What is WordPress? A Beginners Guide

If you’re on this page, you are probably looking to create a new website for your business. You will have seen the many options and come across WordPress countless times, so now you’re asking what is WordPress? As a web design company, we’d like to tell you.

The most basic explanation is that WordPress is the simplest and most popular platform for creating your own website or just a blog. It’s well-known at this point that over 30% of the websites online are powered by WordPress. That means that one in every four websites that you visit on a daily basis is most likely built using WordPress.

Digging deeper into the technical side, WordPress is an open-source content creation and management system that is licensed under GPLv2, meaning that anyone in the world can use WordPress for free. It is a tool that makes it easier to manage important aspects of your website and its contents without the need for knowledge of programming.

This has meant that building a website is more accessible than ever before with WordPress – even for people who aren’t developers.

What Kind of Websites Can Be Made Using WordPress?

During its infancy, WordPress was simply a tool for creating blogs and not full blown websites. However, thanks to changes to the core code of WordPress and its impressive ecosystem of plugins and themes, WordPress is now able to be used to create any type of website you can think of.

WordPress doesn’t only power a huge number of business websites and blogs, it is also the world’s most popular platform for creating eCommerce stores and the list doesn’t end there, you can create:

• Business websites
• eCommerce stores
• Blogs
• Portfolios
• Resumes
• Forums
• Social networks
• Membership sites
• And pretty much any type of website you could dream of.

What’s The Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

• WordPress.org is most often used for self-hosted applications. It is the free, open-source WordPress software that is able to be installed on your own website and create a website that’s entirely your own.
• WordPress.com is their for-profit paid service that is powered by the WordPress software. It is simple and easy to use but it doesn’t have as much flexibility as self-hosted WordPress websites.

Most of the time, when people discuss WordPress, they are talking about the self-hosted platform available from WordPress.org. This is the path you should go down if you want a website that truly 100% your own and the option we recommend going with.

The only things required to get going with self-hosted WordPress are purchasing web hosting and your own domain name.

Who Uses WordPress for Their Website?

WordPress is used by everyone, from individuals to corporations and everything in between. You may be interested to know that we use WordPress for our website. So you should be able to get a pretty good idea about how WordPress looks. However, there are lots of well-known people and businesses that use WordPress as well, so you’re in good company. Here are some of our favourite examples or websites that use WordPress:

Whitehouse.gov

The Whitehouse’s official website is powered by WordPress:

Microsoft

One of the biggest technology manufacturers in the world, Microsoft, uses WordPress for its official blog. It also uses it to power the blogs for other parts of their business, like Windows and Skype:

The Rolling Stones

Yes, that’s right, even some of the most famous rock bands in the world love using WordPress! For example, The Rolling Stones’ official website is powered by WordPress:

Why Should You Use WordPress for Your Website?

So, we’ve established that over a quarter of all websites on the internet use WordPress, including famous names like Microsoft and The Rolling Stones, but why should you use WordPress to create your website?

No matter what kind of website you want to create, there are endless possibilities with WordPress and we have compiled some of the best reasons why:

WordPress Is Open Source and Free to Use

Of course, one of the biggest benefits of building with WordPress is the facts that it’s a free and open-source software. Yes, you will have to pay a small amount for your hosting and domain name, but you’ll never have to pay to use the software. Unlike alternatives like Squarespace or Wix.

Beyond the free nature of the software, there are endless amounts of open-source plugins and themes that change how your website runs and looks, making your website unique.

WordPress is extensible

If you’re not a developer, it is still easy to modify how your website looks and operates thanks to the massive ecosystem of themes and plugins that have been built around WordPress:

• Themes change how your website looks and the styling that makes it your own.
• Plugins change how your website operates. They can be anything from small things like contact forms or huge things like creating an eCommerce store for your website.

As of the time of writing, there are well over 50,000 free WordPress plugins and 5,000 free WordPress themes available, as well as loads of premium options. Meaning you have plenty of choices.

WordPress Is Easy to Install

You’ve probably been lead to believe that you need to be a tech genius to be a to create your own website, but you can think again. It only takes a few simple steps to install WordPress on your site.

In 2018, a lot of web hosts either:

• Offer to have WordPress preinstalled for you so that your website is ready to go as soon as you are done purchasing.
• Provide you with dedicated tools that make the installation proves very easy and friendly for beginners.

WordPress Is Flexible

WordPress is an extremely good platform for building websites because it is flexible and lets you create pretty much any type of website you desire. It also allows your website to evolve along with your business.

If you say want to add a forum to your website, you can do that by adding a simple plugin or maybe you want to add a social network, guess what, there’s a plugin for that too.

With WordPress, you’re never locked into a specific design or set of functions, it is able to constantly adapt to meet your needs.

There is plenty of WordPress help

Due to WordPress’ ever-popular nature, there are plenty of ways to find solutions to any issues you might have. There are plenty of…

• Blogs
• Tutorials
• Forums
• Facebook Groups
• Developers

…and there’s even the option to turn from free help to paid help if required.