For the uninitiated, WordPress has been the bread and butter of most website builders for nearly two decades. From its humble beginnings as a blogging platform to the feature-rich, comprehensive CMS it is today, it comes as no surprise that over 810 million websites today are powered by WordPress CMS.
Yet, despite its widespread popularity, many remain mystified by what exactly WordPress is and how it works. In this guide, we embark on a journey to demystify WordPress, unraveling its attractive features that makes the platform the darling of both novice and seasoned website builders alike.
Here are some of the biggest myths and truths that we have heard over the years:
- Ease of Use: WordPress is known for its user-friendly interface, making it accessible to beginners and non-technical users. Its basic Gutenberg platform allows for a seamless and easy drag and drop function. You don’t need to have complex coding skills to create and manage a website with WordPress.
- Flexibility: With thousands of themes and plugins available, WordPress offers immense flexibility in design and functionality largely due to its modularity. Whether you’re building a blog, portfolio site, e-commerce store, or any other type of website, you can find suitable themes and plugins to customize your site according to your needs.
Popular plugins are as follows:
Page builders: Elementor, WPBakery, and Ultimate Blocks.
SEO: All-In-One (AIO) SEO, Yoast, Google Search Console - Scalability: WordPress is scalable, meaning it can grow with your business. Whether you’re starting with a simple blog or a small business website, WordPress can handle increased traffic and content as your website grows.
Of course, most of the lifting is done by the server hosting your WordPress CMS and database. Make sure you pick a server that is close to where your audiences are predominantly from (be sure to exclude statistics influenced by bots). Also, ensure that the allocated resources are adequate for your typical website traffic be it the number of processors, or ram. - SEO-Friendly: WordPress is inherently SEO-friendly, with features such as customizable permalinks, the ability to optimize meta tags, and plugins like Yoast SEO that help improve your site’s search engine rankings.
Forget about the complicated process of having to include H tags and meta tags directly onto the source code by using one of the many popular SEO plugins that provides a clean and convenient UI within the settings, and even in each post page. - Community Support: WordPress has a vast and active community of users, developers, and contributors. If you encounter any issues or need assistance, you can find support through forums, online tutorials, and documentation.
- Cost-Effective: WordPress itself is free to use, and many of its themes and plugins are also available for free. This makes it a cost-effective option for individuals and businesses looking to create a professional website without a significant upfront investment.
Of course, the idea that it’s cost effective also effectively limits your breadth of creativity in terms of what you can do unless you have some coding knowledge. Nevertheless, the number of free and paid themes out there would effectively cut your production time easily by half or more – some even comes with demo content to help you with the placement and type of content within each location. - Mobile Responsiveness: Most WordPress themes are mobile-responsive, meaning they adapt to different screen sizes and devices. With the increasing use of mobile devices for browsing the internet, having a mobile-friendly website is essential, and WordPress makes it easy to achieve that with their AMP pages.
There are once again plugins that would allow you to enhance this experience further by giving you the ability to “pack” your code, “shrink” your images, and even cache your entire site for lightning quick access. - Backup and Migration: The backup and migration of traditional sites used to be really time-consuming with a large margin for error when part of the code or content wasn’t migrated in whole. This whole process has now been simplified with a click of your mouse, an entire image of your website can be easily backup and restored.
- Regular Updates and Security: WordPress releases regular updates to improve performance, fix bugs, and enhance security. Additionally, there are many security plugins available to further protect your website from vulnerabilities and threats.
Here comes the myths:
- Security Vulnerabilities: We’ve always been hearing of WordPress having a bad name when it comes to security vulnerabilities that leads to hacking and hi-jacking of websites. That was probably true in the first few versions of WordPress, but with frequent security updates, and security plugins in place, you can be sure that you’re safe.
In fact, even malicious malware like keyloggers and a leak in username and passwords are made ineffective with 2FA functions made available to the general public. - WordPress is for Newbies: It’s funny how when software are made to be user-friendly, less-daunting, and low code in nature, it becomes classified as “unprofessional” and a platform for “newbies”. In fact, many tertiary institutions always almost teaches on WordPress as a foundational pilgrimage journey before embarking on more complex platforms like Webflow. It’s simplicity was what made it popular amongst the general public in the first place and we believe it would stay that way.
Given the sheer market share of WordPress at 43.1%, the next closest competitor, Shopify, only accounts for 3.9%. If nearly half the world’s using such a platform, you can’t go wrong.
For corporates, it makes the most fiscal sense where they are able to engage a website designer to build the website and due to it’s simplicity, an appointed individual could easily take on the management of the website and even enhance it further with the relevant plugins. - WordPress is only Good for English: Most WordPress websites you’ve come across is probably in English and we are not surprised. However, there are localization options within WordPress or even plugins such as TranslatePress, WPML, GTranslate, or Weglot.
Overall, WordPress is a powerful and versatile website builder that offers numerous benefits for individuals and businesses looking to establish an online presence quickly and efficiently.
