Web Design – 7 Reasons WordPress is the best platform
Introduction
This is my opinion piece and many people will differ, but that’s ok. I have been creating websites for the past 7 years and for me, WordPress is the best web design platform. I remember when I was studying Software Development, in my Internet Programming lecture we were introduced to the 3 big CMS’s (Content Management System) at the time. Firstly Drupal, then Joomla and finally WordPress. These systems were designed to make it easy for people to manage their websites and the website content.
From what I remember Drupal was seen as the one where the most money was in from a job point of view. I knew about a fairly large company that built their Intranet system on Joomla. Despite this, our task was to create a website using WordPress which was unknown to me at the time. I found out that WordPress was known for blogging and more personal websites. Surprisingly, however when delving into WordPress web design, it was so much more. It was exposed to the world of themes and plugins, pages and posts etc… It was easy to use and felt so natural.
Some CMS usage statistics from Jan 2014 – Jan 2022
| CMS Name | Jan2014 | Jan2015 | Jan2016 | Jan2017 | Jan2018 | Jan2019 | Jan2020 | Jan2021 | Jan2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 64.8% | 61.7% | 56.6% | 53.3% | 51.3% | 45.3% | 43.1% | 38.3% | 33.8% |
| WordPress | 21.0% | 23.3% | 25.6% | 27.3% | 29.2% | 32.7% | 35.4% | 39.5% | 43.2% |
| Shopify | 0.1% | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.6% | 0.9% | 1.4% | 1.9% | 3.2% | 4.4% |
| Wix | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.4% | 1.0% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.9% |
| Squarespace | 0.1% | 0.2% | 0.4% | 0.5% | 0.7% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.4% | 1.8% |
| Joomla | 3.3% | 3.3% | 3.3% | 3.4% | 3.2% | 3.0% | 2.6% | 2.2% | 1.7% |
| Drupal | 1.9% | 2.0% | 2.1% | 2.2% | 2.3% | 1.9% | 1.7% | 1.5% | 1.3% |
So here are my 7 reasons that makes WordPress the best for me:
1. It’s Customizable
Today WordPress powers over 40% of the internet, yes the entire internet, this in itself is mind blowing. It stems from the fact that you can customize every part of WordPress because it is a free open source software. You can customize everything through the WordPress ecosystem without touching the precious WordPress core files. At its core the system is simple and stable and most web designers use it or have used it.
It allows for speed of web design and unlimited variation. Without getting too technical WordPress can be integrated into any other system because of its API. What a system…
2. Teaching
Another reason why I think WordPress is the best for web design is because it is easy to learn and by extension, it is easy to teach non-technical people to perform certain functions that they require. Examples would be showing a client how to upload products to their e-commerce website or showing them how to change content on their website, without having to write a single line of code.
Developers are also not left out, WordPress has great developer documentation and you can write as much code as you want for that customization your project needs. WordPress is a developers and designers dream with so many building blocks to assist in the process.
3. Google Friendly
Whenever I’m approached to re-design a website by a client, in most cases it is a WordPress website. Another great feature of the WordPress ecosystem is that it is built to be Google friendly, you simply install the legendary Yoast plugin and most of your technical SEO issues will be sorted. Go through the settings of the plugin or ask a web designer to do it for you and you will have a solid foundation to start ranking.
4. Power Plugins and Themes
Every WordPress installation comes with default themes for the website presentation and some default plugins, which adds additional functionality to your website. There are also the core functions like the block editor, creating pages and posts etc… For me, however, there have always been some plugins that power up your WordPress website to the next level. There are 5 that I love to use:
Plugins – Custom Post Types & Memberships
- Pods – This plugin makes it easy to set up custom post types and custom fields that fit in with your project. E.g. if you are storing donation data you could create a donation post type instead of using the default post and page post types. There are so much more like custom taxonomies, settings pages enable or disable REST API usage amongst others. Pods is so much more than this but I wanted to illustrate the immense power in this 1 plugin. Others prefer to use Advanced Custom Fields but for me Pods is an amazing power plugin.
- Ultimate Member (UM) – If you have any type of membership program in your business or a community that you want to manage, you cannot go wrong with UM, the extremely powerful membership plugin. Some of the features include, blocking and unblocking of members, custom registration and login forms even signing in as a member if you are an admin to do some troubleshooting. This plugin is a must if you run any type of system where you need multiple users. UM also has a huge variety of actions and filters that you can also take advantage of as a developer to further enhance and customize for your project.
Plugins – Page Builder & E-Commerce
- Elementor – Elementor is one of the most popular page builders in the WordPress ecosystem. It allows you to create visually appealing web pages with ease and layouts that are only limited by your imagination. WordPress does have its own page builder called the block editor, but currently Elementor is still my choice of power plugin. Other features include creating custom header and footers, custom templates, animations. Elementor is so popular that other plugins exist purely for additional features to be used with Elementor.
- WooCommerce – WordPress is the biggest CMS platform on the planet by usage so it makes sense that WooCommerce is the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. If you want to sell products or services on your website then WooCommerce easily filters to the top of the list of plugins. What gives me that little bit of additional confidence is that the same company responsible for creating WordPress Automattic also runs WooCommerce. I don’t really see any other choice. WooCommerce can do anything: physical goods, digital, subscriptions, etc… There are so many payment gateway integrations that are already in place that easily integrate with WooCommerce because it is so popular. An amazing plugin and definitely one of my top power plugins.
Plugins – SEO
- Yoast – We did speak about Yoast earlier on Google friendliness, but definitely a power plugin. It simplifies all your technical SEO tasks and has a huge variety of tools upgrading to the Pro version takes you that much further. In short if you need SEO you need Yoast.
Theme
- Astra – We have spoken mostly about the power plugins here, but a definite power theme is the Astra theme. It is so flexible with loads of free starter templates to get you on the road in no time. When you upgrade you have access to so much more with this amazing theme. Interesting Astra comes from the Latin word star, which signifies power to me.
5. Actions and Filters know as WordPress Hooks
WordPress is developer friendly and has lots and I mean lots of Actions and Filters. This allows you to ‘Hook’ into a certain functionality that is built into the WordPress core and add your own custom code without modifying the file in the core. An example would be when a post is saved to the database a WordPress function runs in the background to perform it. You can then ‘hook’ into that function and run your own code like checking if a certain custom field called “add new user” is true or false or not and based on that perhaps create a new user, delete a user or anything that would make sense in your project.
6. Outside Integration
WordPress can be used as a backend to your web design or any other project. You can access information from any other source using the WordPress REST API. Details pertaining to posts, custom post types etc… You can create, delete and update details and have a very stable backend. So much power, it is really unbelievable.
7. Custom Themes and Plugins
Beyond all this you can create your own theme and plugins from scratch. This is the ultimate freedom that WordPress gives the developer. What more can I say, WordPress is the best, well at least for me.
Thank you for reading,
Graham
G Web Design
