What is WordPress?
WordPress can be defined as an open-source CMS that has been licensed under GPLv2. It means anyone has the right to use as well as modify the WordPress software for free. It can be considered as a tool that makes the life of content publishers easy to manage an essential portion of the website like website content and multimedia files in web pages without having prior knowledge of web programming. The ultimate result is that WordPress helps develop and build a website handy for anyone, even without the skill set of a developer.
Features of WordPress
WordPress is considered to be the most popular content management system due to its characteristics.
- The most important features of WordPress are that you can create a dynamic
website without any programming and design knowledge. - WordPress is theme-based, which provides you options for various open-source
and premium design themes, which can be integrated easily without any designing
knowledge. - Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress, which can be used to add new
required modules. - WordPress sites are search engine optimization (SEO) friendly, and it means sites
built-in WordPress can be easily optimized for search engine listings. - WordPress is Multilingual, which allows users to translate content in their
language. - WordPress has an inbuilt Media Management System, which is used to manage
images, music, documents, etc., and can be used with text content.
Advantages of WordPress
- WordPress is a free and open-source platform under the GNU General Public
License (GPL). - Design theme customization in WordPress is straightforward.
- It allows you to manage users with different roles and permissions.
- WordPress media management is quick and easy to use.
- WordPress provides a WYSIWYG editor to manage your text content, which is very
useful for manipulating the layout of the document.
What kind of websites use WordPress?
Although, WordPress was first designed for bloggers, due to the huge improvements, thousands of plugins, and unlimited themes it has turned into a website-building tool Many famous companies use WordPress for their websites, for example, Sony, Star Wars, BBC, PlayStation, TechCrunch, and Bloomberg.
- Blogs
As mentioned before, WordPress was first designed for bloggers but over the year
it has improved dramatically, but it’s still popular and used for blogging purposes.
Users can use this CMS at a low cost and eventually upgrade it to their website. - Sample website
Freelancers, artists, photographers, musicians, authors, and whoever works in a
specific field, can use this CMS to display a few of their samples. WordPress offers
a variety of services that they can use. - Business websites
- Business owners can also use this CMS. Whether they own a small business or big,
with WordPress they can create and design a professional and powerful website
like Mercedes or Blackberry. - Charity websites
Since this CMS has little cost to run, many charity organizations use this CMS.
Because it’s simple and offers a variety of ways to accept donations. - Online Store websites
With this CMS, users can start their online store without having any programming
knowledge. WooCommerce is one of the most powerful and popular plugins in the
e-commerce world and WordPress. This plugin offers its users, shopping cart, sales
system, payment gateways, and refund on their website. Many other websites such as news, Multilanguage, music, education, etc. use WordPress
What makes WordPress so popular?
- As mentioned above, WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and supports more
than a quarter of all the websites on the world wide web, due to its many features and
capabilities. The most important features of this CMS are as follows: - Open-source
Being open-source is one of the key factors of WordPress. More than thousands of
people across the globe are working to improve this CMS. One of the reasons this
CMS is free is since it is open source. You will only pay for hosting and domain
name. Also, more than thousands of themes and plugins are offered to its users.
Users can make any changes they wish to this CMS or even fix a bug or add many
other features. - Variety of themes and plugins
Even if a user doesn’t have any programming knowledge with the help of themes
and plugins can make changes to their website. Currently, there are more than
50000 plugins and 5000 themes offered for free to its users. In addition, there are
premium versions for both plugins and themes which you can buy. Themes can change the appearance and plugins can change the functionality of your WordPress
website. - Easy installation
With WordPress, you don’t need to have any technology or programming
knowledge to install and design your website. Only with a few clicks, you can install
your WordPress application. Many hosting providers enable easy installation of
WordPress. In addition, you can also install WordPress on your localhost and if
satisfied use it on your main website.
WordPress.com and WordPress.org
The two ways through which WordPress allows you to host a site are by WordPress.com
and WordPress.org. The primary thing which varies with these two approaches is the real
host. By making use of WordPress.org, you might download the script free of charge and
host it on a local machine or any server. But, in the case of WordPress.com, it takes care
of every aspect, right from hosting the site for you to providing features for managing the
content. You don’t have to organize a web server or pay for hosting or even download any
application, but yes, ads will be shown on your site
Pros and Cons WordPress.com and WordPress.org
If you are not paying any interest in hosting or managing a web server, then
WordPress.com is the way to go. This is because WordPress.com is free, and setup can be
done quickly and easily. However, it will charge you to remove the term WordPress which
will be included in the URL as well as you will not be competent enough to upload custom
themes and plugins without having a prior payment for the services. You also cannot edit
or modify the backend PHP code.
WordPress.org is a self-hosted version and provides additional flexibility with control on
your site. Your self-bought domain name can be used, and themes can be uploaded,
plugins can be incorporated. Hence, this gives flexibility and custom control to your web
development.