Are you thinking of building your website on WordPress, but a bit confused? This is the comprehensive guide you need. In this ultimate guide, we will cover everything you need to know about WordPress website development. Stay with us and read!
Making a website from scratch can be one of the most intimidating tasks of all time. It can be a horrifying thought, especially when you are not techy. Well, there’s a software out there that’s so easy to use, namely, WordPress. One of the most common misconceptions about WordPress is that it is just a blogging platform; however, you can easily leverage it to create a unique and professional-looking website, including business, blog, portfolio, or others.
Many people are gravitating towards WordPress website development due to its incredible popularity, excellent features, and designs. Having helped many businesses make a website with WordPress to enhance user experience and boost conversion, HTMLPanda, a WordPress web development company, has decided to create the most comprehensive WordPress development guide. Let’s dive in and learn everything about WordPress CMS development.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a free, open-source, and full-featured website builder platform. It is a content management system (CMS) written in PHP that uses a MySQL database that allows you to host and build websites. WordPress is one of the easiest, simplest, and most powerful website builder in today’s time.
There are various reasons why WordPress is the best fit for your business. From blogging to e-commerce websites, WordPress is an excellent option designed with usability and flexibility in mind. To simply put, it’s the best way to build both large and small websites.
Types of websites you can build with WordPress:
- Blog
- Business Website
- E-Commerce Website
- Portfolio Website
- Non-Profit Sites
- News Magazines
- Art and Photography
- Educational Website
- Social Networking Website
- Forums
Why Should You Go with WordPress Development?
You must be wondering why WordPress is such a widely used website content management system. It is a free and powerful tool to build websites that powers some of the biggest brands like:
- TechCrunch
- The New Yorker
- BBC America
- Bloomberg
- Star Wars Blog
- Microsoft News Center
- The Walt Disney Company
- Time Inc.
- The New York Times
If you are wondering why you should go with WordPress to build your website. We are here to hit you with some insightful WordPress stats, which will convince you to leverage it right now. Let’s dive right in!
- Over 455 million websites use the WordPress platform.
- If you count only the CMS-built sites, more than 63% of them are WordPress.
- WordPress is available in over 100 languages. Yes, you read it right!
- 3,876,748 live websites (and counting) are leveraging WooCommerce development (a WordPress plugin for e-commerce sites).
The 10 Top Benefits of Using WordPress for Your Business
Open-Source and Free
For business owners, who have budget constraints, the WordPress platform is one of the best approaches as it is 100% free and open-source. WordPress lets you access thousands of free themes and plugins and makes it possible for anyone to set up and run a successful online business with ease.
Easy to Use
WordPress is easy-to-use and has an intuitive interface, and can easily be managed from a new site’s administrative dashboard. It makes adding new pages, blog posts, images, and other things breeze, making it easy to manage a WordPress site without editing the core code at all.
Mobile-Friendly with Responsive Themes
Today’s users are inclining towards mobile phones, and that’s why responsive mobile website development is crucial for businesses. A WordPress website is built with mobile-responsive themes that automatically adapt pages and posts for mobile devices.
Versatile and Scalable
WordPress was initially designed for blogging, but because it’s versatile, it is now used for creating all types of websites, including business websites, e-commerce sites, educational websites, and whatnot. With high-functionalities, WordPress is also highly scalable.
Cost-Effective
Gone are the days when creating a website cost you an arm and a leg, thanks to website builders like WordPress. Designing and developing a site with WordPress is extremely cost-effective. Besides, upkeep and maintenance cost is also relatively low as you can do it yourself instead of hiring anyone.
Built-In Business Blog
Blog plays a vital role in content marketing, and that’s why having an active, content-rich blog is crucial for your business. As we said that WordPress was originally designed for bloggers, it comes with a built-in business blog that helps you create and manage blogs hassle-free.
SEO-Friendly
WordPress has very clean and simple codes, making it easy for search engines to read, crawl, and index a website’s content. WordPress also comes with mobile responsive themes, plugins, and a clean and accessible structure that lead to higher rankings and more visibility for the business.
Social Media Integration
One of the best advantages of a WordPress-based site is it allows seamless integration with social networks. You don’t need to login into your social media accounts like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter one by one; WordPress does it all for you.
Increased Security
WordPress has faced a lot of security issues in the beginning, but with time, WordPress resolved and improved its security with every update. We even have shared some proven tips to keep WordPress sites secure. If you have good WordPress web designers and developers, you can fortify your website’s security and make it hacking-proof.
Multiple Users
WordPress’s other big advantage is as an administrator of a website; you can set-up multiple users for the website and assign access levels and capabilities to each user. With this, a WordPress website can be managed by multiple users from any device.
Difference Between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
Although WordPress is simple and convenient to use, beginners might find it a bit confusing because of two versions: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Both versions are best depending on your business needs and resources. Let’s explore the key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org more in-depth and figure out which platform fits perfectly for whom.
