Top 20 Reasons To Use WordPress For Your Blog
Personally I'm a huge fans of WordPress. For the last several years, I’ve programmed 90% of my and our (including all my clients) sites on the WordPress.org platform. WordPress enhances websites at every step of the process:
our users to save money, take control over their own sites
(add/edit/remove content), incorporate advanced functionality
(e-commerce, mapping, user submitted content, etc.) and get better
search results. WordPress.org is simply a stroke of genius, and we take
great pride in using it to make beautiful and powerful websites
for our clients. Below is a list of the top 10 reasons we believe in
using WordPress.org for your website. If you are interested in getting
professional help setting up or optimizing a WordPress.org website, contact us any time.
Unlike other “free” and “open source” solutions that have hidden agendas, WordPress.org is completely free (learn more)
for you, forever. WordPress doesn’t start charging when you hit a
certain size, nor does it close off any of its code to you. This is one
of the less tangible but probably most important elements of
WordPress.org’s success. No fees, no gotchas, no nonsense.
The more I learn about Matt Mullenweg and his company, Automatic, the more I like them. These guys write amazing code, protect open source programming, fight spam, host affordable and educational conferences, take security seriously,
and seem like genuine nice guys. I mentioned that WP is open source,
but what’s really interesting is that it is commercial open source.
That sounds like an oxymoron but it’s actually a breakthrough. Many
traditional community-based open source projects are not well guided –
they end up floundering, splitting into separate projects, or become
stale because volunteers are not motivated to work. Automatic stays on
top of their product, steering development in the right direction and
constantly updating their product.
Plenty of platforms out there offer plugin functionality, but I’ve
never seen a more smooth and thorough implementation than the plugin
effort on WordPress.org. Plugins allow you to add great photo
galleries, sliders, shopping carts, forums, maps, and more great
functionality. There’s a searchable, one-click install directory of
plugins (think App Store for WordPress). Their code is riddled with “hooks”
that allow developers to add their code to virtually any aspect of
WordPress without editing the core. Look for a few new and important
WordPress.org plugins to come from the Computer Courage labs soon!
The intuitive, user-friendly backend of WordPress is probably what
made it so famous in the first place. I’ll never remember the relief I
felt when I first installed WordPress after a few Drupal experiences. I
always tell my clients, “if you can do it in Word, you can do it in
WordPress.” In fact, with the Paste From Word tool, that statement is
more true than you would imagine (this article was written in Word).
WordPress is continually improving its CMS, adding features such as
threaded comments, galleries, revision histories, trash, custom post types, and more. If you haven’t maintained a WordPress site yet, give it a look.
How is this number 5 on the list you ask? WordPress really came to fame for blogging and is still considered by many to be a blog
platform. Even WordPress itself seems to identify with blogging first,
as the default configuration is for the home page to be a blog. Aside
from the amazing advances in CMS (see #4 above), the blog functionality
is still the best in the business. With categories, tags, threaded
commenting, gravatars, easy theming, widgets, fantastic moderation
controls, anti spam solutions, and plugin infrastructure, you can’t find
a better blog solution. Adding a blog to a WordPress site is a great
way to attract and involve visitors, and to keep Google paying
attention. If you don’t need a full site, and just want a quick blog,
check out WordPress.com.
I tell my business clients every day that their site doesn’t need to
“reinvent the wheel” when it comes to design. We love doing custom web design
for our clients, but many of them don’t need it. We’ve been able to
make very beautiful and successful sites by starting from pre-existing
themes and doing customization from there. Because themes are open
source, you can buy or download them and then modify them to your
heart’s content. I have to give special credit to the folks at Elegant Themes
who make wonderfully powerful and easy to use themes at a very
reasonable price. Remember, themes are independent from your content,
so you can edit or swap out themes at any time and keep your content and
functionality in place.
WordPress has always bragged about its “Famous 5 Minute Installation”. Not only is WordPress pretty easy to install (it
actually takes 5 minutes if you are handy with your web servers, newbies
will have a learning curve), but WordPress is also surprisingly easy to
update for security and new functionality. When a new version is
available, WordPress will give you an easy link for a one-click upgrade. Warning:
Computer Courage always recommends backing up your blog before doing an
install in case something goes wrong. Look for backup plugins or
techniques first.
