WordPress offers numerous advantages for businesses that want to establish and grow an online presence. This post will take a look at the best reasons to consider using WordPress for your small business website and a few why you shouldn’t.
You own your website
If you’re running an online business, full ownership of the website is critical. Many website builders can limit source code access and seize ownership of your content, which is impossible with WordPress.
Users of the self-hosted content system can work with any hosting provider and scale their WordPress site as needed. This makes it suitable for platforms that want to start with managed WordPress hosting or another affordable option.
You can freely manage, post, and moderate content on the site without any limitations in terms of services or algorithms.
You own every blog post, product listing, or video on your site, even if you decide to change the hosting company or website platform.
WordPress also provides source code access, letting users change and personalize their site freely. This makes the platform a suitable choice for scaling business websites as their traffic grows.
It’s intuitive
WordPress has a slight learning curve, but it’s still more intuitive compared to other open-source content systems. You can access every feature you need to manage your site through the WordPress dashboard. It’s easy to use the sidebar buttons to create new posts and pages and manage plugins.
The Gutenberg block editor lets users create posts and change elements within pages effortlessly. People started using WordPress as a page builder with Gutenberg’s launch, which gives a lot of control over visual presentation. More than five million sites use the classic editor, and it’s hardly a surprise – anyone who’s used a word processor can operate it.
There are numerous business templates and plugins
Individuals and third-party companies have created a wide range of WordPress themes and plugins for business websites. Depending on your area, you can opt for different sets of templates and plugins. The e-commerce plugin WooCommerce is very popular if you run an online store. WPForms is a fit tool for contact pages.
There are also SEO plugins like Yoast, security plugins like Sucuri, and a plugin for Google Analytics.
It’s responsive and fast-loading
Potential customers will probably leave if a website isn’t responsive and loads slowly. WordPress is on par with the highest standards in this respect. If you use the right caching tool and hosting service, your WordPress website will satisfy even the most particular users. Most WordPress themes are inherently mobile-responsive and guarantee a pleasant experience on all devices.
Open source isn’t the same as free
Now for some downsides of using WordPress. The system is open-source, as it claims: you can access and modify source code as you wish. However, there are upgrades to take into account. Your tweaks must be compatible with WordPress’s upgrades. If they aren’t, they’ll break, adding maintenance to the mix.
Installing WordPress is free, but it’s something you need to take care of on your own or pay someone to do it.
The content is hard to reuse or move
WordPress locks content in, making it hard to move to another platform or repurpose. When the system was launched, its creators decided to store content in a relational database, which limits content modeling opportunities.
WordPress still uses that data model. All content is stored under “posts,” even customized content. There are no standards for storing and structuring plugin content, resulting in various quirks. Page and post content is stored in HTML format, meaning you can’t integrate it into anything but a webpage.
