WordPress is definitely one of the best ways to build your website.
WordPress is free, open-source software with excellent capabilities and feature-sets that allow just about anyone to create and maintain their website, blog, or online store on their own.
Best of all, you don’t need any coding skills. WordPress rose in popularity because it’s free, open-source, and well maintained, and today – over 35% of all websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress.
That’s a lot of websites!
WordPress was started as a blogging platform, and people mostly used it to power their blogs, but that isn’t the case nowadays. The creators of WordPress decided to alter the core code and introduce traditional website features that allowed people to create all sorts of sites using the vast ecosystem of plugins and themes.
Types of WordPress websites
Here are some types of sites you can build using WordPress:
- Ecommerce websites
- Personal websites
- Business websites
- Portfolio websites
- Blog websites
- Forums and online communities
- Social media websites (want to make a Facebook or Twitter clone? No problem!)
- Membership websites
- .. and everything else you can think of!
A quick tidbit – WordPress is one of the most popular choices for building an Ecommerce website today, and WooCommerce (the #1 WordPress eCommerce plugin) powers over 7% of all Ecommerce websites on the Internet.
WordPress website examples
Apart from individuals and small businesses using WordPress as their website software of choice, there is a massive list of largest brands that use WordPress to power their website. Here are some of our favorites:
There are tons of other sites that we couldn’t include here as the list is too long, but this clearly shows that WordPress is for everyone – from individuals and small businesses to government agencies and big brands.
Advantages of WordPress
Here’s our take on why you should consider WordPress as the platform of choice to build your website:
Open Source, which means free – As we mentioned previously, WordPress is free and open-source software, which means its core will always be free, and you’ll never have to pay a dime to use it.
Easy to install and use – You don’t need any extensive knowledge to install and use WordPress, and many WordPress hosting companies even pre-install it for you. If you want to check one out, our favorite is Skystra.
A plugin and a theme for everything – WordPress has a massive ecosystem of themes and plugins, and you can add any functionality you need to your website with the click of a button. Themes change your website look (some premium themes include several premium plugins to extend functionality), and plugins add features to your site.
Can’t afford a premium plugin or theme at the moment? No problems! There are over 56000 free plugins and over 7000 free themes in the WordPress directory.
Full control of your website – your website belongs to you! Unlike custom website builders that lock your site and data into 3rd party ecosystems and limit what you can do with your website, or if you can move it elsewhere – WordPress provides you total control and ownership of your website. Your website, your data – you choose where to host it.
Huge community – means you’re not stuck if you have a problem. You can ask for help in the official WordPress forums, check the extensive code guide on WordPress Codex (if you’re a developer), or turn to third-party sources if needed. Here are some examples:
Stack Exchange WordPress support section
Adfree WordPress Help group on Facebook
Word of advice on using support channels – always check if the question was answered previously, make sure to check the group rules before posting, be polite and considerate, and make sure to ask specific questions.
Upload anything you want – WordPress supports almost all media types – images, video, audio, documents, etc. You can find all support file types here, but you can make WordPress accept anything from standard files like .gif, .png, .jpg, .mp3, .avi, mp4 to more obscure formats such as .ogg, .3gp, etc.
The king of blogs – WordPress has competitors when it comes to blogging, and some options are okay for testing the water, but pros use WordPress. Why? Because nothing can match the power, excellent tools and class of the WordPress engine. It has the best in class content editor, multiple user roles capability, automatic post scheduler, powerful media options, and the best part – bloggers don’t need to know a single piece of code or even what PHP is to run their blogs and monetize!
