Far from being just a tool for amateur websites and small businesses, WordPress is used all over the world by some of the biggest, richest, and most well-known organizations on the planet.
Let’s take an example. The Webby Awards are presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and aim to recognize the best of the best when it comes to the internet. They’re often called the “Oscars of the web” and they’re a big deal for website developers.
In this year’s Webby Awards, many categories were dominated by WordPress developed websites. One impressive example is the official WhiteHouse page — WhiteHouse.gov. In fact, 5 out of the 5 nominees in the Government and Civil Innovation bracket were built on WordPress. Not bad!
On top of that, the Charitable Organizations/Non-profit category also had 3 of 5 nominees built on WordPress, and the same was true for the Law category.
It’s a great haul for WordPress, but it’s not a surprising result. After all, WordPress is an excellent platform for building websites for a whole range of reasons. In this article, we’ll take a look at why WordPress is such a powerful tool for website-building, and why so many high-profile websites like WhiteHouse.gov are using it.
The benefits of building your site with WordPress
Google likes WordPress sites better
When it comes to SEO and search engine visibility, WordPress is an excellent choice. This is because the code used to build WordPress pages is impressively simple and clean, making it easy for search engines to read and index the content — a crucial process that we call technical SEO.
On top of this, WordPress is extremely user-friendly when it comes to optimizing your page for SEO. It’s easy to add meta descriptions, title tags, image tags, and more when creating a new page or blog post, and you can optimize for specific keywords. Optimizing your site for SEO like this helps you boost your chances of ranking highly in Google, which in turn helps you attract more visitors and ultimately grow your website and business more effectively.
It’s highly customizable
WordPress gives its users a huge amount of control over what their final website will look like. In addition to the SEO options we already mentioned, you can play around with a practically endless library of themes (including custom themes), images, fonts, features, plugins, and much more. If you want your WordPress site to be completely unique, that isn’t hard to achieve at all.
Unlike other site builders where you have a limited range of options that look similar to all the other sites built on that platform, WordPress allows you to stand out with your own, unmistakable piece of online real estate.
It’s secure
This one is especially important for sites like WhiteHouse.gov, but it applies to all websites. Attacks like DDoS and ransomware are on the rise all around the world, and an attack on your site can be devastating if you aren’t protected. DDoS attacks lead to an average loss of $417,000 for enterprises and $53,000 for SMBs. WordPress’s built-in security gives its users peace of mind that they’ll be protected against the vast majority of threats. If in any doubt, consider that the White House itself uses WordPress.
It has great UX on both the frontend and backend
The user experience of WordPress is unrivalled. It’s unbelievably intuitive, and you can build and update pages with ease — adding images and blog posts, formatting text, setting up email subscriptions, responding to comments, and changing the appearance of your site. This means that most WordPress tasks can be handled by team members without a vast amount of technical knowledge or skill.
While you’ll need professional developers for some aspects of building a high-level site, many jobs like writing, formatting, and publishing blog posts can be done easily by marketers without any HTML editing ability.
It’s built by experienced developers
WordPress sites and themes are built by some of the best developers in the business. This means the quality of the sites you can create is incredibly high, and you can have a very high-grade, professional website without doing any development at all.
It’s highly scalable
Websites built on WordPress are easy to scale as your business grows, thanks to the powerful resources of the platform. This means your site can support a constantly growing number of pages and posts, and handle enormous numbers of visitors without performance being impacted significantly. This is great news for people with ambitious goals for their website, and we can see proof of this in huge websites like The New Yorker and BBC America which host vast amounts of content with barely any issues at all.
The importance of an expert team
Although WordPress is a wonderfully effective tool for building and managing a professional website even when you do it alone, it’s always best to work with a team of experts.
Teams like Web Loft Designs can help you make the most of your WordPress features.
Among other things, we help you access the benefits of WP Engine, an extremely powerful and reliable hosting platform for WordPress which ensures your site is lightning fast, secure, and easy to use. Here at Web Loft, we make sure your website is as secure, user-friendly, and beautiful as it possibly can be.
To learn more, get in touch.
