Why WordPress?
Posted on 02. Dec, 2011 by Alex Denning in Hosting, Marketing
Nearly two years ago now, I asked a number of members of the WordPress community why they used WordPress. Over those last two years WordPress has changed vastly and thus it’s time to update that post with the reasons I still use WordPress in 2011.
1. The themes
Nodoubt you’ve heard about WordPress’ free and premium themes. These are undoubtedly one of the main attractions to WordPress and certainly the reason many people use it over other CMSes.
If you’re after free WordPress themes, the likes of Smashing Magazine are the places to look. Be wary of downloading themes from sites which exist solely to link to batches of themes as they often sneak in their own backlinks, using encrypted PHP to do so. Stick to places like the WordPress Theme Directory and roundups from reputable sites such as Smashing Magazine.
However, a huge market has sprung up around paid WordPress themes and you can get some exquisitely designed themes for $50 or so. Even if you don’t want an out-of-the-box theme, you can still use one of the many frameworks available to build your site around, thus saving time (and money!).
My personal recommendation is WooThemes. WPShout runs the WooFramework, something I’d thoroughly recommend. WooThemes have over 100 paid and free themes and their monthly subscription is great value, so you should definitely check them out.
2. The hosting
WordPress is supported by virtually all hosts, but some are vastly better than others. On WPShout I recently conducted an independent survey to find the best WordPress hosts; I’d thoroughly recommend you check out the results in order to find out which host is best for you.
WPShout is hosted by WPWebHost, on their $7.95/month “Freedom Plan”. Since I moved to WPWebHost, I’ve had fantastic customer service and as I’m on a commercial package, I can honestly recommend it as something well worth getting. They’ve even given me a discount code — WPSHOUT — which will give you 30% off the Freedom Plan.
3. The ease of use and flexibility
The chief reason remains its ease of use and flexibility. Whether I want to create a fancy portfolio, a simple e-Commerce site or a straightforward blog, WordPress is the easy option. The “famous five minute install” isn’t really true anymore — it takes me about thirty seconds to install a new WordPress site with my host, but we’ll come onto that later.
Developments such as custom post formats have meant WordPress is now much more than a blogging platform; it’s now a fully fledged CMS.
When I want to do something that would be more complicated, the vast number of plugins can just be dropped into my setup and allow me to do just about anything I could think of. If the plugin you want doesn’t exist, there’s likely to be someone with the same problem as you and a solution on its way.
4. The speed
WordPress has the potential to run extremely quickly. WPShout loads in roughly one and a half seconds and there are a couple of little tricks I use. The chief “trick”, if you can call it that, is to use W3 Total Cache. It’s an absolutely brilliant plugin which caches your site, thus reducing the amount of “work” that has to be done each time somebody loads your site.
I’ve often heard accusations levelled at WordPress of the code being “bloated”, but I’ve never seen anything to back this up nor have I seen this reflected in load times. WordPress can be slow if used irresponsibly, but a couple of simple steps and you’ll be flying.
I’ve written a fair bit about making WordPress run quickly on Shout and I wrote a fairly comprehensive tutorial for Noupe on the subject. Good places to start, though are Faster WordPress and a nice overview How To Make Your WordPress Site Load Faster.
5. The community
None of the things I’ve mentioned thus far would exist without the wonderful WordPress community. They’re the people who help you when you get stuck, make the free themes you use on your blog, develop the plugins you rely on and ultimately make the platform you use.
It’s worth mentioning the license WordPress uses — the General Public License – which gives you immense freedom to do more or less anything you want.
One of the reasons I originally chose WordPress myself was because of the active community and it remains the single main reason why I continue to use WordPress; from a great community, all else flows.
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WPShout is hosted by the fine folks at WPWebHost.
You can get exactly the same hosting as WPShout has for $7.95/month with WPWebHost's Freedom Plan.
Plus get 30% off the Freedom Plan with the code WPSHOUT.
