Why WordPress?

If you search “reasons to use WordPress,” you will definitely get results all about its extendability with thousands of free and premium plugins, how SEO-friendly it is, and the fact that you can download the software itself for free.

I love WordPress for all those things, of course. But I want to go a step further and tell you why I love it for my clients.

1. It is versatile and scaleable.

WordPress began as a blogging platform, but now it powers pretty much any type of website you can imagine, including many high profile brands such as Sony Music, Variety and The New Yorker. Up until recently, even Wix, the so-called free website builder, used WordPress for their blog.

So if you start out with a simple WordPress blog, you can scale it up to whatever type of site you need. E-commerce? Yep. Membership site? Definitely. Course site? You bet.

2. You can host it where you want.

I am very particular when it comes to my hosting environment. After ten years of building, designing, hosting and maintaining websites on a daily basis, I can tell you that where you choose to host your site can make the difference between a great website and a horrible one.

You could pay tens of thousands of dollars to have someone build your dream site, but if it’s on a shoddy server, your investment is wasted. Hosting your site on a fast, well-maintained and secure server is imperative, but not every website building solution offers you that choice. If you use any of the popular website builders–Wix, GoDaddy, even Squarespace–you have limited choice in your hosting environment. You also cannot migrate your site as a whole over to another server, as your site is built with their proprietary, closed source platforms.

With WordPress, you have a choice. You can host it and move it freely. You are not limited or locked in to any platform’s hosting services when you have a WordPress site. This is a huge reason I now work exclusively with WordPress.

3. It is constantly being improved.

Because the WordPress platform itself is free and open source (meaning that anyone can contribute code to it), there exists a huge community around it. I had the great pleasure of participating in one of the many WordCamp events and got to experience, in person, the excitement and spirit of curiosity and exploration that characterizes the WordPress community. Programmers and coders are constantly working on and in WordPress, and with that much brain power involved, I have no doubt that WordPress will continue to thrive for years to come.

4. It is robust enough for designers, user-friendly enough for everyone else.

A novice who logs into a WordPress dashboard can navigate with relative ease, which a seasoned developer can find all the places to customize and enhance a site. WordPress does an excellent job of making a beginner feel accomplished while also allowing someone with more experience to make the necessary tweaks and additions to build a more complicated and customized website.

And going back to the scaleability factor, a beginner can go in and create an elegant starter site, and then eventually turn it over to a designer to customize further… all seamlessly.

5. It makes life easier.

I am a big fan of keeping life as simple as possible. When I built my first website back in 2002 using html code, Dreamweaver, and lots of coffee, the process was unnecessarily complicated. Fast forward many years later and WordPress has managed to make the process of building a beautiful website accessible to everyone with an internet connection.

That means that when I hand over the keys to a WordPress site to one of my clients, they have the choice of maintaining it themselves or turning that work over to me or someone else. They can choose to redesign it if they want. They don’t have to be dependent on anyone else to manage their website unless they want to.

Choice, freedom and simplicity. You won’t get all of those things together with any other website platform.