Why Use Wordpress for Web Design?

Updated October 6, 2022

What is Wordpress Anyway?

Wordpress is one of many content management systems. It helps you manage your website in a user-friendly way, without needing a computer science degree to add, edit, and manage content. While there are several CMS options out there, Wordpress is by far the most popular choice. It’s used by over 43% of sites on the internet, as of Oct 2022.

Wordpress Web Design

There are several reasons we and so many other web design companies use Wordpress when building a site.

It saves time (and reduces cost)

Using Wordpress gets you about 60% of the way to a completed website. To be sure, there is much that goes into the design and structure in the 40% that remains but it allows us to focus on things that matter to your business, like optimized content and design that converts. So, you get a better product for a lower cost.

It’s flexible

Wordpress is designed with functionality for plugins. Plugins are pieces of software that can be added to your site without modifying the Wordpress code or site content. Plugins allow customization specific to your needs without the upfront development cost. For instance, WooCommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin that is used by over 5 million websites to sell products online. It’s simple to install and significantly reduces the time needed to set up your store by including solutions for payment handling, shipping, and other ecommerce necessities.

Blogging is built in

Getting found online is all about content. Blogging is one of the most common ways to add content to a site, provide value to web visitors, and build trust with your audience. Wordpress is built for blogging. It comes out of the box with categorization and tagging tools that allow you to clearly structure your content for both users and search engines.

When you add a blog post to a Wordpress site, a number of things happen automatically. Your post is created as a separate page, your post is added to the blog page, category and tag pages are created or updated, and the post is added to your RSS feed. With the click of the Publish button, you’ve changed/added several parts of your website in a simple and uniform fashion.

It’s open source and well maintained

Wordpress is open source software. It is free to use and edit as you see fit because the source code is publicly available. It’s supported by thousands of volunteers (and employees of Automattic) to keep it secure, up to date, and open to all.

Downsides

So far, this all sound great. Wordpress makes it easy to build and manage a website. Unfortunately, that ease of use tends to bring folks into the web design industry that don’t actually know web design. While Wordpress handles much of the behind the scenes work, a great website still requires in-depth knowledge.

We discussed the beauty of plugins earlier. They are a huge benefit and allow you to get many things done much quicker. Many inexperienced web designers use plugins for virtually everything. This is not good for your site! Each additional plugin opens you up to potential security risks and/or code conflicts. If a plugin isn’t updated regularly, it can cause problems down the road. In addition, many plugins require additional script requests, which can slow down your site and increase user abandonment. According to Google, speed directly affects traffic, and traffic affects your revenue.

Conclusion

Wordpress is great. It helps designers build a quality site in less time and it helps site owners manage and update their site in a user-friendly way. However, you need to be on the lookout for “Wordpress experts” that give you a pretty site which doesn’t deliver results. If you have questions, we’d love to chat. Contact us or schedule a consultation now.