Why Choose WordPress?

In a world filled with website building solutions, why choose WordPress?

Wix. Weebly. Squarespace. Joomla. Drupal. WordPress. The list goes on. There are a lot of options out there for someone wanting to build a website. Even specialty builders abound. Ghost and Medium are publishing platforms that offer a focused publishing platform for bloggers. Shopify and BigCommerce offer easy to set up ecommerce pages

You may be about to put together your first blog. Why not go with something like Ghost or Medium?

Wanting to set up a marketplace for your product or service? Why not go with Shopify or BigCommerce?

WordPress is better, but those questions deserve a much better answer than that.

Ya, we’re obviously pretty invested at this point and a little bit biased. We were asking ourselves the same question not too very long ago though, as our founders faced down the decision of what platform to build Ninja Forms for. With so many choices out there, why did we choose to develop for this one?

Why did we choose WordPress? Why should you?

There’s a lot of great answers to that question. Here’s what we see that makes this the hands-down best platform for building any website!

Your WordPress website can be whatever you want it to be, whenever.

Millions of sites begin as ‘just a blog’ or a simple storefront. You have so much more potential than that though, and it’s very likely your story on the web won’t end as it begins. Your website needs to be able to grow with you, evolve to your needs over time.

As a fully featured content management system (CMS), WordPress gives you the flexibility to adapt. As your blog gains followers and you want to do more to engage your readers, you can. As your product or service takes off and you need to adopt new strategies to best serve your customers, you can.

Don’t lock yourself in and sell your potential short. With WordPress, you are future-proof.

Does a website builder that can virtually be anything you want it to be sound like it would be too complex for you? It’s really not!

WordPress is easy!

Lots of website builders bill themselves as the simple solution for this or for that. Truth be told, a lot of them are newer than WordPress, which has been around since 2003. Some of them certainly might seem sleeker and more modern at face value, but WordPress is as easy as it gets and lacks none of the features others offer.

Installation takes no more than 5 minutes. That’s a fact that’s been a point of pride for the CMS since its earliest days as a simple blogging platform. There’s resource material on the 5-minute install if you’re doing it manually, but you might not even have to do that. Depending on your host, it could be as simple as a single click. Bluehost, GoDaddy, and many others offer one-click install, so be sure to check with your hosting provider!

That’s not all that WordPress makes easy! Right out-of-the-box, it is already:

• Mobile responsive
• Completely customizable
• Designed to maximize SEO
• High security
• Accessible
• Manageable on the go via mobile app

Add to that a powerful yet easy-to-use media and content management system, and you’ll be right at home in the WordPress dashboard in no time!

WordPress might be easy, but it’s also extraordinarily customizable. The simplicity of making your website well and truly your own with ready-to-install themes and plugins is one of the platform’s greatest strengths.

Tens of thousands of plugins and themes to choose from mean your website is uniquely your own

Once your site is up and running, there are thousands of free themes to choose from to begin customizing your unique look and feel. Express yourself in any way you want, whether you’re comfortable with CSS or don’t even know what it is. It doesn’t matter, there’s a look you’ll love somewhere out there.

There’s a whole world of professionally designed themes as well. Designers like StudioPress and Elegant Themes feature not just beautiful site aesthetic, but enhanced SEO, spot-on mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and other big advantages.

There are even more plugins that will give you all the functionality you want, and probably more that you don’t even realize exist yet. Plugins exist to meet virtually any need, many with dedicated teams behind them that nurture their software with the same care you give your own website.

Love the drag-and-drop features of website builders like Wix and Weebly? Plugins like Beaver Builder and Divi Builder bring that home to WordPress. There’s no reason to limit yourself for a few choice features. WordPress has it all!

Hosts love WordPress and will make your life easier for using it

We mentioned the advantage of one-click install with many hosts above. Want life to get even easier? How about a no-click install?

As WordPress grows to become an ever bigger part of the web, many hosts have begun to cater managed hosting plans specifically to it. Managed hosting is certainly a cut above the typical hosting plan. How great does it sound to have your platform installed for you and ready to go, daily backups, updates, essentially all you need bundled into one white-glove plan?

Sound expensive? It’s not always!

As the popularity of WordPress continues to grow, very affordable managed hosting plans tailored specifically for it are becoming more and more common. If you’d rather turn the technical side of website installation and maintenance over to professionals, running the world’s most popular CMS is a perfect idea.

Quality managed hosting with WordPress can be found for as little as $5/mo!

It’s not just features and plugins. The community is what makes it great.

It’s easy to talk about all the moving pieces that surround the platform. The features that make it technically superior aren’t even the best thing about WordPress, though. It’s the community that has grown up around it. It’s a mutual understanding that as we help others grow, we all grow.

On a local level, there’s probably a WordPress meetup in your area. They’re a great place to connect and learn with people of all experience levels.

Zooming out, WordCamps happen all the time, all over the world. These are also events where users of all experience levels connect and learn from one another.

More than just meetups and camps, what really makes the community awesome is the culture of collaboration and shared goals. Even between ‘rival’ plugin teams, what moves us all forward is building up the platform as a whole, and that means taking care of each other, and our users.

WordPress doesn’t belong to a development team. It belongs to you.

WordPress is fully open source, meaning every last line of code is available for you to:

• use for any purpose
• study and change
• redistribute
• distribute modified versions

Those four points are the “WordPress Bill of Rights“, and it’s what feeds the culture of collaboration that makes the community so much more close knit than what you see with other website builders. It’s a community that truly values every user, to the point of opening not just the code, but the doors of development team itself to the public.

Ever curious about what’s happening with WordPress? Join in on Editor Weekly Chats and add your voice to the conversation via the Core Editor Slack Channel!

A strong community means fantastic support when you need it

We all need help sooner or later. Whether you have an issue with WordPress itself, a theme, or a plugin, you’re probably going to need to enlist aid at some point along the way.

There’s a variety of places within the community that you can turn for help!

• WordPress.com & .org support forums
• individual plugin & theme support channels
• local meetups
• dedicated support services
• freelance developers

For all general WordPress help, the wordpress.org and wordpress.com support forums are fantastic go-to. They’re a hub where community members from around the globe share their expertise, answer questions, and generally assist those in need.

For more specific issues, any quality theme or plugin has a dedicated team behind it that will troubleshoot issues with you and field general questions.

Local meetups, as mentioned above, are a great place to turn for hands-on help.

For more complex problems or help with loftier goals, services like WP Site Care and ClickWP exist solely to get your back. Major project that you can’t tackle alone? Services like Codeable will put you in touch with qualified community members that can help.

You’re not alone!

There’s a reason 30% (and growing) of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress.

From humble beginnings as a blogging platform in 2003, WordPress has grown to power more than 30% of the world’s websites in just 15 years. For all the reasons we’ve touched on above, WordPress is simply the most powerful, the most easy to use website builder on the planet.

• Need a website builder with flexibility and power that’s still easy to install and use?
• Realize you’re going to grow, and need a platform that will grow with you?
• Need a high diversity of modular functionality and customizable aesthetic?
• Require a stable environment that’s fully supported by any host?
• Want to be a part of a growing community that supports and builds up its members?

WordPress is your CMS. Our CMS. Build the website of your dreams and become a part of something much bigger at the same time. Meet WordPress today!