WordPress has been around since 2003 and has become one of the most popular content management systems (CMSs) on the market. According to WordPress, 39% (statistic updated, accurate for 2021) of all sites on the internet use WordPress. It is flexible, scalable, secure – and a powerful platform for building a solid web presence.
Organisations and, in particular, enterprise businesses, are always looking for scalable and reliable platforms to enable them to remain competitive and offer a quality web experience. WordPress is open source with many plugins and features that allow you to build and design fantastic websites.
This platform has revolutionised the internet by enabling individuals to start their own businesses and web entities. For a long time, WordPress was seen as a blogging site, and not a solution for “serious” websites. But today, many world-famous brands use WordPress for their websites, including BBC America, Time Magazine, NASA Blogs, PlayStation, The New Yorker, Sony, Disney and more.
So, why should you choose WordPress for your global website?
1. WordPress is reliable
First of all, WordPress is developed with security in mind, and it is considered to be a very safe and secure platform to run any type of business.
Secondly, WordPress keeps updating and uses modern technology like JSON REST API, as well as placing a recent emphasis on JavaScript and making further improvements that make the platform future proof.
Thirdly, the platform has a dedicated security team who deal with security issues. Also, the system provides automatic security updates for all WordPress websites when any vulnerability is detected.
And finally, WordPress has a dedicated and predictable development cycle that ensures new versions with improvements, additional features and updates are released all the time.
2. WordPress is scalable and flexible
The CMS is highly customisable. There is pretty much nothing that cannot be customised through page templates, CSS, plugins, HTML, etc. so that your website can be tailored to your needs. Gone are the days of being limited to a few basic templates!
There is a multi-site feature that allows you to build a network of websites from just one WordPress installation, with the ability to add subdomains, subfolders/subdirectories, and standalone sites (landing pages) to your websites without setting up additional entities/URLs, with everything managed from only one dashboard in the backend.
WordPress is extremely flexible because you can use the platform for any purpose, not just building websites. It can function as a backend for JavaScript surfaces and mobile apps. In fact, it has a solution to create or build anything through plugins, which in reality are more like apps now.
Administrators can have full control over what is added to the platform, and most importantly, WordPress is constantly being developed, improved, and innovated to make it even better and more powerful.
3. Plugins and themes – Google loves WordPress
WordPress is open source which means that anyone can use, study, change and redistribute its source code. As a result, the system was designed for everyone, emphasising accessibility, performance, security and ease of use.
The platform has got the most extensive and well-maintained documentation of any system on the market. WordPress is constantly building new plugins which help medium- to large-scale businesses to improve their digital presence.
Plugins are the best way for any business owner to extend the functionality of their site. However, you may need developers to install and implement the selected plugins on your website, as you want to avoid errors/issues after implementation. More companies are investing time and money into integrating their technology, apps and tools with WordPress because it can help with customer engagement and drive revenue. Some of the most popular and useful plugins for WordPress are Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Google XML sitemaps and the Elementor plugin builder.
Another important reason why Google loves WordPress is because it is very readable for various search engines. Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team, said that: “Sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80%-90% of Google’s crawling issues.”
Further to this, thanks to WordPress’s content editor, each page, post and image can have its own meta tags and descriptions, as well as being optimised for specific keywords that will be indexed when Google’s spiders come crawling.
4. Your business will be secure
WordPress is generally very good at keeping its websites safe and secure. However, when hacks do occur, they tend to arise for a few key reasons: because the system has out-of-date plugins and themes, out-of-date core software, easy-to-guess login details or poor hosting. But the good news is that all of these are preventable. No website is ever going to be 100% safe on the internet as any website has the potential to be attacked or hacked, but that is the reason why you should always have good lead developers and a support team who can help you. By keeping WordPress regularly maintained and updated, you increase the security and stability of your site. Precautions include keeping strong passwords in your admin area, FTP accounts, database, hosting accounts and user permissions so that you have complete control over what gets added to the platform and by whom.
Another solution is to use the best WordPress security plugins on the market or use a web application firewall (WAF) which allows you to audit and monitor the system that keeps track of everything that happens on your website, as well as route your website traffic through its cloud proxy servers which allows you to send genuine traffic to your web server.
All websites should also now use SSL certificates and HTTPS because it gives you encrypted data transfer between your website and the user’s browser. This encryption makes it harder for someone to try to dig around and steal private and confidential information from your website.
There are other options and solutions that would need to be implemented in any WordPress site, like changing the default “admin” username, disabling file editing, disabling PHP file execution in certain WordPress directories, limiting login attempts, including factor authentication techniques for users to log in by using a two-step authentication method, disabling directory indexing and browsing, frequently scanning WordPress for malware and vulnerabilities, and so on. Maintenance and support are crucial to large organisations that need to guarantee uptime and prompt security patches.
