If you have been following me for a while, you know that I am a huge advocate of building your website on WordPress. After all, I exclusively use it for my own business ventures as well as for all my client’s needs. In this article I want to share 6 reasons why building your website on WordPress will uplevel your business.

1. It’s flexible

No matter if you just need a “business card” – style website, an ecommerce platform or a full-blown membership solution, WordPress can do it all. You can start simple and add functionality as you need it, and the principles of editing your content will always stay the same.

2. It’s easy to manage

The days have long gone by where you needed a dedicated webmaster for every single update you wanted to make on your website. WordPress gives you the capability to easily change text, images and any other content you’ll ever have to update. If you can use a text processor like MS Word, you can use WordPress. It can’t get any easier.

3. It’s insanely popular

As per March 2016, statistics report that WordPress now powers 26.4 % of all websites on the internet. Every day, around 500 new sites are created on WordPress. Due to it’s popularity, there is a plethora of themes, plugins and tutorials available. (If you want to read up more interesting statistics, here is an additional article for you.)

4. It plays nicely with Google

“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.”

– Matt Cutts, Google Engineer

This means that WordPress “out of the box” already works great with Google. And to make your site even more search engine friendly, you can harness the power of additional plugins like the Yoast SEO plugin.

5. It’s here and it’s here to stay

WordPress has been around the internet for over ten years now. Throughout this time, it has been tested to the core and refined by countless updates. Over time, it evolved into the leading Content Management System on the internet and the No. 1 choice for many companies like The New York Times, Forbes or National Geographics.

6. It’s free for commercial use

Unlike many other website building tools like Shopify or Squarespace, WordPress is open source. This means that it’s free from restrictions and limitations, so you can use the software in any way you want – and you are also able to host it where you like.
With this freedom you can always be sure that you have the ultimate control over your business. Your success is not depending on another platform. Your website – one of your most important business assets – isn’t tied directly to someone else’s business model.

With all the popularity, there are also some myths that circle around the web why you shouldn’t use WordPress. And while answering all objections would probably be a topic for another blog post, I want to address at least the tow most common objections I have come across.

“WordPress doesn’t offer customer service”

I hear this a lot, especially from people who host their websites on Squarespace or similar website builders that charge you money for hosting & using their software. And this comparison is outright wrong.

Let me try to explain it with a little metaphor. Imagine you are hungry, and someone gives you a basket of raw food to cook your own meal. You refuse to take the basket because “in the restaurant, they cook the meal for me.” Can you see where this goes?

And you can get excellent customer service with WordPress as your CMS, if you host your website with a dedicated WordPress hosting service like Flywheel or Siteground and choose a premium theme for your website.

“WordPress gets hacked all the time.”

While I can’t deny that there is always some party pooper who will try to ruin everything for everybody, most hacks & exploits are also due to the fact that a majority of admins who have their sites hacked often neglect maintenance and updates. Regular maintenance and updates on your website are vital to protect you from these nightmares happening to you. But they are also important to make sure that everything runs smoothly in your sparkling online empire.

If you want to learn more about this topic and what you can do to prevent being a victim, you can read my article here.

Which one shall I use – WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

First of all, there is no such thing as WordPress.org. This term is commonly used to refer to a self-hosted WordPress installation on your own website. So this basically means you take the software and install it on any web-hosting service of your choice.

WordPress.com offers you a free website, which sounds like a great thing to start with. However, I would always recommend – even if you are just starting out – to go the self-hosted route. Why? Because WordPress.com has a lot of restrictions on what themes and plugins you can use. Because of these restrictions I find it to be quiet limiting in the choices I can make with functionality, layout and design. To unleash the true power of WordPress, there is no better way than a self-hosted installation.

Is your website on WordPress? Or do you use a different website builder or CMS? Share with me in the comments!

With love, sparkles & pixiedust