Alex Denning is the founder of WPShout. A WordPress developer from London, Alex is a keen musician and freelance writer and developer.
You can find Alex on Twitter.
71 Responses to “Why WordPress?”
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JeremyOLED
10. Dec, 2009
I have no formal webdevelopment education whatsoever, and have only been trying to make websites for myself for about a year now. I have always used WordPress because I started out with a blog, and I do not have the ability to make any kind of decent website on my own. One year later and every single day I am still amazed by the things I can accomplish with WP, and the awesome community that is always, ALWAYS willing to help. WordPress is my god.
Kyle Eslick
10. Dec, 2009
Great collection Alex!!
I actually started on WordPress because of the plugins. At the time I was using Typepad and ran a Typepad Hacks website (big surprise, huh?).
WordPress Plugins make everything so easy, so I made the switch, fell in love, and haven’t looked back!
ocube
10. Dec, 2009
WordPress offers me the most flexibility for someone who is purely a designer (scared of HTML not to talk of php). It is by no means perfect but when i stick with it, I always find a solution or someone who has already gone through the stress and solved the problem.
Personally my biggest challenge is still being able to customise the look easily, but then, I guess that’s easy for developers. Another gripe is it seems really slow in loading but in all its the a lovely package.
Ozh
10. Dec, 2009
Cool collection indeed. Interesting to see how many different paths lead to the same WP
Michael Soriano
10. Dec, 2009
WordPress is freedom. for front end designers like me – you can pretty much design themes any way you want.
Case in point – I like how yo laid out this post – with the “random paragraphs” look. Very Nice! (a little heavy on the text shadow though)
Jeffro
10. Dec, 2009
I agree with Ozh. I love posts like these which shows how many different paths lead to the same place. Looking forward to reading the responses to the other three questions.
joecr
10. Dec, 2009
I use it partly because when I was doing support for web hosting I didn’t see people getting hacked because they had the current version installed. Frequently it was Joomla installs because they never renamed the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess or old scripts.
David Zemens
11. Dec, 2009
Code is poetry.
goofydg1
11. Dec, 2009
It’s the combination of ease and complexity. It’s easy to install, especially after you go through it a couple times. But, with the plugin and theme systems, you can get it to do just about anything you need. Add in my knowledge of php for those occasions where I need to some hand work and there’s not really any boundaries.
The brand has also grown to the point where it’s an easy sell to people. I keep a list of all the large sites that use WordPress. People buy into the brand fairly easily when they see a sampling of the others that are using it.
Greg
11. Dec, 2009
I use WordPress for clients because it is easier for them to understand and use; It has elements that non-technical users are more familiar with which is why I like using it with any of my clients/friends.
Cali
13. Dec, 2009
We have always been using a custom home brewed CMS to handle our sites. It became a real chore over the years and we have been switching all of our clients to WordPress. The platform has been treating us very well and hope the community continues to grow especially now that we am a part of it!
Adam Wood
14. Dec, 2009
I use wordpress for my client’s sake.
I do marketing and design for small businesses- usually sole practitioners. Using WP allows me to implement designs much faster/easier- which, of course, allows me to charge less.
Moreover, web design clients shouldn’t have to pay some guru an hourly rate every month to do edits and upkeep. With WP, I’m able to train my clients and let them do most everything themselves.
I think WP is the ethical choice for most small business web design clients.
Michael Fields
14. Dec, 2009
I started using WordPress because it came with a nice administration section and I had no idea how to code a secure one all by myself…
Chris Olstrom
14. Dec, 2009
WordPress has consistently been the right choice for me. I attribute this to the outstanding community, and up-to-date documentation. It was these that drew me in, and eventually it became familiarity that keeps me tied to it. The idea of picking up a new framework seems wasteful when getting those same results from WordPress is not only possible, but easy.
In a word, Comfort.
