WordPress is the biggest and most popular platform online. It’s currently powering 35% of the entire Internet, which means that over 455 million websites run on it. This is the best indicator that this platform is the greatest. At least, a huge number of people believe it to be this way.
Of course, WordPress is not perfect, but no platform truly is. Understanding both its strengths and weaknesses should help you decide whether it’s the CMS you want to use.
Why Is WordPress So Popular? Advantages
First of all, you need to understand just how big WordPress is. Over 600 new WordPress websites appear daily and every iteration of this CMS has millions of downloads. But the most important thing about the sheer scope of this platform is the plugins.
There are over 50,000 WordPress plugins available now and new ones appear all the time. These plugins allow you to do anything from customizing your website’s look to studying customer behavior. It’s the variety of these plugins that makes WordPress websites so flexible and easy to customize.
And customization is one of the biggest advantages of this CMS. Today, everyone strives to stand out. The fact that WordPress allows developing unique websites on an affordable platform is the main reason why it’s so popular.
Another reason is that for all its flexibility with design, this platform is very easy to use. You don’t need to have any coding knowledge to set up and manage a WP website. Ease of use is one of the main criteria for evaluating popular blogging platforms. All of the top ones allow you to set up a website without specialized knowledge. However, WordPress walks the fine line between being simple and yet not overly simplistic. This means that it allows you great customization capabilities but doesn’t require a lot of complex coding work.
Most importantly, whatever codes you might need to customize your WP blogs, you can easily find online. Simply follow the instructions and embed pieces of code into the pages. The process is straightforward and there are tons of resources that explain how to troubleshoot and fix any issue that might come up. Therefore, you can become your own webmaster even if you’ve never done anything like this before.
WordPress and SEO
SEO must be on your mind before you even think about creating a website. It must be one of your top considerations when you decide on its design and develop content. Therefore, the very platform you use should be optimized to offer the best SEO capabilities.
WordPress does exactly that. The platform is written using standard code, which ensures every website complies with Google’s ranking protocols. This means that even if you are using the most basic WP themes, your website will be SEO optimized by default.
You can then improve it further by using specialized plugins. There is also a detailed WP SEO guide every beginner blogger should read. It will help you optimize your website even better. Also, as this platform is so very popular, many of the top articles with SEO advice are written with WordPress in mind. Due to the high flexibility of the platform, you can also change and upgrade your website easily. Therefore, you will be able to adapt to frequent protocol changes and keep your SEO maximized.
Does WordPress Have Any Downsides?
WordPress might be the biggest and most popular platform, but it is not perfect. First of all, there is a big issue with WordPress security. Accessibility of this platform, which makes it so very popular, also makes it vulnerable. With WordPress code available in free access any hacker can use it to develop weapons against WP defenses.
Using multiple plugins also creates vulnerabilities as some of them might not be well-protected. They might also not integrate together well leaving gaps that hackers will use for attacks.
Overall, to keep your WordPress blog as secure as possible, you should use top-grade security software. You also need to choose your third-party elements very carefully and keep every element up to date at all times.
Another weakness of WordPress also comes from its greatest strength, which is customizability. This platform is easy to use, but if you want to use its capabilities to the maximum, you’ll need to go deeper. For example, WP is SEO-optimized by default. However, in order to tag your content there effectively you’ll need to learn how the tagging system works and how it’s perceived by Google.
Otherwise, the platform will tag some content automatically, and you will tag some of it by hand, and Google will downgrade the website seeing it as duplicate content.
Details like this mean that you’ll need to study WordPress beyond the basics to build a website that can succeed. However, considering the popularity of this platform, there are dozens of courses and a lot of free material to teach you all about it.