7 reasons why the WordPress CMS is a good choice for small businesses
A CMS or content management system is the way a website is organised behind the scenes. There are many CMS to choose from but for a small business, WordPress is a great choice.
In this article, we will look at some of the main reasons why a business would choose WordPress over other CMS like Drupal or Joomla.
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, but with that said, this doesn’t mean that WordPress is going to be the perfect choice for everyone.
1) Easy to find developers
Having spoken to many business owners in the past, one problem they have with working on their website is the lack of good developers. Thankfully WordPress is built in PHP and is a very common language for web development.
You can find developers easily online on job boards or freelance websites. Thankfully because PHP is a common language and the WordPress CMS is one of the most popular choices for a website, finding a good developer isn’t too difficult. If you do consider a freelancer check their feedback first as some can go missing halfway through a job.
There are also many WordPress development agencies that specialise in WordPress builds.
2) Affordable
WordPress is one of the most affordable ways to get a website up and running. You can get free sites but usually, the quality of them is poor and they don’t bring any customers to your business as they never get found online.
WordPress on the other hand can be set up for a small cost. You have to pay for hosting, a domain name and a nice website theme is optional. If you do want to keep your costs down you can use a theme and edit small parts of it such as the colours, logo and even the fonts to match your branding.
If your budget does stretch a little further you could hire a developer to make a custom theme for your website.
3) Userfriendly
All CMS will have a learning curve. WordPress also has one but it isn’t too difficult to master within a few hours. For small businesses that have little time to concentrate on their website this great as small changes are easy to implement sometimes in seconds.
Small business owners would much rather spend their time working on their business rather than getting frustrated updating their website. If time is important to you then WordPress is a great tool for cutting down on the frustration and letting you get back to the more important part of your business.
4) Secure
WordPress is secure out of the box and the community keeps up with the latest security flaws that arise. Having said that no website is 100% secure and there are other ways of improving the security of your website. WordPress websites are attacked over 90,000 times a second so it’s worth improving your security if you can.
WordPress can be configured to force the use of strong passwords, you can also add additional security to the website that can block IP ranges, multiple login attempts and use two-factor authentication.
5) A plugin for everything
One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is that it’s so versatile. WordPress can be either designer or added to, to become something different. For example, you could design a website for your small business and wouldn’t need to customise too much.
Or you could build a site and turn it into a place where people can apply or post jobs with a job board plugin.
You can also turn your passion into something that generates money by learning how to blog and you can also use it for an ecommerce store. There are so many different ways in which WordPress can be used and that’s why so many people choose it as their content management system.
6) SEO friendly
Search engine optimisation or SEO for short is a way of optimising your website so that when someone types in something they could find your business with on Google your website shows up.
There’s too much to cover when it comes to SEO to fit it into one article but very quickly there are two sides to SEO. One of which is off-page where you build backlinks from other websites to yours and another is your on-page or your actual website.
On-page optimisation covers everything from ensuring you have a title, description, heading tags, alt tags and more. When installing WordPress it will cover all of these as standard.
WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, but there are other things you can do such as install SEO plugins to make it easier for your website to show up in the search engines.
One thing that WordPress does that doesn’t make it as friendly as it could be is that it can have a permalink structure set to the date of the post. Where you can change this permalink structure to the post title name.
So instead of having something along the lines of:
Yourwebsite.com/2021/02-11-21/your-title/
You could have it as:
Yourwebsite.com/your-title/
Just a small nitpick but it does make a difference to the SEO friendliness of your website.
7) Great support from the community
Eventually, something will go wrong with your website. A new update or plugin or new version of PHP could break something on your website. When this happens you will find others who have experienced the same problems online and you can read what they did to fix it.
If your problem is new and you’re the first to experience it (not likely) you can post it on the WordPress forums where the community is happy to help.
Because WordPress and PHP are so well used you can also find help on coding websites such as Stack Overflow where you can post your problem and other developers can give you a solution.
Conclusion
WordPress isn’t going to be the right choice for everyone and when a business grows such as an ecommerce business to a certain size there are better options out there. With that said the majority of business owners will benefit from using WordPress as their CMS.
