WordPress: Guide to the Top CMS

After taking a broader look at CMS platforms and covering Drupal, it's time to focus on WordPress: in this article we look at the features and benefits of the most widely used CMS for building websites and blogs.

What are the main advantages of WordPress?

The ability to run a blog or a website without needing any programming experience, along with its ease of use and the intuitive nature of its graphical interface, are the main reasons (though not the only ones) why WordPress is worth choosing.

Why is WordPress open source software?

WordPress, then, is a great resource for anyone taking their first steps online who doesn't have specific knowledge of HTML and similar technologies: a few clicks are enough to create a post or a page.

But there are other good reasons to choose this tool too: for instance, the fact that it's open source — in other words, the CMS isn't protected by copyright, which means every user has the ability and the right to modify it as they see fit.

This is a valuable opportunity that lets many developers propose new features and implement them: as a result, WordPress is bound to keep improving, continuously, thanks to the collaboration of a large and active community.

What you can do with WordPress

Another point in WordPress's favor is its versatility: with this CMS you can design and build websites of any kind.

These are dynamic websites, meaning that all data — such as the information related to posts and pages — is stored in MySQL, a purpose-built database; this highly reliable database is queried every time someone visits the site's address.

Free themes

WordPress offers a huge number of themes to choose from: some are paid, but many others are free.

Simply head to the dedicated panel to select and install a theme: there's a theme for every taste, with different visual styles and features. Using themes is genuinely easy, and users have the ability to customize a wide range of aspects of the site, making it more engaging while still staying consistent with what they expect.

Adding content is fast, and in general you can create new pages in a short amount of time — which means your site can always stay alive and can be updated at any moment.

Practically unlimited functionality

Another strength of WordPress lies in the ability to extend its functionality through plugins.

Even on its own, this CMS lets you do a great many things — but plugins multiply the possibilities and let you add ad hoc functionality.

As with themes, plugins come in both paid and free versions, and there's a huge range of options available.

There are plugins of every kind: to count daily visitors, to add a contact form, to improve your SEO, to make backups easier, to fight spam, to make images lighter, and many, many more.

A real help for SEO

Finally, one last — but important — reason to choose this CMS is SEO (Search Engine Optimization): given how it's built, WordPress is without a doubt SEO friendly.

Permanent URLs, in particular, make it easy and quick to get a site indexed, along with all the pages that make it up, on the various search engines, starting with Google.

Joomla

And what about Joomla? What is it, and what are its main features? You can find a dedicated article here!

In the meantime, as always, we invite you to get in touch with us for any kind of IT support or consulting need!