At Computer Courage, we focus on getting new customers for our clients via Search Engine Optimization.
Ever since we started doing WordPress.org installs, I noticed a spike
in search results. Over the years I’ve used many valuable SEO plugins
such as the All-In-One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.
But even without these plugins, I always felt like the simple layouts
of WordPress, the permalinks, and the easy linking in WordPress would be
naturally attractive to Google. I even heard it straight from the
horse’s mouth. Matt Cutts,
the other awesome Matt and the head of Google’s “web spam team” spoke
at WordCamp SF 2009 and said it directly – “Google Loves WordPress”.
Edit: After saying this for the last year, I went back and checked. It
turns out I’ve been exaggerating. He said “WordPress is a great choice” but still, he goes on to gush about how much WordPress helps you get
better results. We always recommend a conversion to WordPress when
doing SEO.
WordPress sites are usually built on relatively simple and accessible
technologies. It’s easy to install on Windows or Linux servers. It
uses all free license server software. The web pages render in HTML and
CSS allowing them to show up on iPhones, BlackBerrys, Android, iPad,
etc. It’s also easy for alternative browsers such as text only browsers
(see Lynx) which are excellent for those with disabilities.
When you add up a lot of these features, you find that your WordPress
site can grow with you over the years. You can easily upgrade it for
new features and security. You can add a new theme (ma.tt seems to add a
new theme most years) without redoing your whole site. You can add new
plugins for enhanced functionality (add e-commerce if your business
grows, focus more on search results, add a store finder, etc.)
WordPress.org is used by millions of sites, from the simplest little
blogs to huge brand names like the New York Times blog, People, Flickr,
and more. See the WordPress.org showcase.
This reason is a variant of source code being easier to manage. Without
a good version control strategy it is much harder to get a local copy
of a website for development. Developers in a Drupal shop have to spend a
lot more time merging their databases so the up-shot is that many
Drupal developers co-develop on the same installation, and often the
live installation at that which results in overwriting each other’s code
and limits a developers ability to roll back. It’s much easier to
develop with a local copy of WordPress so WordPress developers tend to
do it more often.
This reason is also a variant of source code being easier to manage. 1
but the headaches are seperate so I list is as a seperate reason.
Because WordPress maintains a lot more of its logic in PHP code
WordPress is much easier to deploy than a Drupal application. Drupal
developers end up writing a lot more SQL code that they then need to
test everytime they need to merge data used to control new application
logic into the database of a production webserver on deployment of a
revision to an existing website. The significance of this is hard to
underestimate.
To create a beautiful website design for WordPress designers need to be
good at design, of course, but beyond that they really only need to
learn how to copy and paste "Template Tags" as they able to have full design freedom when producing the HTML that will be used for a WordPress theme.
Drupal designers, on the other hand, need to be skilled PHP developers too
and with a rare exceptions those two skillsets are mutually exclusive.
When you do find someone who can do both and do both well, they will be
hugely in demand and thus outrageously expensive but the real problem is
with Drupal you really won’t know if they are one of the rare few until
after you’ve paid them a lot of money to either create a "house of
cards", or a really ugly house.
With WordPress you can get a great designer to work with a great
developer, both of which are easier to evaluate than combined greatness,
and you are set.
A corollary to finding skilled designers, it’s simply much easier to find WordPress professionals to hire for projects than it is to find Drupal professionals.
Another corollary to finding skilled designers and more WordPress
professional being available is it is less expensive to find a WordPress professional than a professional for Drupal.
If you ignore the fact that there are many more WordPress professionals
another factor is WordPress professionals don’t need to be as
proficient in as many areas as their Drupal counterparts. People who can really make Drupal sing are really expensive.
Drupal’s
highly nested architecture makes it so that a developer spends most of
his time looping through a few core functions waiting to find which code
controls what they need to modify. Often with WordPress the developer
can simply set a breakpoint on the theme’s template file and debug from
there.
