4 Great Reasons To Use Wordpress
Wix, Shopify, Weebly, WordPress, and more — business owners have a lot of options out there when it comes to building a website. But you know what? Not all website platforms are created equal. Picking the right platform can have a major impact on your business - online, and in the real world. When you work in the back ends of dozens of different websites, it’s only natural that you are going to develop not just a preference but the experience to know what works. For us at Helix House that’s WordPress! Our own site is built using it and we encourage all of our clients to migrate over to a WordPress site when given the chance. Why use WordPress over those other options? Here are 4 great reasons we love using it and why you will too!
4 Reasons Why Using WordPress is The Right Call
It’s Easy!
WordPress is easy to learn, easy to customize, and easy to manage. It’s just plain easy! You install a theme, make design tweaks to fit your vision, learn how to navigate the back end such as the functions of Pages and Posts, and you are well on your way to making your best website yet!WordPress is, by its nature, an open-source software: the code it operates with is available for anyone to modify and redistribute. This makes it so anyone with the time and basic skills can sit down, pop the hood on the code, and begin to tinker and make it better.Because it’s open-source, it also has a ton of skilled people using it! Almost a third of all websites on the internet are using WordPress. This makes the amount of tutorials and learning materials freely available absolutely staggering! If you are ever struggling with an error or want to find out how to do something specific, a simple Google search will turn up tons of information! No need to go on a quest to exotic lands to find the one sage with arcane knowledge tucked into a hidden cave, it’s all right there waiting for you to explore!
Built for SEO
WordPress has built-in SEO features that can help beginners and pros alike.. The platform automatically generates title tags and meta descriptions for every page and blog post. These are necessary to help search engines categorize your content and serve it to searchers.There are a ton of more advanced options and features available through plugins to turbocharge your SEO results. One of our favorites is the Yoast SEO plugin that gives you a checklist of best practices to ensure you’re not missing anything.[caption id="attachment_8685" align="aligncenter" width="525"]
This is a previous blog focused on the keyword: “backlinks.” After writing it and plugging it into WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin lets us know, “Hey! This could use some links throughout the blog!”[/caption]
Total Control
Some website builders are designed for specific things. For instance, running an eCommerce shop with Shopify may make sense, but Shopify only focuses on the online store portion. Its blogging and SEO potential is hamstrung. Meanwhile, WordPress has the plug-ins and additional tools available to custom fit your site for eCommerce as well as the built-in SEO functionality.Additionally, other website builder platforms like Squarespace and Wix (just to name a couple) severely limit the number of things you can control and interact with in an effort to make the process simple, while others lock features behind premium paywalls. These limitations make it so you are stuck with whatever they have decided are the best options. The language used to code them can also be unique to their service, meaning if you ever wanted to make changes you’d probably have to hire a developer specialized in that service. And of course, specialized means a higher cost!Because WordPress is open-source, because it has so many different people developing the best tools and plugins for the platform, you will have total control over your website and the exact features you want. If there’s anything outside your capabilities you’ll be able to find someone to help — fast!
It’s Free (mostly)!
WordPress is free for anyone to download and many of the themes and plugins are also available for free. All that said, WordPress is self-hosted so you will have to shell out some hosting dollars. Most hosting services can get you up and running for a few bucks a month on shared server space, or you can pay up to a couple hundred a month to put on a premium server with the best speed and performance, it just depends on your hosting needs. With WordPress being such a popular, easy to use platform, whomever you decide to host with will know what they’re doing. But that’s just the hosting! The WordPress platform is Free. Need help designing your new WordPress site? Want to get some great content written for your site and capture searchers? Give us a call and our CEO and Lead Strategist Mike Donato will chat with you about how WordPress (and Helix House) can help your business get to where you want to be!