As long as you always follow best practice and address security issues, you dramatically reduce the risk of any hacks. When we manage sites for clients, we always ensure that everything is as up-to-date and secure as possible and constantly monitor sites so that we can detect and fix any problems as soon as they arise. Check out our full range of WordPress hosting packages here.
5. WPML plugin
WordPress offers the WPML plugin, which facilitates the simple management of multilingual content within a WordPress website, making it easy to manage translation in multiple languages. It also includes advanced features for translation management and an interface for professional content translation, as well as allowing admins to add language switching options for users.
The WPML plugin includes a complete API for integrating with other plugins and translation systems. This can help when you want to launch a second language on your WordPress site, or build and run multilingual e-commerce sites.
It is important to clarify that the plugin does not actually perform any translation – this should always be done by a professional translator – but makes it more efficient to update multilingual sites and reduces upload errors.
6. WordPress is fully SEO friendly
WordPress is fully SEO friendly to make sure your pages are fully accessible to all the different search engines. It contains default features, as well as plugins, to help you monitor your analytics and drive traffic.
Here are just some of the SEO-friendly options WordPress and its plugins offer:
- custom domain
- SEO-friendly URLs
- canonical links
- breadcrumbs
- no index, no follow URLs
- focused keywords
- meta data
- image alt tags
- social sharing buttons
- blog categories
- video support and embedding
- mailing lists
- custom CSS
- mobile responsive
- XML sitemaps
- schema and structured data
7. Create successful landing pages in WordPress for PPC campaigns
There are successful marketing tools that you can use to increase leads and conversions. However, landing pages for PPC campaigns are something super-special for businesses because they are actually a dedicated webpage optimised to capture conversions. They are one of the very best methods to improve and increase sales figures for any business.
WordPress uses dedicated plugins that allow you to create great landing pages, and of course with the help of web designers and developers you can choose the right tools for your WordPress website and get all best benefits from them. Some elements/features that you might want to consider for your landing pages are ad creation, payment options, email integration, A/B testing, drag and drop elements, pricing tables and media support.
The whole idea of constructing and building landing pages in WordPress is to make them different from your other pages through the use of different plugins and themes, as well as using custom page templates.
The present and future of WordPress on an enterprise level
WordPress has long been the best tool for small business sites. However, over time it has also turned into a full solution and alternative for large sites.
This amazing CMS has all the necessary features to work as a full-blown enterprise CMS; it is reliable, flexible, scalable, affordable and ready to accommodate the needs of any client. WordPress recently launched its Gutenberg update (WordPress 5.0) which is one of its biggest changes to date. It totally redeveloped the WordPress editor, fundamentally changing the way we create content within the platform.
WordPress 5.0 uses a blocks/components-based editor, which allows you to create more intuitive page layouts, work cross-device and create more interactive, engaging webpages more efficiently. The Gutenberg WordPress editor is a new page builder that is designed to integrate with WordPress core. Gutenberg enables you to add content blocks and page builder-like functionality to every up-to-date WordPress website.
Zack Katz, speaking at WordCamp Denver 2017 said that: “Gutenberg is an important step forward for WordPress. Gutenberg enables WordPress to build content layouts, not just write articles. It is one of the many transitions happening in WordPress toward a more simplified user experience.”
Conclusion
We believe that WordPress is one of the best website builders out there because of its features and growing popularity with developers, businesses and designers. This platform has captured a huge amount of overall online traffic because the platform allows users to create and manage websites of any size, including e-commerce sites.
This platform lets you have control over your site. It provides you with lots of plugins, tools, customised templates/layouts and integrations with modern online service technology. WordPress is compatible with almost anything you can see and find on the web; how amazing is that!
Other CMSs like Sitecore, Episerver and Adobe Experience Manager are more difficult to use, more expensive and have more complex interfaces. In contrast, WordPress is really easy and friendly for administrators, editors and users as it comes with a very intuitive interface. It is also a great source of development for developers and designers as you can use your best coding skills to create your own features and designs.
There are a number of factors why your business should use WordPress, but all I can say is that this platform has an increasing number of satisfied enterprise users on board using WordPress as a CMS for their website. Large enterprises feel safe and protected with WordPress because it is able to handle the large amounts of content and the complex features/elements on these websites. WordPress has had a huge impact on web standards, usability and the internet at large, and it continues to go from strength to strength, maintaining and ever growing its dominant market share, making it an easy choice for business owners looking for a fast, reliable and responsive website.
Marcela Salcedo Caldas
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