Dan
15. Dec, 2009
I thought it would be a good idea back in 2004 to make a blog that was based on XML as the data source just for giggles. After that became a pain after a week or so I gave WordPress a go and haven’t looked back
JhezeR
15. Dec, 2009
WordPress is user friendly, simple, cool and Powerfull.
[I Luv WP]
Regard : JhezeR
Brian
15. Dec, 2009
I started blogging with Blogger but was curious about the idea about “self-hosted” blogs. I was planning to use WordPress “temporarily” just to try it, but I never looked back and WordPress is now my CMS of choice.
I’ve tried other CMS including Drupal and Joomla! but nothing matches the ease of use and flexibility of WordPress.
Oscar Garcia C.
15. Dec, 2009
Since I begun working @ lasprovincias.es, the leading newspaper in Valencia Land, in Sept. 2008, I simply did not questioned the use of other CMSes. Just chose WP for using it as the main CMS for local developments.
Since then, More than 10 projects have been released under WP/WPMU flavour, and our VIP blogs network -currently in deployment- will of course use all WP potential. Ths will be the first time I use WP as a blog platform at work.
Why WP? The question is not why WP. In my humble opinion, the question is, why don’t you try to do THAT THING YOU ARE SUFFERING TO DO in a better, smarter, simple way with WP?
Eric Marden
15. Dec, 2009
I was really hoping this collection of comments would be suitable for sharing with clients, but the results were too geeky. Especially since there was multiple “I’m only using it because I used b2 comments”.
Still a great post, but I was hoping it would be a good place to point folks too that were considering WordPress as a platform.
Camil
15. Dec, 2009
I use wordpress because of the ease and functionality.
I also think it is the easiest to teach people with no experience how to use, which is the business I’m in.
I just launched my personal WordPress website recently, check it out and leave a comment telling me what you think – Awesome post!
Riley West
15. Dec, 2009
Hello Folks!
I just love WordPress although I am bewildered by how fast it moves up in 2.8.1 2.8.2 etc.
One more thing…don’t you think WP could fix the pinging problem?
I’m referring to the problem that is caused by people such as myself,who have to make many changes to posts, causing the post to be “pinged” too many times – risking possible ping-spam penalties!
I installed MAXblogpress’ ping optimizer and it seems to do a great job…and you can “control” it.
Thank you,
Riley West – An Internet Marketer In The Making.
Moyo
15. Dec, 2009
One day I looked for and downloaded 3 PHP CMS platforms — Movable Type, Joomla, and WordPress — and a had a ‘platform battle’ so to speak.
I said to myself, “I’m going to install each one of these platforms to a subdomain on my website — ‘mt’, ‘joo’, and ‘wp’ — and whichever one I like the best, I’m going to stick with it.”
Needless to say, WordPress won hands down with it’s quick & easy installation, plus it closely resembled a personal CMS platform I had coded for previous projects in 2004 & 2005 before I even knew what a CMS was.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get the other 2 platforms to install properly, which is not to knock them, because it could’ve been my fault, but I guess I didn’t need to look back after feeling out WordPress and seeing what it offered.
Oddpoet
15. Dec, 2009
I choose WordPress about two months ago over the other CMS for no other reason other then I liked the name.
I am so glad I did. The extensibility and plugins are simply incredible. I get a kick out of trying different pieces and WordPress never breaks.
I was gonna crack the books and do my site in HTML and only use WordPress for the Blog section but after seeing it in action I abandoned that idea and stuck with WordPress for the entire site.
Very cool software.
Lina Zaproudi
16. Dec, 2009
Why WordPress:
- You can host Wordprees on your own domain .
You get all the benefits from links to your site and more overall control, plus you can have ads, all sorts of wonderful plugins and tweak whatever you want (with very little php knowledge)
- WordPress installation on my site was easy, in fact most webhosts offer an automated installation option, which is handy, and another reason to go for WordPress.
- Customization of WordPress was also easy and there are thousands of themes out there you can choose from and modify easily to create a personal style.
- The Admin interface is good, since version 2.7 (before, it kind of sucked).
