Why WordPress is a Good Idea for Your Website and a WordPress Expert is Even Better
As of January 2024, there are more than 835 million websites that use WordPress, or about 43% of websites world-wide. This ensures that WordPress is well supported by a large, ever-growing community of users, plugin creators, and contributors to the open source WordPress core–the code that runs that platform–and that large network of support, in turn, makes WordPress more dynamic.
In 2022, people from 229 different companies contributed to the WP core, mostly from companies like Yoast and Automattic that have WordPress plugins as the center of their businesses, but also from general Internet players like Google. There are almost 4,000 WordPress events worldwide in 2024, from conferences and “WordCamps” to smaller meetups.
A Huge Community Supporting Security and Functionality
This robust development community keeps WordPress running smoothly, ensures quick security updates and bug patches, and provides a plethora of plugin options to extend what a WP website can do. As a developer, one of the benefits of WordPress’s openness and massive presence is the ability to benefit from this community to find answers to challenges others have faced and shared their solutions to.
WordPress is a Powerful and Flexible Platform Today
WordPress is also powerful–long gone are the days where WP was primarily a blogging platform. Almost any complex functionality, if there is not already a well-supported plugin for it, can be developed by a dev team and integrated into a WP site. WordPress even has a built-in API which, like most things WordPress, can be customized. This means that WordPress can be a “headless” CMS.
WordPress as a Headless CMS
With a headless CMS content can be managed and edited and maintained with the easy-to-use WP CMS that is familiar to many, but then sent to another front-end, public-facing web application using any one of a number of tech stacks.
WordPress Out-of-the-Box vs. Custom Build
Out-of-the box, so to speak, WP is great for a lot of small organizations, and makes a WP website a powerful, competitive option compared to website building services such as SquareSpace and Wix.
Solving Back-end Usability
Organizations that hear WordPress is great often install it and choose a ready-to-go theme, but may end up frustrated that they are unable to accomplish some of their goals. They may run into road blocks tapping the adaptability to build new page layouts that work with their brand ethos, or empowering marketing admins to add and direct the changes and updates that they need.
Often, the frustration is a symptom of WordPress theme that is not designed for backend usability. And this can be effectively solved by having a WordPress expert to customize the out-of-the-box WP experience and create custom building blocks for your team to create new pages, and to add and edit content.
WordPress Gutenberg block systems put power and flexibility in your hands
With the right build, a content manager can create page layouts using WordPress’s native Gutenberg block system. This system allows editors to drag and drop content blocks like headings, paragraphs, images, videos, and columns onto the page. A WordPress theme styles those blocks on the page, allowing for branding with logos, fonts, and colors.
A WordPress expert or agency does not have to manage content for you, or end up being a middleman between your ideas and your website, but can rather create a custom theme and custom blocks for your marketing admins to use every day. Blocks and functionality can be created on the back-end to meet an organization’s specific needs and brand ethos, address any pain points from out-of-the-box WordPress, and make content editing and additions a smooth, ongoing process that supports business goals.