WordPress is the most widely used blogging and website content management system (CMS) in the world and it keeps getting more and more popular. In the last year, the system has been downloaded nearly 50 million times. This comes out to be over 5,000 downloads every hour and 89 for every minute. With an upgraded version planned to be released at the end of this year, the number of downloads will most likely continue to increase.
Overall, these numbers are supporting what most web designers already know and that’s the fact that there are a lot of good CMSs in the world, but WordPress is standing out from the crowd.
Currently, there are three main CMSs that are used worldwide. They are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. WordPress holds the #1 spot with Joomla lagging behind and Drupal behind that.
So what put WordPress so far ahead of its game?
First of all, its backend is very user-friendly, especially for individuals with no technical training or very little. As a matter of fact, WordPress was designed with the non-technical individual in mind. Practically anyone can set up a blog and manage their content. Businesses with employees who have very little in the way of computer skills can even set up a very simple company website by following online tutorials.
Keep in mind, however, that there are limitations to the simple web design that WordPress offers through its web-based program.
For the professional web developer, WordPress offers a number of advantages. The system is easy to install and maintenance is simple. Adding new content to a site or reformatting the existing web pages can be done fast so that clients remain satisfied. In addition, documents, video files, graphical content, and image galleries can be integrated into the site.
Due to its popularity, WordPress has a large global user community that Drupal and Jommla don’t have. WordPress also has more extensions, themes, and plugins, which gives users a much greater choice in regards to how functional the site can be. Plus, broken plugins or security issues result in a global WordPress community working together to solve the problem.
What even makes it better is that search engines love it.
The search engines love that it is clean and that the coding is simple. This makes it easy for them to read the content and index the site. This is why WordPress websites are more likely to be found higher in search engine rankings than Joomla or Drupal sites. WordPress also gives the opportunity for each page, post, and image to be given meta tag keywords and search engines eat that stuff up.
In the end, WordPress gains popularity on the technological end in that it is not as technical as Drupal and Joomla. Not everyone is well-versed in coding. When a web designer builds a website and gives their client the opportunity to maintain their site’s content as they need to, the client doesn’t want to be met with a system that is going to confuse them. Instead, they want to get in and get out as quickly as possible, which is what WordPress does.
