Why is WordPress Important?

WordPress is important. WordPress is probably the most important content management system in the world as well as a very flexible platform to build your own thing.

Used by big names like The Newyorker, BBC, Bloomberg and EBay, to name  a few, WP is a powerful tool available to anyone willing to invest the time to learn how to wield it. WP powers 40% of websites.

WordPress is malleable

WordPress was built to be easily customized, it is one of the most customization friendly CMSs out there, with over 59,000 plug and play functionalities ( wp plugins) to build your online vision.

I have used WP installations as platforms to build project management tools, marketing and lead generation tools, documentation centers, support communities, a wiki, a sports magazine, a forum, an online store, an online psychometric test and as the central online hub for dozens of businesses and countless marketing strategies. I believe WP is as critical skill for everyone.

How big is WordPress? Here are 5 Facts that you should consider.

“At the age of 15, WordPress, with 75 million websites and 58.7% market share is, without doubt, the leading CMS on the market. Small blogs and personal photography websites, startups and world’s top companies alike have decided on WordPress when creating their websites.”  – Source: 10Web.com

1. “…WordPress powers 39.6% of the internet in 2021, a growth of nearly 5% from 35% in 2020, and a 4% rise from the year before.
2. If you count only the CMS-built sites, then 64.1% of them are WordPress – 4% growth from 2020. Over 400 million people visit WordPress sites each month.
3. In 2016, nearly 118 billion words were published on WordPress But WordPress is not only for blogging – nearly 28% of all e-commerce goes through WooCommerce. 281 n\New WooCommerce shops appear on average every day.
4. WordPress.org offers over 58,000 free plugins and over 3,500 GPL-licensed themes.
5. In 2018, the non-English WordPress downloads were more than the English ones. …”

Source: hostingtribunal.com

A platform that enables anyone to publish online independently.

The internet has always been a place were new ideas can be brought to life. If you are a web developer, well you can pretty much build whatever you want. But when you are trying to do your own non-developer thing, WP becomes a free, powerful option, that could help you set up an independent online source for people to find your own creations, business, organization, art, etc. As long as you abide by the law, no one can block or censor you on the internet, and it makes the internet an infinite canvas for human creativity to populate with amazing experiences. WP is a tool that allows for virtually anyone to build and edit a customization experience and host it in their own domain.

A great ecosystem: Because of the size of the WordPress community, there are many individual hosting vendors, plugin developers, and WordPress management services all competing to provide a unique and high value service. Making WordPress owners enjoy a large number of options when it comes to developing specific functionalities for WordPress.

Why is WordPress so Big?

Its constantly being improved based on user feedback since its creation, more than 15 years ago, by a team of volunteers and thorugh the feedback of millions of users, some of them content creators, others create themes and develop pluggins, other are WP developers, they build and maintain WP based websites.

WordPress is SEO Friendly

WordPress makes it very easy to be optimized for SEO, and allows for plugins that enable you to have content wide changes in the way you phrase titles, meta data and more. One of the most downloaded plugins in the world is SEO Yost, a plugin that provides real time feedback on the SEO performance of your content, as you write it, based on the target keywords you are trying to write for.

WordPress enables remote collaboration by having user management in its core.

WordPress allows for the creation of users and many plugins exist to allow for these users to have specific access to specific areas of any platform, so it enables you to create work flows and to have separate roles in the wordpress management, from the basic ones likes subscriber and author, to editor, designer and web developer as well as collaborator. Some plugins allow you to manage and create new roles with specific access.

WordPress is designed to make it easy to share video, audio an other types of content. Most Linux based hosting services offer plug and play WordPress Installations. You can use it to build pretty much any type of website.

Some popular uses for WordPress are:

• Blogs
• Business websites
• Portfolios
• Forums
• ECommerce sites
• Ratings websites
• Membership sites
• e Learning modules
• Chatrooms
• Galleries
• Personal websites
• Job boards
• Business directories
• Q&A websites like Quora
• Non-profit websites for collecting donations
• Wikis and knowledge bases
• Media-centric sites like YouTube
• Auction and coupon sites.

Think about your own niche and re read the previous list, only that should enlighten you of some possibility. For example if you are a Fishing expert, WP could be your platform for your blog, business website, forum, your customer social network? Perhaps your very own membership site? WP enables almost any kind of website type there is.

This is why its important to know how to use WordPress, WordPress is also important because of the social impact of enabling individuals to download, use and build on top of this amazing platform, free of charge. With over 65,000 Million WordPress sites active on the internet WordPress is perhaps one of the most important democratic tools in terms of enabling anyone to have a sophisticated Web application that is capable of organizing online communities.   I highly recommend reading this article on 35 eye opening statistics about WP .