Here are some WordPress Benefits You Need to Know
Whether you are new to eCommerce or have been using the internet for marketing, virtual storefronts, or communications with customers and clients, you might not be familiar with WordPress benefits for your foray into the online world. Not so long ago, websites were difficult to build and maintain, and the sites that did well took a lot of development, requiring knowledge of HTML coding, computer science degrees, and almost no time left in their day for a social life.
As web development has become a necessity rather than an extension of a business’s presence in the online world, you now have access to a very powerful tool to help build your business and deliver it to the world.
WordPress Platform: Ease of use
WordPress has allowed hundreds of millions of people access to web development, with more sites made daily with this tool than any other existing platform. One of the reasons for this is WordPress is surprisingly easy to use. Let’s examine why this CMS platform beats its competition regarding simplicity and user-friendly access to impressive design tools.
Advantages of WordPress Themes
When you envision your WordPress website, it usually follows a theme. Photographers and influencers might want their images to catch the attention of people browsing for photographs of interesting subjects and exotic locations.
Foodies might focus on graphics-heavy landing pages or galleries with close-up shots of delicious meals accompanied by recipes and stories about the culture and background of the food. Bloggers might focus on episodic storytelling, whereas businesses want the products they sell to be front and center for potential buyers.
WordPress gives you the benefit of being able to choose from hundreds of website themes. Photographers, influencers, bloggers, travelers, restauranteurs, and online boutiques can get lost in the number of themes tailored to their venture. With each theme comes functionality specific to that outlet.
From parallax scrolling and landing pages with full-page backgrounds to simple layouts that put the text and the story at the forefront of the site, site builders are no longer bound to the limitations of how well they can code a site. The template does all the work.
Themes also allow your site to keep up with the current aesthetic of next-generation web design. Unlike your competition, whose site still looks like it was created in the late 1990s.
Content creation tools: Block vs. Classic
With improvements in WordPress over the years, block-based page building means that you can simply point and click, drag and drop, and in a matter of minutes, you can start creating blocks of narrative text, inserting photos and galleries, or even gifs to brighten up your page. If you need more control over how your pages are built, you can switch to classic web design.
For the most part, block design builds pages just as well, with little guesswork regarding how your end product will turn out. It is easy to build pages quickly, and with the help of plugins, you can check the strength of your SEO as you go, from landing pages to blogs. Activate and deactivate pages as needed to keep your site current.
Media library
Your media library holds the graphics you want to include on your site. Once loaded, they can be used from any computer you use to log in to your WordPress site. You no longer have to be worried about hosting the images from your PC or server since they have been imported for future use. You can drag and drop your images into the media library where they will load and allow you to name and caption them, add metadata to improve search engine optimization, and include copyright information.
Your media library lets you quickly find your photos and graphics and add them to blocks on your pages seamlessly, whether it is a landing page, a blog post, or a featured image that loads automatically when you promote your page on social media. For the most part, people are visual learners, and media and graphics are a crucial part of good website creation and visitor retention. With a dedicated media library, you won’t experience the broken links and missing graphics of other web development platforms.
WordPress Websites offer Versatility
Even with so many themes available to help you start building your site, a WordPress benefit you will appreciate is how customizable your site is. Just because you pick a theme doesn’t mean you can’t make changes to suit your needs. You can activate and deactivate menus, and logos, and even customize your graphics (or leave them as they come standard) to create the site exactly the way you need it to be done.
Majority of website building for marketing
Some studies have shown that 62% of the top 100 fastest-growing websites use WordPress (Techjury.net, Oct 2022). Ease of use is just one of the WordPress benefits that have made it pretty much universal when it comes to web development. The tools are fairly intuitive to web-developer needs and to the newcomer to creating websites alike. Pages are created with a set-it-and-forget-it method that lets your site remain consistent and easier to maintain.
WordPress is very familiar to most web developers, especially in marketing. A less common or homegrown system will be more expensive, and WordPress won’t leave you high and dry if your web developer goes to a different job. Once the site is set, just about anyone can tackle updates and maintenance. Hiring bloggers to promote your online business site also means that they are more likely to understand how to write and publish content on WordPress.
