If you’re starting or running a small business, chances are you already have a website that was developed some time ago. If not, then you’re definitely thinking about one because it’s not something you can afford not to have in the digital age. A website is what a business uses to represent their brand and to quickly show off what unique values they can bring to the table. It is your online business card.
Running a small business takes up a lot of time, energy and resources, so the last thing you want to do is start learning how to code a website. In the past, you would have had to hire a developer just to create a simple website or to make a few minor changes to its content. Though you might still want to hire one if you really want to spare your time, you can already create your own professional looking website with minimal or no technical knowledge at all. WordPress is your best option for making that happen. It is the ideal platform for creating and maintaining your small business’ website or blog.
Making your business survive in today’s challenging market is tough. For the majority of business owners and entrepreneurs, taking care of a website is a pretty daunting task. It requires constant optimization, updates and other regular duties. You don’t just have to create a website but maintain it. This is where WordPress really shines. Busy entrepreneurs will not only be able to manage their website but also have the creative freedom to build it the way they want it. They can create the look and feel they want for their website without having to hire a developer to do it for them.
About every 4th website on the web is created with WordPress which makes more than 78+ million websites on the web. According to Builtwith.com, more than 50% of the top 1 million websites are running on WordPress.
It is an open-source platform that anyone can download for free and use. It is an incredibly flexible system that can always adapt to the new challenges of the digital world.
There are thousands of plugins that extend its functional capabilities and thousands of themes that allow users to design their website. You can easily run a blog, keep your site updated and running smoothly without investing too much time into it.
WordPress has made a name for itself as the most user-friendly CMS on the web. You can make anything you want out of it whether it’s a blog, an online shop or a simple business website. Here are some of the most prominent reasons to use WordPress for creating your website.
1. WordPress is Completely Free
Being an open-source content management system, you can use the core system and hundreds of its plugins without paying a dime. If you’re a small business owner, you’re probably looking to set up a business website with a minimal upfront cost. This platform lets you do just that, as it has already convinced many business owners by sparing their time and money as well.
2. Has Plenty of Free Themes, Plugins and Frameworks
Sure, it’s hard to believe that you can create a high-quality website and walk away without paying a dime. You will definitely have a much better website and have an easier job with a premium theme and some premium plugins. But you still have hundreds of free themes and plugins that you can download and use. If you’re lucky enough to find the perfect fit for your website for free, than it can spare you hundreds of dollars.
WordPress is the foundation you build your website upon. Your themes and plugins are the tools you choose to build it with.
3. Inexpensive Premium Themes & Plugins
Premium themes cost around $60 and usually come with tons of features that free themes do not have. Most of them have their own visual site building interfaces that let you create a website from simple drag and drop elements. One of my favorite premium theme is Divi by ElegantThemes, which comes with a very intuitive builder, which allows customizing your website as you want without touching the code.
These are the perfect choice for beginner users as it allows them to create a beautiful website without knowing much about how to code. You can easily find a theme that will be a good fit for your technical experience.
Premium plugins help you the same way, as they provide you with advanced features for SEO and marketing to help you keep ahead of the competition.
4. WordPress is Very User Friendly
You can easily find plenty of other open-source platforms for free, but none of them is as user friendly as WordPress. It is simply the best at making your job easier. You’ll see a simple and convenient dashboard right after you install it with one click. You don’t need to be an expert in handling servers or developing websites. All you need to do is find WordPress in your hosting provider’s control panel and run the installation. You have a self-hosted option that you can use for free, but it isn’t something you should build your website upon because it’s slow. It is however a great way to see if the system works for you.
Once you have your website running, you can easily add posts, make modifications, and install plugins and themes. Enjoy complete creative freedom through one of the most comprehensive dashboards mankind has ever known.
The entire platform is created so that non-technical users can make the most of it. This is what drives its success and makes it so highly demanded all over the globe.
5. Great Community Support & Documentation
WordPress has a massive community of millions of users and an outstanding online support system. Thanks to them, skilled developers and plenty of online discussion forums, you can find the solution to every problem you would come across. Anything that you might need to solve has been solved by someone else before you. That someone has either made a forum post or better yet, made a blog post or a tutorial about your specific problem.
Most WordPress blogs post tips and guides almost every day. There is an ocean of information waiting for you to make use of it. So if you want to add anything new to your site or have a question, you only have to do a few minutes of searching.
6. High Variety of Themes
Whatever business you’re running, whether it’s a convenience store, a yoga club or a gym, you’ll easily find a theme that suits it. WordPress has been around for more than 15 years now and it has tens of thousands of themes. Not only can you find themes for every particular industry, but you have a lot to choose from. You’ll find it very easy to come across the theme that perfectly reflects your business and how you run it. At WordPress.org you can find all the free themes you need. If you don’t find what you need on these then go to Themeforest to get the best premium theme for your website. There is literally nothing holding you back from getting the design that your website requires.
