What is wordpress?

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) and as of today 29% of all websites on the internet use wordpress, in this blog post we’re going to look at the advantages of using wordpress and how that has enabled it to become such a cornerstone of the internet, we will also look at some of the potential cons of using wordpress, and how these can be avoided.

Most people who I have spoke to that are ‘anti-wordpress’ are often unclear as to what wordpress can be; they think of wordpress as purely blog based and think that is the extent of the system, when in reality wordpress is a multi faceted CMS and can be used as a building block to design and develop fully functional websites and online stores.

All CMS’s (should) provide their users with certain advantages of using them over a barebones build, and they do so at different levels of success and user preference, but in this post we will be looking at why you would use wordpress over another CMS, so for the sake of brevity we will only touch on the advantages of CMS’s in general:
they save time; require less knowledge to perform complex functionality, and provide flexibility with a vast array of prebuilt features and plugins, this means that users do not need to spend time and resources re-inventing the wheel when it comes to developing a website and spend enormous amounts of time learning how to operate or update those sites, if you want to read more about content management systems you can do so here:  Are content management systems as boring as they sound?

Why choose wordpress over other CMS’s?
It All Revolves Around Popularity.

Out of all CMS’s on the web wordpress makes up 59% of them, and in my opinion the main argument for using wordpress is; it’s the most popular. There are other systems out there that are arguably better technology wise, or user friendly-ness wise, but how popular, is a huge draw to choose wordpress for building your website. The popularity of wordpress means that there is a lot of support and experts out there, if you need help fixing something or adapting something you have a wealth of documentation and experts at your fingertips, this also helps when it comes to functionality; if you’re looking to add or develop functionality on your site the popularity of wordpress means that there is likely to be a plugin out there you can simply add to your site and that the price of the plugin is likely to be lower than an equivalent plugin on another CMS due to the wealth of users and developers. The vastness of wordpress also allows for ease of integration, it’s more likely systems you want to use are built to integrate with wordpress and there is more support available, furthermore newly developed technologies will have wordpress integration sooner than some lesser known CMS’s as developers are more likely to prioritise the most used CMS.

Popularity can also attract the wrong type of attention

Due to it being the most used CMS on the internet wordpress also attracts the attention of people trying to exploit systems, a more popular platform will allow exploiters to develop one script that will look for vulnerabilities in tech or passwords across a large number of sites, and have knowledge of the system that can be transferable across those sites. The majority of exploit attempts can be thwarted by regular updates to wordpress, themes and plugins (and developers of reliable plugins will be rolling these out often), furthermore some quite simple wordpress security steps can be taken (even with the assistance of a plugin) that reduce the ability for automated hack attempts on your site.