Why Use WordPress

4 min read

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• But I am a Developer
• But I am not a Developer
• Beginner or Advanced
• Frontend Frameworks
• Learning a New Skill
• It's Free
• Conclusion

Wordpress is a content management system to its users. While to developers, it is a framework. Wordpress helps bridge the gap between client and developer.

Introduction

Whenever you search "WordPress" articles immediately slam it for being out of date, bad, and going away. Yet, just like PHP, it runs the internet. While all these articles bash it, it holds over 40% of the marketshare of hosted websites.

The article from TechJury at "What Percentage of Websites are WordPress in 2022?" gives us the answer on how many websites are using WordPress 455,000,000 use WordPress!

But I am a Developer

WordPress is made for client use. There is no reason to skew that. Its way to add features can be a bit annoying compared to other frameworks but its difficulty to work with also provides a good layout if you want to create plugins for clients.

Instead of creating a website from a foundation you are injected into a community of thousands of plugins, themes, integrations from big companies. If you want to integrate Google Site-kit into your website with a complete dashboard? WordPress has a plugin for that.

Instead of fighting to create your own stack, or a stack that is not matured, WordPress provides the foundation for you. It puts the user in control of how technical they want to be. You can change anything you want in the PHP files to fit your needs, create your own private plugins, themes, custom post types, or custom database items. It is up to you at the depth you want to go.

But I am not a Developer

WordPress was developed for the person that writes the content. Especially with the introduction of Gutenberg. The new editor allows you to write blogs without any knowledge of what the code is doing. Even as a developer, I am amazed at the technology it has. It is not a desktop application; however, it gets closer and closer to feeling like one.

You can leverage plugins and themes so that you never have to touch a line of code. The community is massive for WordPress and a plugin or tutorial exists for anything you can think of. A website has probably been made for the project you can think of in WordPress.

Beginner or Advanced

As I said, your level of use is what you want it to be. If you never want to touch code you do not have to. If you want to create everything on your own it is still a fundamental PHP project will additional functions. Everything in PHP still works.

Creating your own plugins is a cool feeling as well. It has a modular feeling that you can take it from one website and move it to another. Rather than worrying about if your code will transfer to a new client, you can just grab its folder zip it up and have WordPress download it to the new site. Modular code helps you develop faster and be portable with the code.

Frontend Frameworks

Popular Frameworks like:

• React
• Vue
• Angular

Still let you use WordPress. You can create a beautiful frontend and don't have to worry about creating the backend. WordPress can manage all your content while you worry about the frontend looking the way you want it too. WordPress has an integrated REST API that you can use out of the box.

Learning a New Skill

Programming is still programming, if you are learning look into WordPress. You can get your website off the ground and start playing around with it. You can use Shared Hosting to just have the server handled by an organization or you can use a Virtual Private Server to learn everything about hosting a server.

WordPress can be downloaded from their website. You can run it from your own local development server or from a cloud service. The core of WordPress is portable to allow a drop-in service.

It's Free

The biggest competition WordPress has costs money. Services like Square Space and Shopify cost money to use. WordPress does have a good number of premium plugins and themes though. At the core, WordPress is free itself. There was never a pay screen before you could start using it. The premium plugins and themes are not from WordPress itself. Those are created by 3rd parties.

If you have your budget in mind, WordPress makes sense 9/10 times. Unless you have a very specific request that other services can provide that WordPress cannot, WordPress will win out.

Conclusion

WordPress owns the internet. It is used by so many organizations, small businesses, and people. Dive into it and create your own website. It can create anything with the person behind the keyboard.

Let's learn together!