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 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: