Did you know that WordPress turned 10 years old this week? Over the past 10 years, WordPress has come a long way and has become the most popular blogging platform in the world. Currently WordPress hosts blogs in over 120 languages, powers more than 66 million websites around the world, and has over 4 billion monthly pageviews (as of April 2013). At Perpetual West, we use the self-hosted version of WordPress as our blog platform and recommend it as our blog platform of choice to all of our clients. To celebrate the 10th birthday of WordPress, here is our list of the top 10 reasons why we use the self-hosted WordPress blog platform for our company blog:
Top 10 Reasons Why We Use The Self-Hosted WordPress Blog Platform:
- Dashboard is user friendly – The Dashboard is easy to navigate and gives you a bird’s eye view of what is happening with your blog (i.e. blog drafts, number of views, news about updates etc.)
- Variety of themes – you can choose from over 1700 free themes or buy a premium theme for your blog from a suggested list of suppliers.
- Easy to create blog posts – the ‘Edit Post’ screen is user friendly and is well laid out so that you can format your blog post or toggle between visual and text view (in case you need to add any HTML code to a blog post.
- Easy to add images and/or featured image to a blog post – Nobody wants their blog post to look like a block of text! It is easy to add images to a blog post with the ‘Add Media’ button so that your blog post has some visual appeal too. Some of the WordPress themes also support a featured image (that appears at the beginning of your blog post).
- Customize sidebar with widgets – WordPress comes preloaded with a variety of widgets that you can use to personalize the sidebar of your blog (email subscription tool, search by topic, tag cloud etc). Users can also download widgets to add functionality to the sidebar (i.e. social media icons, text, images, videos etc.
- Access to a variety of plugins – Plugins work behind the scenes to increase the functionality of your WordPress blog. Some of our favorite plugins help us manage Search Engine Optimization (SEO), spam comments, backing up our blog, and view statistics.
- WordPress app – You can edit or publish a blog post on the go with the WordPress app (available in various formats including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia, and WebOS).
- Supports multiple authors – You can choose who the author of a blog post is by creating a ‘username’ for each individual in your company who writes a blog post.
- Update Notification – On the Dashboard, WordPress lets you know if there is a new version of a plugin or theme available for your blog.
- Support Forums – If you have a question, you can look for answers in the WordPress documentation/online manual or Support Forums.
For more statistics about WordPress, check out this infographic by Statista
