WordPress came into being in 2003 as a blog publishing software. Ever since then, it has been evolving with the passage of time. As on today, it supports building and publishing any type of website. And that is the reason it runs more than 40 percent of all websites on the web today. Not just that, more than 60 percent of websites use this software as a content management system. In short, while WordPress started as a blogging software, it evolved into a powerful website publishing platform and a multipurpose CMS. In this post, I will talk about why is WordPress popularity steadily on the rise.
Where ever I have used the term WordPress in this post, it denotes a WordPress.org or the self hosted website. It is not the same as WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a hosting service for WordPress websites.
WordPress.org Is Different From WordPress.com
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WordPress Costs Nothing To A User
Why should someone spend money on buying a software for publishing a blog or website if the software is available for free? The WordPress core software is available for free to every one who wants to use it.
In fact, this website building software costs nothing to download, install and use. Any one can modify it to satisfy his or her needs for the type of blog and website of one’s choice.
If you want to build your blog or website on the WordPress platform, the only money you will have to spend is on buying a
- Domain name and
- Hosting service
Domain name is the address of your website on the world wide web. This is the term that your website visitors enter in the address bar of their device’s browser. For example, this website’s domain name is pkailash.com.
The hosting service is the one that houses your website. A hosting provider provides space on their web server computer when you request for this service. The hosing service provider for this website is Hostgator.
WordPress Is User Friendly
Although WordPress is very powerful and feature rich software to build any type of website, it’s very easy to use it. You can easily create posts and pages for your website and customise the website as a whole.
The WordPress Comes With An Easy To Use Dashboard
The dashboard of your website enables you to perform several tasks on your website when you need. So, what is a dashboard? And what does the WordPress dashboard do for your website?
The answer is for everything you do on your website, you use the dashboard. When you log into the dashboard as an admin, you get an overview of everything on your website. It enables you to create new posts and pages and publish them subsequently. Also, it allows you to add plugins, themes and do much more things.
The image above in Figure 2 shows the dashboard of my website pkailash.com. All WordPress website owners get access to a dashboard of their website. As you see above, the left side of the dashboard contains a list of menu items from top to bottom.
You add a post or page to your website clicking on the the respective menu item. Also, you can customise your website as a whole using the Appearance menu item.
The dashboard lets you create menu and add or delete menu items to your website. When you write a post in your WordPress site, it is added to a menu item.
We call this menu item a category. A menu in your WordPress site can have one category or more than one categories. Also, a menu can have a page or more pages in your website. However, unlike posts the pages are not grouped into categories.
Other than what I mentioned above, you can add and delete the plugins, themes and the widgets to your website by accessing this dashboard.
It’s Easy Customisation Makes WordPress Popularity Going Up Steadily
There is another reason why WordPress popularity is going up over time. And that is it’s customization feature. WordPress’ easy to use software allows you to customise your website to give it a look that you like.
Here, by customising WordPress I mean making changes to WordPress so that it delivers your website a look of your business. These websites include the blogs or personal websites, business websites, online store, membership sites, portfolio sites and so on.
Remember, for building any type of the websites as above and more, you can use WordPress. And you you don’t have to change any code in the WordPress core software for doing so.
Even if you are not a web designer or developer, WordPress allows you to use a theme for the type of the business your website belongs to. That way you can provide your website a look that you want without changing a single code in the WordPress core software.
WordPress Themes Provide Your Website The Look Of Your Business
There are thousands of free themes for different businesses that you can use on your website. Also, there are premium themes that you can use for your blog or any type of website.
The themes enable you to put links to important content of your website and the other website that you want them to see at the very first glance when they visit your website. In fact, the themes do it by allowing you to insert widgets in the sidebars, headers and even the content area of the posts and pages. And you put the links in these widgets.
Since I launched this website, I have used different themes to have different looks and feels for the website as a whole and for the pages and posts as well.
In short, the ease of use and flexibility are the most important reasons for WordPress Popularity being steadily on the rise.
At present, I am using GeneratePress theme on my website.
WordPress Popularity Is On The Rise As It’s Easy To Maintain And Secure A Website
The WordPress is so user friendly that even the absolute beginners can maintain their websites on their own.
For maintaining a website, the website owner needs to perform a few tasks on a regular basis. These tasks include updating the plugins, the themes and also the WordPress.
Another maintenance task on your website involves backing up your site. You can use a WordPress backup plugin to backup your site and keep it on safe storage so that if some thing goes wrong and you lose your website, you have access to the content that you have backed up.
Even the beginners can keep their WordPress site secure by following the maintenance practices and some security best practices.
And all the above is possible because WordPress is very much user friendly.
SEO Friendliness Is Another Reason For WordPress Popularity Going Up
The developers of WordPress developed this software with the Search Engine Optimisation, in short SEO, in mind.
The SEO is the way you make your website search friendly for a search engine. The better you optimise your posts and pages on your website, the higher they rank on the search results page.
WordPress software is very flexible in nature. It accepts plugins that you, the website owner, may need to add to add any feature or function to your website.
It is true for adding a plugin for SEO to your WordPress website too. I use Yoast SEO plugin on this website.
The content that I wrote on this post up to here is optimised in such a way that it will show up on Google Search Results Page as per the quality of the content.
See the green dot indication on the top right corner in Figure 3 above.
WordPress Is Open Source And Is Going To Be In Scene For Long
Since WordPress is open source and the source code is available to creators for change, it is going to stay. The fact that no individual or organisation owns it makes it sure that it will not disappear. Even if it’s on the way to disappear, some one will most likely fork its code and launch it with a different name at some point of time.
Some Facts In Support Of WordPress Being So Popular
The following list furnishes some data in support of ever increasing popularity of WordPress software.
- As on January 2022, 43.2% of the websites on the web use WordPress
- There are 9,558 free WordPress themes available on the WordPress Themes Directory
- WordPress usage has increased 12% every year on an average since 2011
- 65.2% of all websites on the internet use WordPress content management system
- Of the top 1 million websites on the internet 36.28 are powered by WordPress
- One of the top 10 million websites on the internet is the one that starts on WordPress every two minutes
- Of all WordPress websites 20.4% use WooCommerce
- The WordPress plugins directory has 59,590 plugins available for free use
The above facts indicate that WordPress popularity is steadily on the rise.
WordPress History Convinces You Why Its Popularity is On The Rise All The Time
If you go through the history of WordPress, you will see it has always been changing towards being more feature rich and more secure. This shows that WordPress will always remain evolving in nature.
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