7. It’s Easy To Scale
WordPress can easily be scaled according to your business’ needs. You don’t have to pay an additional fee when you reach a certain level of traffic or you want to expand your website. It’s like a video game purchase. Once you have it, you can use it for life. To setup a WordPress site, you will need to purchase a domain and hosting. Hosting will cost you about $5 per month, while a domain name around $10 per year.
If business is running smoothly and you require some additional features, like a chatbot, a form, or to let users make orders from your website, you can do it pretty easily. There is definitely a free or a premium plugin that will let you add the features you want without a hassle.
8. WordPress is Search Engine Friendly
One of the greatest challenge for a business website in the online world is for it to come up as high as possible on Google’s search results. Making your website succeed in search engines requires you to optimize your pages. That’s a demanding task, but you don’t have to do it if you use WordPress. It is SE friendly right out of the box and Google likes it very much. The structure it follows is already acknowledged every major search engine on the web, making your job a lot easier. All you need to do is optimize your content if you decide to publish articles on your site.
You can also improve on your SEO and have a lot of help with content optimization if you use a few plugins. There are also tons of great guides that you can follow to make the most of your website’s search engine optimization.
9. WordPress is Mobile Compatible
With mobile devices being one of the most important things we take around with ourselves, it has become infinitely important to optimize our websites for them. It is unlikely that you’ll have a successful online presence if people can’t view your website from their mobiles on the go. It should be accessible from any device with an internet connection. With WordPress theme developers being well aware of this, 95% of WordPress themes are fully responsive. They look good no matter what screen you put them on, which is one simple thing that you will not have to worry about and will benefit your business by a great deal. However, if your theme doesn’t look perfect on smartphone or tablet, you can always use a plugin that will help you optimize your site.
10. It’s Safe and Reliable
WordPress is frequently updated by its core developer team. Since the platform is so wide spread, they have to make extra sure that every security threat is handled. Hackers are quick to catch on to security vulnerabilities, so thousands of professionals go out of their way to make the platform safer with plugins as well. You can take just about every security measure from password protection to backups and make your website almost impenetrable. Nothing is foolproof of course, but WordPress does it’s best to ensure the safety of its user’s websites. Not only that, but it is also a very robust system that won’t crash on you. If your server is functioning properly, there is nothing stopping you from having your website up and running for years.
11. It’s Constantly Improved
The regular updates aren’t just for security measures; they constantly offer new features to make the platform even better for everyone. Besides the work of the core developer team, millions of developers all around the world are creating new plugins every year. They leverage the system’s flexibility to create their own custom features and share it with the world as well. So, if there is by any chance something useful that WordPress doesn’t include yet, then it will be available sooner than you think.
12. It Can Handle Multiple Media Types
If you want to make your website truly content rich and engaging, you’ll want to include more than just an “about us” page. A site becomes much richer if it includes a video or an image gallery. WordPress allows you to include those seamlessly right out of the box. All you need to do is drag and drop an image or copy-paste the link of the video and it will appear.
You can also include numerous file types, such as .mp3, .mp4, .m4a, .wav, .3gp, .ogv, .avi, .mov, .mpg among others. WordPress provides you with the freedom to upload what you want and as much of it as you want.
13. Easy To Handle User Permissions
You can set unique permissions to every user on the backend of your site. You can create authors, moderators, contributors, admins, super admins and more, each with their own limited access to your website. This makes WordPress great for large organizations as well, because a lot of employees can cooperate within the same system. It allows them to share the responsibilities of handling a massive website. Having support for multiple users is also an important security measure as well. You definitely wouldn’t want someone with publishing responsibilities to mess up with your websites code by accident.
14. Easy Integration
WordPress integrates seamlessly with the most popular platforms on the web, giving your business a big boost. Need to work on your marketing campaign or launch an email campaign? Just install MailChimp or Aweber and have it seamlessly integrate with your system. Maybe you want a payment gateway? Integrate PayPal or any of the other popular payment gateways.
15. Plenty of eCommerce Extensions
You can make something that’s so much more than just a simple business website. You can turn it into a fully-fledged online store, with product listings and more. There are numerous solutions that help you do this. You can sell your product with plugins like Shopp, WooCommerce or WP eCommerce.
Conclusion
WordPress allows you to have a proper website in less than a day or within a week at most. It depends on how much you’re willing to work on it. But even if you decide to hire a developer to build a site for you, it will be a whole lot cheaper to do it with WordPress. The system spares more than half of the work for the developer, so all there is to do is edit your theme a little bit.
If you choose to do it yourself however, you won’t have to strain yourself too much if you choose the right theme. So, are you ready to get down to it? Few platforms will make your job as easy as WordPress!
I hope you enjoyed reading through this article and that we helped you learn something new today!