Advantages of Blogging using WordPress
Creating content for your site and keeping it fresh improves your Search Engine Optimization. Since search engine traffic is constantly changing, blogs are some of the best ways to keep content current and allow your page to break into the top of the stack when it comes to results with search engines. Blogging is second nature to WordPress, with hundreds of millions of bloggers relying on WordPress to promote their content. WordPress even has its own community of bloggers who “Press” their stories and promote their sites through a dedicated online community.
You can choose to have a dedicated page to introduce your small business site, or more commonly, you can let your blog posts speak for you. Either can be selected in your settings to be the homepage people find when they access your content. Blogs are the most common landing page on a site, next to the About Me page. When you have constantly changing content, you are developing a relationship with your visitors. When the information is current and knowledgeable, you are giving them the trust and confidence they need to be a customer. Getting customers to build businesses and more traffic, whereas repeat customers create brands.
Appearance and presentation
When putting your best foot forward, WordPress benefits your business by its ability to play well with a variety of different web browsers, from Firefox to Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari. It also works well with different OS platforms such as iOS, Android, tablets, and desktop operating systems. One of the best tools in WordPress is the Preview function, which lets you see how your pages will appear on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops before you even publish.
As you create drafts on your web pages and even blog posts, WordPress allows you to keep track of your drafts. That way if you make a mistake, you can revert back to any number of drafts, reload, and start where you left off. The clean features of the various themes provide next-generation aesthetics that keep current with the websites of this era without looking clunky or shiny like the sites at the early beginnings of the internet. WordPress also works well with an assortment of accessibility programs for the visually impaired to help users with disabilities access your content.
Help is available
Since WordPress is so ubiquitous when it comes to website building and maintenance, you have nearly unlimited resources when it comes to technical support on building your site. A vast network of people experienced in building WordPress websites with a variety of different themes have produced tutorials, YouTube guides, and instructions on just about every aspect of WordPress. If you are one of those do-it-yourself website owners, you can find just about anything you need to work on your site with a few searches.
Another benefit is if your web designer changes, the next person you hire for your content management system than likely be familiar with how WordPress works. They can pick up where your last web designer left off without reinventing the wheel. The WordPress community is extremely useful when it comes to finding helpful information 24/7.
Build your business, build your WordPress Site
If you are running an online retail storefront or online marketing, WordPress is an important tool to have in your toolbox for virtually any website. Other platforms to build new a website, such as WooCommerce and Shopify, also take on this role, but both can be very expensive, especially for someone just starting with their business.
Storefronts: Other platforms allow you to create online catalogs filled with pictures, pricing, and a shopping cart. The good news is that WordPress also allows you to do this. It also gives you the flexibility of integration with other storefront sites such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and other e-commerce sites.
Inventory and pricing: You can keep track of your inventory, backorders, and other vital e-commerce requirements to make sure your customers stay happy, all through your WordPress site or e-commerce plugins.
Sell what you like: Whether it is a physical product such as soaps, gift baskets, auto parts, or any other physical product, you can operate your business website much like a store. The internet also allows sellers to distribute electronic material such as photography, voiceover work, digital services, eBooks, and client-exclusive content, all through an online store.
Functionality with Plugins
When you install WordPress, you’ll be introduced to plugins early on. Plugins are like little programs that work in conjunction with your website; think of the variety of different apps you might have on your phone. Plugins allow your website to have different functionality, depending on what you need your site to do. WordPress has thousands of free plugins and premium plugins that have been developed by third-party creators, some of which are free to install and use, and others might require a subscription. Here are some different types of plugins that will boost your site’s performance.
-
SEO: Search Engine Optimization is important when it comes to placement on a web search. These plugins can rate the content of your site based on keywords used, the frequency of the terms, and apply them to how a web search might be used to find your site. The better the score, the more likely your site is to appear at the top of a Google search. Common SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, JetPack, and Akismet are available.
-
Backup: You’ve put in a lot of work to build your site, and if your site were to crash or be hacked into, your backup would save you a lot of headaches when restoring your pages.
-
Security: Malware, hackers, and spambots are a constant threat to the integrity of your website. Security plugins allow you to block these attempts to steal your data and limit the danger to your site and customers.