Themes and Plugins
WordPress.com allows you to use any theme from more than 150 free themes and 200+ premium themes. However, you can’t use custom themes with WordPress.com. On the other hand, WordPress.org enables you to install any custom theme from over 4000 free themes. WordPress.com offers limited theme support, while WordPress.org provides unlimited theme support.
WordPress.com comes with built-in plugins by default for various features like sharing, stats, comments, and more. With WordPress.org, you can install any free or premium plugins to extend functionality based on your needs.
Security, Backups, and Maintenance
When it comes to basic security, backups, and maintenance, WordPress.com takes care of them all with built-in features. With WordPress.org, you can take the help of third-party hosting and even install plugins for regular security, backups, and maintenance.
With WordPress.org, you are responsible for keeping your site updated, keeping regular backups, having SPAM control options, and keeping your site well-optimized. While with WordPress.com, you don’t have to worry about anything; it does everything automatically, whether about updates, backups, or optimizations.
Cost
WordPress.com does allow you to set up a website entirely for free up to 3GB of storage space but with some limitations like no customization option. On the other hand, with WordPress.org, you can launch a completely functional website at $35 for the first year and then $50 every year after that. For high traffic sites, the cost of hosting with WordPress.org can also get expensive.
Branding
WordPress.org does give you branding freedom, which means you do not have to display any ‘Powered by’ links. You can do so if you feel like or want to, but it’s not mandatory; it’s entirely up to you. However, with WordPress.com, users are forced to display ‘Powered by’ links on their website on top of having ads displayed on your website that you don’t even make money from. You can only stop this by paying some amount to WordPress.
SEO Features
WordPress.com comes with some limitations; hence you don’t have much control over your website SEO since WordPress.com restricts you from installing popular SEO plugins. With WordPress.org, you can install the best SEO plugins and utilize other third-party SEO tools to maximize your SEO potential and rank higher in SERPs.
E-Commerce Development
WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to create an online store. To create an e-commerce store, even WordPress recommends switching to self-hosted WordPress and utilizing a proper web hosting provider. On the other hand, you can easily create a complete online store on WordPress.org to sell whatever you want.
5 Things You Must Consider While Building a Successful WordPress Site
Whether you are a blogger or a business professional running an e-commerce site, you can easily build awesome looking and high-performing websites with WordPress. However, building a WordPress site requires an investment of money, time, energy, and effort. So, here are a few things you should consider before getting started with WordPress development.
Selecting the Right Domain Name
Domain name plays a significant role in website development; it can make or break your online presence. Think of your domain name as your website’s identity. Your visitors will use it to access your WordPress site. That’s why choosing the right domain name that goes well with your company’s niche is crucial.
It is always advisable to choose a snappy, attractive, unique, short, and easy to remember domain name. Try to make your domain name memorable, use keywords, target your geographic area, and avoid numbers or hyphens in the name to have a standout domain name for your WordPress site.
Choosing the Right WP Theme
WordPress comes with oodles of free and paid themes that make WP development easier than anything else. As a business, you need to pick the theme that not only looks nice and fits your brand but is also easy to use, responsive, and fulfills all of your needs. You must understand how themes operate on the WP backend.
According to your business, choosing the right theme is essential because it keeps your online presence responsive across devices and will load instantly. Chalk out your requirements, and then decide whether you want to go with a free theme, need a paid one, or a customized theme.
Secured-Hosting
While choosing a hosting provider, you should overlook proper hosting. Having high-quality and secured hosting is what you should be looking for. A proper hosting can prevent your website from severe damage like getting hacked. Not having a proper hosting service can result in a corrupted website, slow loading, and more.
Investing in high-quality and secured hosting is a lucrative investment. It will help you save countless headaches in the future and keep your website safe from all the unforeseen activities.
SEO Intelligence
The best thing about WordPress is it has plugins for everything. Though SEO elements in WordPress are not built-in, you can always install a plugin for that and grow your organic reach. There is a popularly known WP SEO plugin named Yoast SEO that handles all your SEO-related tasks and helps you establish highly optimized website pages and blogs on every page. To top it all, the best thing is this plugin is free to use and get installed in no time.
Analytics Tracking
WordPress doesn’t come with built-in analytics and visitor tracking. Like other platforms, it is essential to have the ability to track and measure your website performance on WordPress. Having insight into your site’s performance, like your audience’s demographic and geographic characteristics, can help you validate your target audience. That said, make sure you have your Google Analytics properly set up and added to your WordPress portal.
End Thoughts
Having an impactful website is of utmost importance in today’s time. It helps you connect with your visitors, create a positive impression, and ultimately increase conversions. WordPress is a powerful website builder you should leverage for your website development.
Hope this ultimate guide helped you understand everything about WordPress CMS development, from the benefits, differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org to crucial things to keep in mind before starting with WordPress development.
Build whatever you want, a blog site, portfolio, business site, or an e-commerce store with WordPress. Are you ready?
