At Glade Digital, we build most of our websites on the WordPress Open Source platform. What makes WordPress so popular, and why do we prefer it to other CMS solutions like Drupal and Joomla?
Free, Open Source
WordPress was released back in 2003 by Automattic, and quickly became the world’s favourite blogging platform. WordPress.com utilises its software to provide a straightforward, accessible blogging service for writers who don’t want to host their own websites, but they also offer their software as a free download for those who do. While the hosted service is considerably limited, by comparison, the self-hosted version from WordPress.org is fully customisable, updatable, and extendable in nature, making it perfect for scaling from self-employed startups to major corporations like CNN. Innumerable developers collaborate to design and develop not only the core software but also thousands of plugins and themes, making it particularly robust and easy to find support.
Extendable, flexible
WordPress.org provides an enormous library of plugins to extend any theme’s capability, such as adding contact forms, live chats, modal popups, and galleries. We can even build e-commerce stores – both from scratch as well as into existing websites! This remarkable library, along with a selection of premium, industry-standard plugins, enables us to implement solutions quickly. With WordPress plugins, it can take just a few hours to add new functionality for your website, not months of developing expensive custom solutions.
SO much more than blogging
The core software of WordPress enables us to create two post types: Posts and Pages. Whilst we do recommend that you have a blog or news section on your site (Google loves regular content updates) we know that not everyone wants one. That’s fine, though, as they never have to be used and we can rely on Pages to display your information, which is what many business websites do. We can even create custom post types which power e-commerce stores, online courses, booking systems, and much more. WordPress has grown well beyond its blogging roots and now stands as a reputable CMS (content management system) in its own right.
WooCommerce lets you set up shop
The heavily customisable WooCommerce plugin turns your WordPress website into an online store, by seamlessly blending in a catalogue of your physical or digital products, as well as account pages and checkout options which can fit neatly into your existing site.
Unlike Magento, EKM, Shopify (and various others), you don’t have to plan for an e-commerce store from the beginning, or shell out expensive fees each month to display your products. You can add your store later and have it designed and configured at a time that is right for your business.
Specialised Studio
Sticking with WordPress enables us to become experts in our field. Working with it every day gives us a solid foundation for providing support and developing new features. While we might also use other platforms depending on the project requirements, WordPress will always have a particular focus for us as we continue to utilise its fantastic benefits to deliver exceptional value and efficient production for our clients.
With WordPress and a great hosting provider, there are endless possibilities available to developers and business owners for creating diverse and scalable websites!
