Just How Did WordPress Capture 60% Of The Web?
To the everyday person, WordPress may be well-known as an online platform where anybody can set up a quick site and create a personal blog about their hobby. However, for many, many businesses worldwide, this leading Content Management System (CMS) is actually the foundation of their entire web presence and the back-end editor of their website and landing pages.
WordPress emerged about 15 years ago, amidst the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, and has quickly become a solid favourite of website builders, both amateur and pro. But why? WordPress’s popularity has, in a large part, been thanks to its strong and active community of followers and users. WordPress is user-shaped with hundreds of developers worldwide contributing continuously by imagining, building and supporting thousands of themes and plugins for the CMS platform that keep it constantly evolving into a better version of itself.
Just How Popular Is WordPress And Why?
According to web survey organisation W3Tech, WordPress runs a little over 32% of all websites on the Internet. That’s nearly a third of the entire web! Once narrowed down to only sites that are run using a CMS, the numbers translate to WordPress having nearly 60% of the pie. Aside from nurturing a growing community of user-generated plugins and themes, what else contributed to WordPress’s success?
Who doesn’t like a freebie?
The answer is “nobody”, and that’s why WordPress’s most crucial drawing card is that it’s accessible for free. It’s easy to download and offers an open source code, so you can make changes to tailor your website in the ways that you need.
Usability
WordPress is accessible and easy-to-use, with a wealth of features to choose from. You don’t need to be a professional coder or web developer to design a website with WordPress. In many ways, WordPress has cut out the middleman and provided an opportunity for any and everybody to try their hands at web design.
Innovative Plugins & Themes
The ability to mix and match features and looks is among the key components of WordPress’s consistent growth. With plugins, you can customise your website’s features with additional software. With the various themes that are added daily, you get to choose a style for your website that goes with your business look.
When its not WordPress, it’s…
WordPress may own 60% of CMS-based websites, but who is ruling the rest of the coop? There are a variety of other CMS options to consider for building a website, and often these options are catered specifically to the type of website you’re looking to build. There’s:
- Wix – an incredibly simple and user-friendly website building platform that’s probably best known for “not having as much to offer as WordPress”. This might sound like a negative, but for many first-timers building a website, this is actually a much better alternative to what can sometimes be a bit of a complicated WordPress back-end.
- Shopify – toting itself as the preferred CMS option for anyone wanting to build an online store, Shopify is purposeful, directed and won’t disappoint. The platform is secure and reliable and opens itself up quite well to a multitude of marketing techniques to drive business to the store.
- Weebly – works well for small-scale entrepreneurs, helping them to build websites and even facilitate e-commerce. It’s a simple drag-and-drop platform that is inexpensive and intuitive. However, it lacks the community support of other platforms like WordPress.
So get experimenting and pick a platform. Once you’ve found what works for you, website building on your own is really about experimentation, trial and error and some late nights in the glow of a laptop screen.
