Why Wordpress is our preferred CMS platform

(Note: I wrote this blog post a while back because we we’re explaining the virtues of Wordpress so often that I thought it would be worth putting on the web!

Today in 2015 Wordpress now powers roughly 20% of the top 1 million websites in the world, it leads the market by a huge margin, click this link to see a full breakdown and comparison of CMS market share. You don’t get that much of a lead on the market unless you’re doing something right!)

We’re regularly asked which website CMS platform we use – Wordpress is our preferred CMS platform by a long way for a number of reasons. We’ve highlighted some of the reasons further down the page and have included a handy infographic which presents this in a much more impactful visual format.

In episode 24 of our podcast The Business Marketing Show we discussed CMSes and Wordpress. Definitely worth a listen if you’re not familiar with Wordpress. In many cases, we find it difficult to help a customer with Adwords or SEO if they’re not on Wordpress so often our number 1 recommendation when starting a new engagement is to migrate the underlying CMS of a website to Wordpress.

Some of the specific reasons why we prefer Wordpress include:

  • Search Engine Friendly-ness
    Wordpress is by far the most search engine friendly CMS platform and all things being equal, in our experience sites built on Wordpress generally tend to rank higher than sites built on other platforms. In many cases we migrate our SEO clients across to Wordpress as one of the many SEO improvements we make to help increase their search engine rankings.One reason for the increase is rankings is because Wordpress website code is generally cleaner therefore search engines can better understand what search terms to rank the site for. Another reason is due to the many SEO plugins available for Wordpress which extend its SEO capability much further than many other platforms.Wordpress also tends to support new SEO standards such as schema.org and Google Shopping price feeds much faster than other CMS systems which means sites running on Wordpress often have a 1-3 year lead on sites built on legacy CMS systems.
  • Over 19,000 Free Plugins available for Wordpress
    There are well over 19,000 plugins or “apps” available for Wordpress most of which are free and allow you to add additional functionality to the core Wordpress system.Because of the abundance of plugins available its likely any additional website functionality you need is available as a plugin therefore eliminating the high cost of having a website developer write custom website code for you.This also means is much easier and less time intensive to add new features to a Wordpress site.
  • Wordpress is Open Source
    Wordpress is an Open Source platform which means that thousands of software developers and programmers around the world contribute to the code so improvements and enhancements are rolled out regularly AND there is no licensing cost for the software unlike many other platforms.Particularly in today’s business environment where every dollar counts, it means limited website budgets can be allocated to other areas like Adwords or SEO which can directly benefit the business’ bottom line.
  • Wordpress runs on Linux which helps boost security and uptime
    Wordpress runs on the Linux operating system (versus a Microsoft OS) which means its inherently more secure and less susceptible to attack. It also means better uptime because as you’re probably aware, Microsoft release security patches all the time which require a reboot. A reboot means downtime for your site.

Other things you didn’t know about Wordpress

A lot of people confuse Wordpress.com, the personal blogging platform with Wordpress.org, the CMS software, which often leads to misconceptions about Wordpress in a business environment. The two are certainly related but from a business perspective are completely different platforms. Here are some interesting facts about Wordpress you may not be aware of:

Examples of Wordpress Websites

Many people are familiar with Wordpress in a blog layout but ultimately you can build a Wordpress website to look any way you like. Here are some examples of client Wordpress websites:

The infographic below was created by Yoast – visit http://yoast.com/wordpress-stats/ for more information on this infographic (click the infographic to enlarge)

 

 

 

2 Comments

  • Barrick Becca

    Reply Reply August 5, 2015

    I agree
    with you on all but “Securtiy”, there are some loopholes in
    Wordpress security and here I am referring to “Wordpress.Org” not
    Wordpress.com, Wordpress security has updated a lot but still they need to
    improve. So, that everyone can use Wordpress without the hassle of installing
    additional security plugins.

    • Brendan Tully

      Reply Reply August 5, 2015

      But thats like any CMS, when its installed the security is very average out of the box…I wouldn’t recommend any money site or important site be run on vanilla hosting. If its important enough that its making you money then its important enough to spend a little more on a managed wordpress hosting provider like WPEngine, link: http://bit.ly/1E7y0wi

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