6 reasons why you should use WordPress for your website

Published: June 2014

WordPress is the Urban River CMS (content management system) of choice and many agree with us; 20% of all websites created in the last 5 years have been built using it. It has a lot to offer as a platform to manage your website and below are six of the many reasons why WordPress is King.

1. Usability

For a CMS, usability is obviously one of the most important factors for site administrators. WordPress provides you with the ability to manage your website content, make site-wide changes and moderate content provided by the wider community. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor makes updating pages as simple as typing in Word; images can be dragged straight into posts or uploaded with the media library and updating contact details is just a simple update field in the settings page. All of this is so easy to use and provides you with the power to create amazing content easily and efficiently.

Having the ability to define user groups and assign permissions to those groups also makes the administrators life easier. User groups can be easily moderated and updated but the ability to moderate singular users is there too. So when working on a site with large numbers of contributors or content coming from different users, the administrators still have full control and won’t get bogged down.

2. SEO

SEO (seach engine optimisation) is the art of getting your website known and highly ranked by the likes of Google and other search facilitators. This means that with good SEO your site won’t just serve the users who already know its there, but will allow you to be found by users searching for content or services that you can provide.

From the word go, WordPress is great for SEO due to its cleanly written code and the ability to completely customise and optimise each page. Another benefit to the clean and fast code is that your website will run faster and Google gives bonus points to websites that run quickly and efficiently. This gives you an edge over other websites and certainly over any other CMS we have used. Plugins, which are a huge part of the WordPress success, can be found to help you optimise for SEO. They can be used to rate pages and give you clear insights to help improve your rankings.

Google also likes sites that are well organised and structured in such way as to give users a great experience when navigating.  Through its category-based tagging system, and its page structuring methods, WordPress automatically creates a site structure which Google approves of.

3. WordPress sites are easy to monetise

Whether you’re running an e-commerce site or integrating adverts and affiliate offers, WordPress makes monetising your site easy. Adverts can be dropped into any area of your site then changed, removed or moderated or your site can be built to be a full-featured e-commerce store rivaling any other.

There are plugins available such as OIO Publisher that don’t just let you put adverts on your site, they handle reports, payments and tracking in a simple easy-to-use interface within your website. WooCommerce, a popular and powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress comes with all the customisation you need from shipping methods to tax management and marketing reports but remains easy to use as it is integrated into the WordPress dashboard.

4. Regular updates

WordPress, like any good system, is continually evolving. One of the best tricks WordPress has is that it does minor security updates automatically, keeping your website secure and your information safe. Major updates to the WordPress system however, are still reserved for the website owner to carry out, meaning that if you have a good reason not to update, then you don’t have to. It’s really the best of both worlds, keeping your website secure but not forcing major changes in the way your current website works.

5. Your site can grow as you grow

If you’re just starting out or already an established business, WordPress’ flexibility will allow you to grow naturally, without any bumps along the way. News and blog functionality allows you to expand on the regular content you provide to the wider community and plugins for enhanced functionality allow you to carry out more advanced tasks or make existing processes more efficient.

E-commerce websites can be easily upgraded to provide a better service to their customers through upgrades such as product reviews, live chat support or advanced delivery options. Websites that promote services can be expanded to or adapted as their service range increases or start looking in new and innovative areas. All of this can be as simple as expanding your content or adding plugins to your website and it all stays integrated in one place on your website keeping the day-to-day management as easy as possible.

6. Standard web compliance

All of the code used in WordPress is 100% compliant with the web standards set out by W3C. With technology moving so fast, these standards mean that your website will work in a modern day browser and protect it to keep it working correctly in future browsers too. Some CMS’ don’t follow these standards and their websites are will begin to break as time goes on.

We’ve highlighted 6 of the key reasons we use WordPress as the basis of the majority of our websites but, really, we’ve only just scratched the surface. With its millions-strong worldwide community of developers, testers and advocates, WordPress is constantly growing and improving, meaning that, nowadays, there really are very few sites WordPress would not be suitable for.