8 Reasons to Use WordPress

1) Search Engine Optimized (SEO)

If Google employees say it is good for SEO, then you should probably take that to heart.

It is a fantastic piece of software, makes your blog easily crawlable by search engines, solves some 80-90% of mechanics of SEO and is the first big step anyone can take towards creating a popular online business.  — Matt Cutts (from Google)

So I’m sure it is very similar results with Yahoo and other search engines people don’t use. 🙂

2) Wickedly Popular

If you need an average guy to help you out with making changes you probably know someone who uses it. This is also nice for clients because you are never locked into one developer. Take a look at the popularity of WordPress searches on Google compared with Joomla and Drupal.

3) Plugins (reinventing the wheel is a waste of time)

I have known some people in the past that developed their own CMS (content management system like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) but they only developed what a basic CMS needed.  Which make sense, I used to be one of those guys.  The problem is, if a client says “I need to have some kittens on my site”, I would have to write the code to go to images.google.com, randomly select an image that has a kitten, display it, customize it a little, etc.  Somewhat time consuming, and expensive for the client.  Or, I could use WordPress and search for “Kittens” and you’ll find the “Kitten of the day” plugin (no joke). Compared to Joomla and Drupal, WordPress has more plugins available that serve a variety of needs. To date WordPress has 23,958 plugins, Drupal has 20,860 modules and Joomla has 6064 extensions.

4) Simple Management

You can make changes extremely quickly, even media like pictures and video. For example, my dad, who is a baby-boomer (I didn’t want to post his age, but you git the gist) maintains his website using WordPress.  I got tired of making changes to his site so I designed a custom layout, developed the theme and handed it over.  He has asked me about 5 or 6 times in the past 3 years and he has posted YouTube videos, changed the content, changed out pictures and uploaded PDFs.  Not bad.

5) You’re Not Stuck With Your Web Guy

This might be a little do complex, but bare with me.  You should check out my blog post about how to “How to Fire the Web Guy” for more details, but with plugins like Duplicator, you can download your site and set it up on another server in a matter of minutes.  (I’ve used the plugin 10+ times so I know what is involved, might take a couple hours the first time you use it)

6) Scalability

We all want to have a popular web site, the more traffic you get it is more likely to hit your goal.  What if your site becomes too popular?  Well, with plugins like “W3 Total Cache” you are able to quickly start caching pages, MySQL queries, compress JS and CSS and able to move all “assets” to the cloud (Amazon’s S3 cloud is what we recommend). WordPress is easily able to accomodate both small and large sites and maintain speed and functionality.

7) Fast-Paced Development

The developers behind WordPress are brilliant.  I was able to hang out with a couple of the core developers at a WordCamp and they are “wicked smart” (Good Will Hunting reference there).  They were talking about all of the plans for 3.5 (December 5th 2012 release) and 3.6 (2013 release).  The don’t stop, there are normally 2 or 3 point releases every year. This means that WordPress continues to get better and better at a rather quick pace.

8) Because Sideways8 Uses It

I know, that sounds a little weird, but its true.  We are a company that over the years have launched over 150 sites, most on WordPress (over 50 sites this year alone). We have not had a single client that has requested to move away from it, but we have had several clients from aforementioned CMS platforms thank us for moving them to WordPress… 🙂

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With all that said, I hope you see the value of using WordPress.