-
Outreach, subscriptions, email campaigns, and promotions: Marketing is important to e-commerce, and reaching out to clients and customers keep you moving forward in building your brand. Some plugins allow you to create distribution lists, newsletters, and subscriptions to new content on your blogs to keep you in the back of your client’s mind for future business.
-
Social media: Much of the internet has been partitioned into social media. Sites such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and many others are almost synonymous with the internet to some users. These plugins let you reach those potential customers by linking your site to posts that appear on their social media feeds.
-
Analytics: If you want to know detailed information about the demographics of those accessing your site, you want to use analytics. These statistics break down how many visits your site has had as well as information such as age, gender, location, and a lot of other information. This way you can make changes to the way you deliver your content to appeal to your audience.
-
Widgets and customization: Widgets are similar to plugins in that they allow different functionality on your site. But widgets allow users of your site to interact with you, from donation buttons, links to ads and other monetization, subscription forms, social media links, shopping carts, and other features.
Monetization
One of the benefits of having a website is the potential for passive income. This method of income creation relies on a slow trickle of funds that can come from all sorts of different sources. Ads, affiliate marketing sponsors, and Clicks Per Minute (CPM) are ways aside from products you sell. So even if you aren’t building a storefront to sell physical items or electronic items, it is possible to use your site to create income in other ways.
Popular sites can generate income simply from the number of visitors to the site or by clicking on a link that takes them to another site, providing you with a kick-back for spreading awareness.
WordPress benefits its users by allowing ease of access to a large scope of monetization solutions. Whether it is through the WordPress ads plugin or the ease with which you can apply code provided by affiliates who want you to represent their product, WordPress has you covered. An interface WordPress makes even allows you to see how well your monetization is going, whether it is from ads published on your site through WordPress or CPM.
Othe Content Management System Platforms
WordPress isn’t just a blogging platform it’s an open-source platform. Other sites have come and gone over the years, whereas WordPress continues to remain strong and consistent. Not long ago, you needed to use DreamWeaver, HTML coding, or another application to build your site. Other website platforms, especially for blogging content, have gone by the wayside, and even then, WordPress often integrates well with them with the use of plugins.
Shopify is the next most commonly used web development tool, and it works with your existing WordPress site if needed. Wix, Squarespace, Name.com, GoDaddy, and a variety of other website-building platforms also allow you to use WordPress to build and configure your site.
WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com: advantages and disadvantages
There is a bit of confusion when it comes to these two platforms. Not all WordPress sites are the same. The dot com WordPress is a free platform that allows you to host your site on WordPress. You can buy a dedicated domain name, plugins, and other features, but the site is kept on WordPress’s servers. This might limit your ability to run different kinds of ads, affiliate marketing may be limited, and it may be difficult to rank on Google without a dedicated site.
WordPress.org sites are when you use a self-hosted WordPress platform to create and build your site with its own domain hosted by an outside provider. You have more freedom when it comes to ad creation, distribution, and affiliate marketing, and the site is hosted on servers outside WordPress, such as BlueHost, Wix, or many others. Depending on the features you need, dedicated hosting with WordPress as your web development platform may be more expensive, with the trade-off of limiting your ability to monetize.
The standard package with a WordPress.com site may include free domain registration, plugins such as JetPack, SSL, and firewall protection. In contrast, a WordPress.org site may require you to subscribe to those services separately, oftentimes for an annual fee. It can be a little bit confusing to website owners since the interface and the method to build your site is based on the same program, but its functionality might be very different depending on how you need your site to be used.
The WordPress Blogging Platform Advantage
These are just some ways WordPress benefits your ability to build, maintain, and promote your website. While there are advantages and disadvantages, WordPress websites often rank higher than most websites. With a whole constellation of widgets, plugins, and a worldwide community of other users happy to help, you might see why WordPress has quickly become one of the easiest and most popular web development platforms.
Contact Digital Neighbor – SEO Agency if you would like to learn more about how WordPress can benefit your business and change how you access the internet. We are here to help you succeed in a growing market with the stiff competition of hundreds of millions of internet users and more starting every day.