You spend a lot of time with the admin interface, it’s important to have a good one!
- WordPress is highly popular which brings these benefits: lots of community support, large knowledge base, bugs tend to get fixed, lots of themes available.
- The plugins: One of the best features, there are so many that make your life & blogging much easier. I use for example HeadSpace for meta-tags, Nextgen for photo galleries, WP Cache to speed things up, Flexible Upload for uploading images, Post Template for post templates, Wordpess Mobile …adding them & updating them is very easy.
And because WordPress is so popular, people keep writing more useful plugins for it.
- Because a lot of other bloggers use WordPress, trackbacks are virtually “automatic”.
- WordPress is “standard” – if you ever decide to use another platform, you bet they will have an “import from WordPress” option!
I have used a smaller/more obscure blog software for another blog and regretted it. Updates were a pain, there was no support and extra plugins to speak of. Moving the blog to another platform was difficult.
Lesson learned: go with one of the popular platforms.
- I briefly tried Blogger.com, I don’t like the interface so much and find the top navigation bar annoying.
aidle
16. Dec, 2009
I love wordpress because its easy to install, support wide version of PHP, and managable editor as well as the plugins plus the themes….The best part is the auto upgrades/plugins installation, save me time….its one of the coolest CMS in the internet world….
Jonah West
17. Dec, 2009
I’ve tried many different systems and even though there are still things I wish WordPress could do, it’s been the easiest and most user friendly for me and my clients to use.
Stuart M
17. Dec, 2009
Personally, I chose WordPress because MovableType (which was a far more mature product at the time) changed their license for version 3.0 in 2004.
Making the switch to WordPress was great, because I was able to easily make modifications in PHP, whereas MovableType’s Perl-based code had a steeper learning curve.
I still recommend WordPress over other simple CMS software because it has a large developer community (documentation, plugins and themes), and is easy to extend and modify.
Cheers,
Stuart.
Gabriel de Kadt
19. Dec, 2009
WP is great – but even with Super Cache I find it too slow on shared hosts.
Vikas
15. Jan, 2012
Gabriel, it’s not wordpress playing the evil, its your hosting. If you are using dreamhost or godaddy then no wonder why you are frustrated. Please switch to the hosting mentioned by Alex.
Also, instead of using any other caching plugin, use w3tc total cache.
—- Happy Publishing —-
Greg
21. Dec, 2009
WordPress is different to anything else in the ability it has to scale from a simple blog to a powerful CMS. This allows people who use WordPress to grow their site along with their expertise and resources. We started out as a blog with a theme that was a minor customization of the default Kubric. 3.5 years later and we have an integrated forum, a social network platform, and an online store… all built on the same (but evolved) WordPress core. It has grown with us and there’s a lot of runway to do even more.
Kerry
30. Dec, 2009
Why WordPress? There are SO many reasons it will be hard to limit my response but here goes…
1. It is open source.
Open source allows improvements to be made and input considered from many minds, not just one or even a small group. Best of all it is free.
2. The hundreds of theme options.
Changing the basic layout, colors and background graphic is as simple as a click of a button once a them is installed.
3. Thousands of plugin options.
If you can think of a function you want, it is likely someone else has already thought of , perfected and provided it for you in a plugin.
4. Customization ability.
As a website designer or developer WordPress offers an unlimited variety of options. You can learn only what your need to know or continue to learn whatever you want to. It is an unending education with as little or as much detail as you decide to use.
Hikari
02. Jan, 2010
I started with WordPress because blogger/blogspot had pratically no customization features. I tried WordPress 1 or 2 times before I was able to setup it.
During these 2 years I use WordPress, I’ve tested some other CMS like Drupal and Joomla, even tried to go for Drupal and go away from WordPress.
But indeed, WordPress is great. For blogging, there simpling isn’t anything better, period. For content showing oriented websites, I believe there is also nothing better than WordPress, in the meaning of features/easy-of-use.
