You’re in excellent company when using WordPress as your tool to publish content on the web: from famous bloggers to news sites such as Bloomberg Professional, TechCrunch; celebrities such as The Rolling Stones and Katy Perry; and websites for famous brands such as Disney, Microsoft and the Whitehouse.gov.

And if you’re curious about just which other famous personalities and brands are using WordPress, take a look at the WordPress Website Showcase to view the impressive list of users and even more impressive designs of their WordPress powered websites.

We take a look at why you should use WordPress to power your website.  From websites for businesses to blogs, social networks, news sites and beyond, here are our top 7 reasons to have WordPress as your content management system of choice.

1 – WordPress: the primary CMS for websites

When it comes to market share of content management systems (CMS) for websites, WordPress takes first place.  According to the Web Technology Survey of W3Techs, WordPress commands a lead of 31.4% of websites using WordPress as their CMS.  This is 50% more than its closest rival, Joomla which weighs in with a content management system market share of 5.9%.

2 – WordPress is current and cost-effective

WordPress can be self-hosted, which means that downloading, installing and upgrading a WordPress powered website can be done without incurring any costs.  There is only a small expense for your domain name and hosting.

As it’s open source, WordPress has an extensive network of developers across the globe who can upgrade the code and build additional features and applications through plugins and themes. In this way, WordPress remains current and relevant, addressing the needs of its users while introducing new offerings which improve the design and functioning of a website.

3 – WordPress Code is built for SEO

WordPress code out-of-the-box is very SEO friendly.  WordPress uses simple, high quality code, tailoring its features and functions to accommodate search engines to read and index a site’s content.  This code guides search engine spiders and crawlers through the website’s pages, posts and categories to collect, analyse and store data so that your website pages can appear on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

WordPress uses tags to mark up the page content, making it easy for Google and other search engines to differentiate the important parts of your website and index them accordingly.

4 – WordPress Stats

According to codeinwp.com some of the highlights when it comes to WordPress statistics are as follows:

• WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web (compared to Shopify’s and Squarespace’s 60-80).
• 17 posts are published every second on WordPress sites around the world.
• The keyword “WordPress” gets googled around 2.8 million times every month.
• Around 19,500,000 websites on the entire web use WordPress.com has only 394 employees. Facebook has the same number of monthly unique visitors (US) as WordPress.com, but they employ 25 times more people.
• 50,000+ WordPress plugins in the official directory, with new ones being added daily.
• 1,250,000,000+ total plugin downloads happened on WordPress.org so far.
• WooCommerce powers 28% of all online stores worldwide, with over 30 million downloads so far
• WordPress.com reaches 181 million monthly unique views – the 4th most viewed platform in the US after Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.
• 50,000 WordPress.com websites are being launched daily.

5 – Versatility

WordPress is flexible in its application and can be used as the structure for a wide variety of websites: the Wonderlings website (https://wonderlings.com.au/) uses WordPress for the whole site – from the blog to the brand’s eCommerce offering.  Renowned for its versatility in being able to be modified and customized, WordPress can be used for a variety of different types of purposes and sites such as:

Blog, gallery, news site, resources, stockphotos, online shopping, Facebook Groups, a membership site … and more.

6 – User friendly installation

WordPress is easy to install.  Available on the WordPress.org site, all you need do is to click on the “Download WordPress” button.  Many WordPress hosting providers offer tools to automatically install WordPress for you (such as Fantastico, Softaculous, and SimpleScripts).  Generally, WordPress is very simple to download and install, taking under five minutes to complete.  Additionally, many web hosts offer to preinstall WordPress for you or provide dedicated tools to facilitate the installation process.

7 – WordPress Community Support

The WordPress culture of sharing and collaboration makes it a natural space for forums and groups offering support for its users.  Tapping into this network can help you to find a solution to any issues with your site while also opening up new avenues of connection with the WordPress community and opportunities of learning.

Types of support groups include: WordPress.org/support; Facebook Groups; community-based question and answer sites such as Quora; forums and tutorials across the web.

Wrapping it up

The open-source software of WordPress may have started out as a content management system for creating blogs, but its capabilities have extended far beyond these beginnings.  Various evolutionary stages with changes to the core code and additional application and feature support via plugins and themes have made WordPress the reigning CMS on the web.  In fact, whatever website you wish to create, WordPress can help you get the job done beautifully and effectively.  Best of all – your website can now add its name to the long list of illustrious sites on the web which are already powered by WordPress.