Drupal runs upwards of 100 SQL queries for every page load
because of its site architecture. With WordPress the number can easily
be less than 10. And the time to run those SQL queries easily add up.
Drupal advocates will claim those queries can be made insignificant by
the creative use of caching but the reality is that you cannot cache
most items in the admin console so the end user who is forced to use
Drupal will be saddled with a level of fatiged and is just not
necessary, if you instead choose WordPress.
And lest you feel this is unimportant technical concern be aware that site performance is now something that Google uses to determine search engine result rankings.
Host your website on a slow platform and prepare for an uphill battle
when it comes to achieve top rankings in Google’s search engine results
pages.
A
corollary to page load performance is that the typical Drupal site
requires a lot more server to serve each of it’s pages than does a
typical WordPress site. Those who choose WordPress for a seriously high
traffic site will usually find they can serve more pages with the same
servers and/or that the memory requirements for WordPress will typically
be a lot less. And for a high traffic sites this could either be real
money and/or it can mean that the site is less likely to fail in the
case of a flash mob such as a Slashdotting.
More companies or their 3rd parties offer plugins for WordPress to integrate with their services than another other platform, specially more than modules available for Drupal. Twitter, Facebook, Freshbooks, MailChimp;
you name it, they all have WordPress plugins. If you need one for
Drupal and it’s not a mainstream service like Twitter or Facebook
chances are you’ll have to pay to have it written.
Have further thoughts on why WordPress.org is or isn’t a great
platform for building websites? We’ve love to hear from you in the
comments below. Thanks for your participation and interest in the web
and in WordPress.org. Finally, if you’re looking for a professional
team to put a WordPress.org website together for you, contact us today or sign up for our newsletter.
our users to save money, take control over their own sites
(add/edit/remove content), incorporate advanced functionality
(e-commerce, mapping, user submitted content, etc.) and get better
search results. WordPress.org is simply a stroke of genius, and we take
great pride in using it to make beautiful and powerful websites
for our clients. Below is a list of the top 10 reasons we believe in
using WordPress.org for your website. If you are interested in getting
professional help setting up or optimizing a WordPress.org website, contact us any time.
1. WordPress is Truly Free and Open Source
Unlike other “free” and “open source” solutions that have hidden agendas, WordPress.org is completely free (learn more)
for you, forever. WordPress doesn’t start charging when you hit a
certain size, nor does it close off any of its code to you. This is one
of the less tangible but probably most important elements of
WordPress.org’s success. No fees, no gotchas, no nonsense.
2. Automatic is an Awesome Company, and it Takes Care of WordPress
The more I learn about Matt Mullenweg and his company, Automatic, the more I like them. These guys write amazing code, protect open source programming, fight spam, host affordable and educational conferences, take security seriously,
and seem like genuine nice guys. I mentioned that WP is open source,
but what’s really interesting is that it is commercial open source.
That sounds like an oxymoron but it’s actually a breakthrough. Many
traditional community-based open source projects are not well guided –
they end up floundering, splitting into separate projects, or become
stale because volunteers are not motivated to work. Automatic stays on
top of their product, steering development in the right direction and
constantly updating their product.
3. Plugins Give You More Functionality
Plenty of platforms out there offer plugin functionality, but I’ve
never seen a more smooth and thorough implementation than the plugin
effort on WordPress.org. Plugins allow you to add great photo
galleries, sliders, shopping carts, forums, maps, and more great
functionality. There’s a searchable, one-click install directory of
plugins (think App Store for WordPress). Their code is riddled with “hooks”
that allow developers to add their code to virtually any aspect of
WordPress without editing the core. Look for a few new and important
WordPress.org plugins to come from the Computer Courage labs soon!
4. The Visual Editor and CMS are Outstanding
The intuitive, user-friendly backend of WordPress is probably what
made it so famous in the first place. I’ll never remember the relief I
felt when I first installed WordPress after a few Drupal experiences. I
always tell my clients, “if you can do it in Word, you can do it in
WordPress.” In fact, with the Paste From Word tool, that statement is
more true than you would imagine (this article was written in Word).
