7 Reasons Why We Love WordPress

 When you’re looking into getting a website, you’ll most likely hear about WordPress. It’s one of the most popular website platforms, powering around 40% of all websites worldwide!

WordPress is accessible to anyone, no matter what their level of expertise is. And it works brilliantly for all types of websites; it doesn’t matter if you’re a small business owner with an online store or on the Forbes 500 (hello, Microsoft!).

With its easy to use interface, most people can learn to create a simple website that’s perfect for blogging or running a side hustle. But for web developers (like us!), the beauty of WordPress lies in the fact that its open-source software gives the freedom to custom build beautiful websites that are fully tailored to the needs of our clients, along with having the technical specifications required for high performance—which is why we love it here at Peach HQ! 

Let’s have a closer look at what makes WordPress so great!

1. We can create custom ‘themes’ to suit any business

When it was first created, WordPress was a blogging platform with an intuitive, easy to use Content Management System (CMS)—the ‘backend’ interface that allows you to quickly edit or add new content. Things quickly advanced and now you can create any type of website imaginable while still having access to the powerful CMS that WordPress is famous for. 

While it’s possible to buy ‘off the shelf’ designs known as ‘themes’, a bespoke design that is expertly created for your audience and business objectives is vital. We design and build a custom theme for each website we create, and plugging it into WordPress means that it’s easy to make simple updates.

2. Plugins and integrations to take your site to the next level

One of the great things about WordPress is the ‘plugins’ that you can easily integrate into your website. There are plugins for everything from payment processing, contact forms, spam filters, SEO…the list goes on!

Like with themes, there are free and premium plugins, along with the custom built options. It’s important that you choose them carefully, as they can quickly go out of date or slow your site down (more about this in point 5 below). 

As well as themes and plugins, you can integrate third-party tools like email marketing software, Google Analytics and payment gateways. Given that WordPress is so popular, tech companies make sure their products are built to work with it!

3. WordPress is SEO friendly

SEO is one of the most important things to get right on your website, and you need to put the building blocks in place to make sure you rank above your competition in search engines.

WordPress makes it really easy to fine-tune your content for SEO by automatically creating meta descriptions for your pages and blog posts so they can be picked up by Google. And the great thing is the availability of plugins that make it easier to optimise your content for SEO. The SEO plugin Yoast is an advanced tool that essentially gives you a checklist that you can work through. It analyses each page and tells you how effective it is at targeting your chosen keywords. Once you’ve got your strategy in place, it’s easy!

4. It’s mobile friendly

Of course, there’s more to SEO than keywords. If you want to rank in Google then your website has to be mobile friendly. While many ‘off the shelf’ themes and plugins aim to be responsive, they vary in quality so it’s worth reading reviews and doing your research if you choose that option. By getting a custom built website you can ensure that your website works perfectly across all mobile devices and screens.

5. Optimised for speed

A slow website not only creates a bad user experience that will cost you sales, it will also rank poorly following Google’s latest update (you can read more about it on our blog here). WordPress is pretty powerful and inherently fast, but because there are so many themes and plugins to choose from, users have to be careful to keep it running smoothly. A custom design can help you avoid pitfalls that could affect your SEO efforts.

6. Tight, thorough security

Websites are constantly under attack from hackers and malware, so security is a huge consideration. WordPress has tight controls and dedicated security teams that help keep your website secure, but ultimately the responsibility lies with the website owner to make sure they follow all the best practices they recommend! It’s something we do by default.

7. It’s user friendly and easy to learn

Once we build a WordPress site and hand it over to our clients, it’s really easy for them to learn how to manage it themselves (if they want to!). Even someone who has never used a CMS before will be able to get the hang of WordPress pretty quickly and will feel confident adding new media, blog posts and content in no time!

As you can see, there are many reasons why WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world and we trust it to get the best possible results! 

Unlike other CMS tools, WordPress is completely open-source, meaning that every aspect of the design can be customised to the needs of a business and its customers. And compared to building an entire CMS from scratch, WordPress allows for greater flexibility for a much lower cost.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about getting your own, custom WordPress website.