes and templates you can use for the basic design of your website, the drag-and-drop nature of the editor to move things around, and the range of plugins you can install to tweak the functionality and appearance. It’s like working with a ball of Play-Doh – it can be moulded into absolutely anything you can think of.
It Has A Huge Community Behind It
WordPress isn’t just one company providing a service. Because it’s open source, there is a huge community of developers who create add-ons and plugins for the platform. They make WordPress sites infinitely customisable, add accessibility and functionality, and give users the ability to create whatever they need. It also means there is a huge wealth of information available, so if you’re ever struggling with how to do something, there will be a free resource to help you fix the problem.
It’s SEO Friendly
SEO is a big factor in getting your website found online, and websites built using WordPress are a great way to start. Because there are a wide variety of SEO plugins you can use (our favourite is Rankmath), you can easily improve and boost your SEO across the site, with overarching improvements like mobile responsiveness and site speeds, as well as granular actions like internal linking suggestions and title and meta descriptions. It’s easy to set up and can even send you a report on how your content is performing each month
Downsides Of WordPress
Of course, like everything in life, there are downsides to WordPress, and we wouldn’t be giving you an impartial review if we didn’t talk about those too. A few of the key issues include:
Frequent Updating
Because WordPress uses plugins to provide so many of the features you love, you need to make sure they are all kept up to date. Each plugin will receive updates individually from the developer, so it’s your job to ensure you have updated your version to the latest. If you forget, this could break something on your website that you didn’t even realise, or leave you open to security risks. You can opt to have plugins automatically update, but this isn’t ideal for all users.
It’s A Target
Like all things on the internet, your website is always at risk of being hacked or spammed – but if you’re using WordPress then it’s slightly more likely. Because it’s so popular, WordPress websites are often a big target for hackers and spammers, which means you need to keep your security protocols up to date. If you leave comment sections open on web pages or your blog, you’re likely to get spammed multiple times a day.
It Can Be Slow
While there are a lot of different things that can slow your website down, being on WordPress will contribute to that lack of speed, especially if you use cheap hosting. You also need to be careful how much you add to your site as each plugin will slow it down a bit, so you need to make sure that the functionality they add is of benefit to your end user. It can be managed, but it takes some work to keep WordPress sites loading quickly. Fortunately, we have many years of experience in making sure WordPress sites run smoothly and even offer a WordPress maintenance service that includes fast hosting that is close to your users.
Did you know that Lion Spirit Media can help you with your website too? We don’t talk about it as much, but we love creating intuitive, easy-to-navigate websites that look good and perform well. We can create custom website designs for any project, and our team has years of experience in designing high-quality website concepts. And because we also have our own content writers in-house, we can handle the whole project from start to finish! If you’d like to know more about our web design services you can click here, or book a free consultation with our team to discuss your ideas.
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