But what I love about WordPress is its action and filter hooks system. It is simple and powerful at the same time, anywhere there is an action or filter call we can customize anyway we want!
Plugins are easy to start developing (focus on what you wanna do and not on how to talk to the engine), and themes API is easy to use and learn. And now with child themes, I really don’t think it can became easier to customize your site’s look.
Lars Tong Strömberg
03. Jan, 2010
Great questions and idea for a post + lots of good feedback in the comments!
Credit to all the theme/framework/plugin developers that extends WordPress and makes it so flexibile.
John
03. Jan, 2010
I’ve tried many different systems and even though there are still things I wish WordPress could do, it’s been the easiest and most user friendly for me and my clients to use.
Matt Maan
08. Jan, 2010
Because it saves so much time and gives clients and website owners the best option for future development choices. I’m a web dev beginning with my band’s site in 1996. Every non-ecommerce site I build is now WP. For those of you who don’t know yet, you will.
Theo
08. Jan, 2010
WP is a very powerful and stable application i don’t want to miss.
You can pretty much design themes any way you want and it makes client/developer happy.
John Macpherson
09. Jan, 2010
While i still use WordPress im now more of an Expression Engine user. WordPress is good no doubt about that but the three main problems i have is the constant updates, the poor plugins or conflicts with plugins. and power. Handling more than a ‘ blog’ or lightwight cms was not what WP has been built for.It has been built up from a blogging platform and has been ‘hacked’ to do other things. Dont get me wrong i like WP but its not the best solution for every CMS project. There are two main downsides to EE -1. is that its a paid for product (but if a design firm pass that cost onto the clients anyway.) 2. Learnign curve – it takes quite a while to get used to it, but over the last 12 months a lot of training material has become available. Of course many users of WP are not design agencies or have a zero budget and use it for their personal projects / sites. Anyway 2 great bits of software – EE and WP. Just my 2 cents. ( No affiliation with EE other than a happy user ).
NpXp
11. Mar, 2010
The decision should be left to the user whether he wants to go for wordpress or not. But I only wish that person is not too late to realize the actual facts about WordPress.
Just my 2 cents.
Victor Johnson
25. Apr, 2010
WordPress is a fascinating Content Management System. Its search engine friendly features and the ability it gives the web masters to update the content without any technical skills is impressive.
It is a triangle love story!! My customers love wordpress as much as I do. I recommend anyone starting a web site to consider WordPress CMS.
Michael
29. Jan, 2011
My customers go crazy over it… I agree!
vinod
04. Jun, 2010
Easy to use, Easy to learn, Easy to customize, Easy to develop themes for it.
Easy, Easy & Easy!
Ant Gray
06. Jun, 2010
It’s a first ever CMS I started learning. And just thinking if I need any other, WP is good enough for me.
Jennifer
17. Jun, 2010
I love Worpdress because it’s fast, secure, optimized for SEO and very easy to use
Chris von Nieda | LenderTech
29. Jun, 2010
I have been using WordPress for about 2 years now and love it. I have a prospect that is asking for some references about WordPress. I am going to refer him to this post! Thanks for all you do Matt and Alex!
blogs
04. Sep, 2010
Worpdress is very useful and symple, i like WP.
Martin Varesio
02. Mar, 2011
Notable people throughout the WordPress community to figure out why they choose to use!!
Jonathan
02. Dec, 2011
Interesting idea. How did you force an older post to look fresh in the RSS feed?
Alex Denning
03. Dec, 2011
It’s just a case of changing the date published
Lauro Faria
03. Dec, 2011
The universe is shown WordPress challenging with their community and their “sub-products”: plugins and themes. The creativity of all, it encourages doing something good, even when they do not have enough knowledge.
Jack C.
03. Dec, 2011
WordPress is far the best out of all the other flatforms.
ATravelling
12. Jan, 2012
I choose WordPress Platform because it has many customize ways from themes to working plugins.