We design and build a lot of websites of all sizes for clients, and we choose to use WordPress to power most of them.
What makes WordPress such a powerful tool? It’s an open-source content management system (CMS) used to create, edit, and publish content on a website. Or, more simply, it is free software that makes managing a website’s content easy for people without programming knowledge. WordPress is flexible enough to create just about any type of website, and with more than 50,000 plugins available, it’s cost-efficient and easy to customize a website’s functionality.
Though a modern software, WordPress was launched in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the official successor of b2/cafelog, a revolutionary web blogging tool created in 2001.
WordPress continues to add improvements and features since its inception back in 2003. Some of our client’s favorites are:
Previewing/Scheduling Content: WordPress allows users to build out an entire page of website content as a draft, and preview it without making it visible to website visitors. From there, a user can either publish it with one click or schedule it to be published at a later date.
Revision History: WordPress includes a feature that tracks the edit history for a page of content. This means if you have multiple team members collaborating on the same webpage, there will always be a record kept when that page is updated. If a mistake was made that needs to be reversed, content can be reverted to a recent update tracked in the revision history.
The Media Library: WordPress is built to handle a wide range of media files (photos, videos, etc.). Any media file added to the media library can be used anywhere on the website. With built-in features like bulk uploading and image editing tools adding images and other types of media to a WordPress website is very straightforward.
One of our favorite things about WordPress is the more than 50,000 plugins created by the WordPress developer community. Chances are, if you need a specific type of functionality, there is a plugin that can provide it. Plugins save developers time and clients money. Our team always hand picks the plugins we use to make sure they are secure, thoroughly tested, and supported for the foreseeable future. Some of our favorites are:
A multisite network allows users to manage multiple websites all from one WordPress installation. This feature is a great solution for clients managing multiple websites, but want to keep hosting and maintenance costs down. The multisite feature offers:
WordPress was built to be flexible and user-friendly. While many platforms require an external solution to power an e-commerce storefront, WordPress allows users to easily add e-commerce functionality by installing a plugin, which means everything related to the site can be managed from a single dashboard.
Many content management systems are great at powering the content on a website, but fall short of a robust e-commerce solution. Similarly, there are plenty of great e-commerce systems that work for selling products but are weak at managing content. WordPress combines specialized features for managing both e-commerce and content into one robust platform.
Our go-to solution for adding e-commerce functionality to a WordPress website is the WooCommerce plugin.
What makes it different? WooCoomerce is free to use, and while it does have paid add-ons for advanced functionality, there are no monthly fees or tiered pricing based on the number of products. That makes it more wallet-friendly for businesses on a budget. Inventory management, payment integrations, and shipping options are also built into it, and WooCommerce can be integrated with a long list of third-party apps and services. We use WooCommerce to power every e-commerce WordPress project we create because it provides all the tools to get an e-commerce storefront up and running quickly.
We host all of our WordPress sites on the managed hosting platform WP Engine. WP Engine specializes in hosting WordPress sites, and it provides a suite of tools to ensure that websites hosted on their platform are secure, speedy, and scalable. The following are just a few of our favorite features:
