One of the first marketing questions new business owners and entrepreneurs have to tackle is what they should do, or use for a website. Because many small business owners and start-ups are on tight budgets, many lean toward do-it-yourself options; and the confusion over what to choose is understandable given the predominance of do-it-yourself platforms out there. Deciding on a website provider or website creation tool is a big decision; and the process of creating a website frequently includes a lot of time and energy as well as money (because even if you do it yourself, your time is valuable!). The worst possible scenario is to go down the wrong path and end up having to start from scratch soon afterward… just one of the reasons to use WordPress! It is a “best bet” for nice looking, high functioning and user friendly websites.
The Difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
My recommendation is always the WordPress.org option which is “self-hosted”. This means that you have the freedom to buy hosting anywhere for your website files to reside on. This is an important reason to consider WordPress.org over most of the other “do-it-yourself” applications as well. These require that you to host your website with them, and you can’t move it or (in many cases) make a copy of the files. In essence, you don’t have control over the website and have limited flexibility if you want to change something in their design templates or add functionality.
8 Reasons to Use WordPress & Why WordPress Rocks
1. It’s free and easy to learn and use. You will have to buy a domain (which you should do for branding purposes anyway – that’s the “www” address) and you will have to pay for hosting, but there are some very inexpensive options available. The upside of self-hosting (as mentioned above) is that you own and control your own website.
2. WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management Software) and blogging platform on the Internet. There are over 75 million WordPress websites worldwide for a reason! The “open source” platform means that it is highly customizable. It can be adapted, edited and updated for a variety of uses. In fact, WordPress was developed as a blogging platform but is now used just as often for static websites.
3. Hands down, WordPress is the best option for blogs. This makes sense as it was WordPress’s original function. You can add multiple users (such as content authors that don’t get access to the rest of website), schedule blog posts to automatically post at a future date or time, allow comments and organize posts with categories and tags. By the way, everyone should have a blog! If you are on the fence, here are some reasons every business should have a blog.
4. There are thousands of design templates & plugins. This means that you save money! You don’t have to hire a programmer to set-up a fancy website – in many cases you will be able to find templates and plugins (free or low cost) which will help you accomplish what you are looking to do.
5. WordPress is flexible and can grow with you. I can’t stress enough how important it is to not just think about your business as it is today. If you want it to grow and evolve, you will want a website that can grow with you rather than starting from scratch with a new website next month or next year! Through the use of plug-ins, WordPress has more flexibility than any other CMS. Besides a static website or basic blog, you can integrate it with your email and social platforms, utilize multimedia, or even add ecommerce or a membership site!
6. WordPress is secure. Did you know that there are vicious hacking attempts to websites every day? WordPress is updated frequently which helps keep it fairly safe from attack, and then there are plug-ins, which I recommend, to take your website’s security to the next level… because website attacks and downtime is not something you want to deal with!
7. It’s mobile friendly. Not every theme is mobile friendly so you need to look out for this, because you shouldn’t use anything that is not. There are hundreds of templates that are “Responsive” in the WordPress universe, however. Responsive means that the template will adapt to the size of the screen of the user. Being mobile friendly is important because there are now more internet surfers using mobile than desktop, and mobile visitors will not stay on your website if they have to scroll around and pinch to read it!
8. And my number one reason is… I saved my favorite for last because this one reason is enough for most people to choose WordPress. WordPress is easy to use and very effective for SEO. It works well for SEO out of the box, and there are plug-ins that make it even more SEO friendly. Unless you are in a market without any competition, your search engine optimization is not something to mess around with or take lightly – go with WordPress!
So are you convinced yet? One hesitation I hear from small business owners is that they think it is too hard to set-up and get going on and some of the do-it-yourself platforms don’t make you start with your own hosting. Don’t let this dissuade you! Setting up hosting is not complicated, but if you find the process intimidating I have created a Getting Started, Do it Yourself WordPress Package to help you over the hump.
If you are just starting to think about a new website or redesign, you should to download my Free – Website Planning Guide & Checklist, and please let me know if you have additional WordPress questions in the comments below.
The post 8 Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Business Website appeared first on Online Marketing Recipes for Service Business Growth.