WordPress is continually improving its CMS, adding features such as
threaded comments, galleries, revision histories, trash, custom post types, and more. If you haven’t maintained a WordPress site yet, give it a look.
5. Easily Add a Blog To Your Site
How is this number 5 on the list you ask? WordPress really came to fame for blogging and is still considered by many to be a blog
platform. Even WordPress itself seems to identify with blogging first,
as the default configuration is for the home page to be a blog. Aside
from the amazing advances in CMS (see #4 above), the blog functionality
is still the best in the business. With categories, tags, threaded
commenting, gravatars, easy theming, widgets, fantastic moderation
controls, anti spam solutions, and plugin infrastructure, you can’t find
a better blog solution. Adding a blog to a WordPress site is a great
way to attract and involve visitors, and to keep Google paying
attention. If you don’t need a full site, and just want a quick blog,
check out WordPress.com.
6. Themes Let You Style Your Site
I tell my business clients every day that their site doesn’t need to
“reinvent the wheel” when it comes to design. We love doing custom web design
for our clients, but many of them don’t need it. We’ve been able to
make very beautiful and successful sites by starting from pre-existing
themes and doing customization from there. Because themes are open
source, you can buy or download them and then modify them to your
heart’s content. I have to give special credit to the folks at Elegant Themes
who make wonderfully powerful and easy to use themes at a very
reasonable price. Remember, themes are independent from your content,
so you can edit or swap out themes at any time and keep your content and
functionality in place.
7. It’s Easy to Keep WordPress Secure
WordPress has always bragged about its “Famous 5 Minute Installation”. Not only is WordPress pretty easy to install (it
actually takes 5 minutes if you are handy with your web servers, newbies
will have a learning curve), but WordPress is also surprisingly easy to
update for security and new functionality. When a new version is
available, WordPress will give you an easy link for a one-click upgrade. Warning:
Computer Courage always recommends backing up your blog before doing an
install in case something goes wrong. Look for backup plugins or
techniques first.
8. Google Loves WordPress
At Computer Courage, we focus on getting new customers for our clients via Search Engine Optimization.
Ever since we started doing WordPress.org installs, I noticed a spike
in search results. Over the years I’ve used many valuable SEO plugins
such as the All-In-One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.
But even without these plugins, I always felt like the simple layouts
of WordPress, the permalinks, and the easy linking in WordPress would be
naturally attractive to Google. I even heard it straight from the
horse’s mouth. Matt Cutts,
the other awesome Matt and the head of Google’s “web spam team” spoke
at WordCamp SF 2009 and said it directly – “Google Loves WordPress”.
Edit: After saying this for the last year, I went back and checked. It
turns out I’ve been exaggerating. He said “WordPress is a great choice” but still, he goes on to gush about how much WordPress helps you get
better results. We always recommend a conversion to WordPress when
doing SEO.
9. WordPress Sites are Accessible
WordPress sites are usually built on relatively simple and accessible
technologies. It’s easy to install on Windows or Linux servers. It
uses all free license server software. The web pages render in HTML and
CSS allowing them to show up on iPhones, BlackBerrys, Android, iPad,
etc. It’s also easy for alternative browsers such as text only browsers
(see Lynx) which are excellent for those with disabilities.
10. Your Site Can Grow With You
When you add up a lot of these features, you find that your WordPress
site can grow with you over the years. You can easily upgrade it for
new features and security. You can add a new theme (ma.tt seems to add a
new theme most years) without redoing your whole site. You can add new
plugins for enhanced functionality (add e-commerce if your business
grows, focus more on search results, add a store finder, etc.)
WordPress.org is used by millions of sites, from the simplest little
blogs to huge brand names like the New York Times blog, People, Flickr,
and more. See the WordPress.org showcase.
11. Collaborative Development is Easier with WordPress
This reason is a variant of source code being easier to manage. Without
a good version control strategy it is much harder to get a local copy
of a website for development. Developers in a Drupal shop have to spend a
lot more time merging their databases so the up-shot is that many
Drupal developers co-develop on the same installation, and often the
live installation at that which results in overwriting each other’s code
and limits a developers ability to roll back. It’s much easier to
develop with a local copy of WordPress so WordPress developers tend to
do it more often.
12. Revisions of WordPress-based Websites are Easier to Deploy
This reason is also a variant of source code being easier to manage. 1
but the headaches are seperate so I list is as a seperate reason.
Because WordPress maintains a lot more of its logic in PHP code
WordPress is much easier to deploy than a Drupal application. Drupal
developers end up writing a lot more SQL code that they then need to
test everytime they need to merge data used to control new application
logic into the database of a production webserver on deployment of a
revision to an existing website. The significance of this is hard to
underestimate.
13. Easier to Find Skilled Designers for WordPress
To create a beautiful website design for WordPress designers need to be
good at design, of course, but beyond that they really only need to
learn how to copy and paste "Template Tags" as they able to have full design freedom when producing the HTML that will be used for a WordPress theme.
Drupal designers, on the other hand, need to be skilled PHP developers too
and with a rare exceptions those two skillsets are mutually exclusive.
When you do find someone who can do both and do both well, they will be
hugely in demand and thus outrageously expensive but the real problem is
with Drupal you really won’t know if they are one of the rare few until
after you’ve paid them a lot of money to either create a "house of
cards", or a really ugly house.
With WordPress you can get a great designer to work with a great
developer, both of which are easier to evaluate than combined greatness,
and you are set.
14. There are More WordPress Professionals Available
A corollary to finding skilled designers, it’s simply much easier to find WordPress professionals to hire for projects than it is to find Drupal professionals.
15. WordPress Professionals Charge Lower Rates
Another corollary to finding skilled designers and more WordPress
professional being available is it is less expensive to find a WordPress professional than a professional for Drupal.
If you ignore the fact that there are many more WordPress professionals
another factor is WordPress professionals don’t need to be as
proficient in as many areas as their Drupal counterparts. People who can really make Drupal sing are really expensive.
16. WordPress’ Code is Much Easier to Debug
Drupal’s
highly nested architecture makes it so that a developer spends most of
his time looping through a few core functions waiting to find which code
controls what they need to modify. Often with WordPress the developer
can simply set a breakpoint on the theme’s template file and debug from
there.
17. WordPress Sites Load Much Faster than Drupal Sites
Drupal runs upwards of 100 SQL queries for every page load
because of its site architecture. With WordPress the number can easily
be less than 10. And the time to run those SQL queries easily add up.
Drupal advocates will claim those queries can be made insignificant by
the creative use of caching but the reality is that you cannot cache
most items in the admin console so the end user who is forced to use
Drupal will be saddled with a level of fatiged and is just not
necessary, if you instead choose WordPress.
18. Wordpress technical concern
And lest you feel this is unimportant technical concern be aware that site performance is now something that Google uses to determine search engine result rankings.
Host your website on a slow platform and prepare for an uphill battle
when it comes to achieve top rankings in Google’s search engine results
pages.
19. WordPress Requires Less Expensive Hosting
A
corollary to page load performance is that the typical Drupal site
requires a lot more server to serve each of it’s pages than does a
typical WordPress site. Those who choose WordPress for a seriously high
traffic site will usually find they can serve more pages with the same
servers and/or that the memory requirements for WordPress will typically
be a lot less. And for a high traffic sites this could either be real
money and/or it can mean that the site is less likely to fail in the
case of a flash mob such as a Slashdotting.
20. WordPress has the Most Integrations
More companies or their 3rd parties offer plugins for WordPress to integrate with their services than another other platform, specially more than modules available for Drupal. Twitter, Facebook, Freshbooks, MailChimp;
you name it, they all have WordPress plugins. If you need one for
Drupal and it’s not a mainstream service like Twitter or Facebook
chances are you’ll have to pay to have it written.
Have further thoughts on why WordPress.org is or isn’t a great
platform for building websites? We’ve love to hear from you in the
comments below. Thanks for your participation and interest in the web
and in WordPress.org. Finally, if you’re looking for a professional
team to put a WordPress.org website together for you, contact us today or sign up for our newsletter.
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