When Matt Mullenweg (best known for developing WordPress) announced plans of forming the b2 blogging software in January 2003, nobody thought that the resulting software will soon power a quarter of all the websites of the Internet. WordPress has come a long way since its early days and it is estimated that more than 25% (http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all) of all the websites on the Internet use WordPress in one form or another.
WordPress started as a pure blogging platform but it soon morphed into a full blown content management system (CMS). These days, all kinds of websites are built using WordPress including e-commerce websites, portfolio sites, information websites as well as blogs. It offers a number of advantages as compared to various other content management systems available in the market.
Here is a small list of reasons why WordPress is the go to platform for you website.
Advantages of Using WordPress for SEO
1. Free
One of the main reasons that WordPress is so popular is that it is completely free. Anyone can download the package from the main website of WordPress and use it to create a website. In fact, most of the popular hosting packages already have tools to install WordPress in just one click.
It is also important to mention here that not only the main system is free but WordPress.org offers thousands of free themes as well as plug-ins. While there are a number of other free content management systems available today, the number of free themes and plug-ins available at WordPress.org cannot be matched by any other platform.
2. Open Source
WordPress is completely open source which means that its code base is free for anyone to see and modify. One of the biggest advantages of using open source software is that users are not tied to a proprietary system. A company that offers a proprietary CMS can go out of business which means that customers using that CMS are stuck with an outdated system.
On the other hand, thousands of developers contribute to open source software and the users are not dependent on the original team for updating the software. WordPress is one of the most popular open source CMS available today and it is being constantly updated and improved by a big team of developers.
Another advantage of using open source of software is that it turns out to be much cheaper as compared to a proprietary solution as developers constantly build new features directly into the system.
3. Easy to Use
There is no other content management system that can match the ease of use of WordPress. It has a very intuitive interface and any user can easily add new blog posts, pages, images and other things quickly. The built-in editor means that users can quickly format the content before clicking publish.
4. User-Friendly Dashboard
WordPress has a user-friendly dashboard that makes it easy to manage content and make other changes. The dashboard is clean with menu on the left column. Users can easily post content by creating a new page or post and the system takes care of the rest. The dashboard allows users to manage content and other functions of the website in a single window.
5. Search Engine Friendly
It is one of the most SEO friendly content management systems available today. Its code is extremely clean which means that the default templates do not contain any excess fat. Users can easily add titles, URL strings, excerpts, categories, meta tags as well as various other things to make the website SEO friendly. It also allows customisable permalinks which means that users can include targeted keywords in the URL.
6. Browser-based
It is a browser-based content management system which means that you only need access to Internet to login to your website and add content or make any other changes. On the other hand, various other proprietary platforms require you to install software on a particular computer and you can use only that software to update your website.
7. Easy to Add Content
As far as organic traffic is concerned, many SEO experts agree that content is king. It is very well known in the SEO circles that adding high quality content on a regular basis not only enhances the trust rank of the website but also brings loads of traffic. Search engines such as Google love content.
Since WordPress is extremely easy to use, adding new content on a regular basis is much easier. The only thing a user need to do is to create a new blog post, add content, insert some images or videos, add some tags and links and hit the publish button.
Publishing high-quality content on a regular basis attracts more visitors from search engines.
8. Optimised Images
While the written word remains the major source of search engine traffic for websites, images also have the potential to drive a lot of traffic to a website. However, search engines want optimised images for ranking. WordPress makes it extremely easy to optimise images as alt text can be added easily with the click of a button.
9. Search Engine Friendly Website Structure
The website structure plays a very important role in the search engine rankings. WordPress makes it easy for users to create a search engine friendly website structure. Users can create a number of different categories to lump together similar type of content.
10. Built-In RSS Feed
While the popularity of RSS has gone down in the last few years, it is still great for SEO as RSS feed provides a link directly to your website from the feed directory. Also, it is easy to get content syndicated through RSS feeds.
11. W3C Compliant
The development team at WordPress makes sure that all the code generated by WordPress is in compliance with the W3C standards. In other words, a WordPress website is going to work with all the browsers and at the same time, maintain forward compatibility with the next generation of web browsers. In simple terms, W3C compliant code means that your website will keep working as it should in all the browsers.
12. Easy User Management
WordPress makes it extremely easy for the Webmaster to give different levels of access to different users. For instance, different users can be given different privileges such as administrative privileges for managing the website and author privileges for writing the content. Similarly, subscribers can also have a profile for making comments and other such things. In simple words, multiple users can use the same website with ease and can be assigned different levels of access.
13. Easy to Update
Technology on Internet moves at a fast pace. Browsers keep adding new features and criminal elements also constantly come up with new loopholes to exploit. Therefore, it is extremely important for the website owners to update their website to the latest version of the software.
Updating WordPress is extremely easy as it requires only a few clicks to update the software from the user dashboard. In fact, the user dashboard also displays a warning whenever a new version of the software is available.
14. Fast Page Load Speed
Google announced in 2010 that its algorithms will also take into account the page load speed as a ranking factor. Managing the page load speed is in the hands of the Webmaster and WordPress makes it very easy for web masters to decrease the page load speed. There are a number of resources available online that show you various ways to enhance the loading speed of your WordPress website.
There are a number of plug-ins that allow users to cache the WordPress pages. Caching is the process of storing the WordPress data in memory to ensure high speed retrieval. WordPress also makes it easy to optimise images and that helps in improving page load speed.
15. Ease of Design
While WordPress started as a blogging tool, it has morphed into a full-blown content management system over the years. Designing a WordPress website is comparatively easy for web developers due to clean code and availability of documentation. Huge popularity of WordPress also means that there is no shortage of WordPress developers.
16. Easy to Create a Website
An experienced user can create a new WordPress website from scratch within a few minutes. In fact, there are a number of tools available today that allow users to clone a particular website and install it on another domain. In fact, creating a new website once the theme has been chosen takes less than 60 min as the user just need to click a few things to create a new WordPress website from scratch.
17. Not Just for Blogging
Any type of website can be built using WordPress ranging from a static page website to a full-blown e-commerce store. There are a number of free as well as paid plug-ins available in the market that allow users to run full-blown e-commerce stores with thousands of products.
18. Constantly Updated
One of the major reasons of the continuing popularity of WordPress as a content management system is that it is constantly updated by the developers. So, whenever Google or other search engines come up with some new requirements, WordPress team is always ready with a new solution.
For instance, when Google and Bing started asking for data in schema format, WordPress development team quickly came up with a solution to allow WordPress websites to easily provide structured data to the search engines.
19. Responsive and Mobile Friendly
2014 was a water shed year in the history of Internet. This was the first year when more people connected to Internet using their phones instead of using a computer. These days everyone carries a small computer in their pocket and that smart phone is mostly used for browsing Internet (http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2353616/mobile-now-exceeds-pc-the-biggest-shift-since-the-internet-began).
Google has also announced that it also uses mobile friendliness as a ranking factor when it comes to search on mobile. Since the share of search on Mobile has already surpassed 50%, webmasters can no longer ignore mobile friendliness.
WordPress makes it extremely easy to create a mobile friendly website as the only thing one needs to do is to use a responsive WordPress theme. These themes allow a WordPress website to adjust the display as per the screen size of the accessing device. In other words, WordPress is in compliance with the mobile friendly guidelines of search engines.
20. Accelerated Mobile Pages
It is a new open source initiative that is being designed to allow content to load super fast on mobile. These pages in AMP format are specifically designed to load instantaneously on mobile. It has been observed that web pages that take a lot of time to load are not liked by the users and bounce rate can be more than 50%. Note: Google first announced the AMP project in October 2015
Using AMP technology will allow users to engage with content as it will load instantaneously. AMP mobile pages work similar to other HTML pages. WordPress is already on board and is supporting the AMP format.
For a comprehensive resource on AMP you can visit https://kinsta.com/blog/google-amp/
21. Thousands of Themes and Plug-Ins
While WordPress is already flexible, its functionality can be enhanced way more with the help of a variety of plug-ins. There are thousands of free as well as paid plug-ins that allow users to add more functionality to the website. For instance, there are a few plug-ins such as Yoast SEO that allow users to create a SEO optimised post with just a few clicks.
There are also thousands of themes available for free on WordPress.org.
Overall, these are only some of the reasons of using WordPress for building your site. If you still have doubts, consider the fact that more than 25% of the websites on the Internet are built using WordPress and this number is growing at a fast pace. There is a reason that more users are using WordPress to create their website. It is easy to use, simple and extremely search engine friendly.
Note: It’s for the above listed reasons we at Top SEO Brisbane and our sister company on the Gold Coast consistently build all of our websites with WordPress and recommend to clients who have crappy websites built on dodgy frameworks, to get a rebuild. Oftentimes this can be done without breaking the bank.
About The Author: Follow @seowebmagic
Andrew Riedel together with partner Trish Riedel have a passion for local business and online marketing. They have been building and ranking WordPress websites for clients in Australia, UK and USA since 2008. The tools they use for clients include Search Engine Optimisation, Adwords Management, Video Marketing, Content Writing, Website Design and Development. Andrew can be contacted on 1300 885 487.
