WordPress has come a long way from a blogging platform to a full-blown content-management-system and some may not know that it is running almost a third of websites on the Internet.
With so many websites, WordPress is being used both with small and large websites, but still, it is more popular with small business and companies. There are many reasons for this opposite attraction and we will discuss them a bit further as the practical benefits are many.
Website independence
Being a small business you may want to keep the online presence cost as low as possible, therefore taking the route of pure social media presence with a Facebook page.
The main issue here is that all your data which is posted on Facebook or other social media is locked. If you look at the fine print of Facebook EULA you may find a particular section which implies that everything you have posted on their social network is now their property, not yours anymore.
The most extreme example that you are not in control of your social media page is that your content, page or user account can be deleted without your consent. From another perspective, even when you delete content, Facebook may be keeping it on their storage and for their own purposes. What can you do?
If you want to be your own boss, get your own website. Facebook is a convenient means of marketing your business, but it should never be your baseline for online presence. Instead, get a WordPress website that you own, and have certain content linked and posted on your social media presence.
A WordPress website content is easily managed, can be exported with the use of plugins, and transferred if needed. With a WordPress website, you are independent of a third party or a content gatekeeping entity.
Website control and ownership of content
Having a WordPress website you can easily move or transfer your website, but more importantly, you have full access by any means, including but not limited to HTML, CSS or JavaScript.
The reason why most users choose WordPress is that as a CMS enables building website without the need for any kind of coding knowledge, but the fact is that you can edit, add and change content AND source code of your website in the way you see fit. It is a CMS that fits all user categories, from beginners to experts.
WordPress platform is versatile
First online blogs where comparable to online diaries, weblogs, and WordPress brought and influenced the change which made it possible to have any kind of website made with the use of themes and plugins.
Current small business users present a variety of service and/or product business websites, and with WordPress, you can make it. Frankly, only the extremely complicated corporate sites and secure government websites are the ones which require a custom-coded website.
Tweaking the WordPress theme, a number of present plugins and scripts, you will fine-tune your website for maximum speed or amazing functionality, whichever you need.
The newest addition to WordPress, Gutenberg?
The final goal of WordPress CMS is to provide front-end website editing, making changes to your website using an intuitive drag and drop interface in a true WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) fashion.
The relatively new block editor named Gutenberg is still relatively far from WYSIWYG vision, as it is a back-end editor, but it offers a more streamlined WordPress editor with an intuitive interface, certainly a step in the right direction.
The content is organized in blocks which you can format and customize. Once you have customized a block to your liking, you can duplicate it and use it again for next content block, or rearrange.
Free themes and plugins are getting better by the day
WordPress CMS has a large and evergrowing developer community. Developers compete with each other and this competition result is free themes and plugins with amazing aesthetics and functionality.
No matter what your small business is, you are bound to find customized plugins that fit your needs, albeit a contact form, customer scheduling, e-commerce, SEO. The brick and mortar local businesses will appreciate plugins which help customers find you.
WordPress plugins and themes make the most additional coding work redundant. It just may be that all you need to do is tweak a setting or adjust a very specific type of design, or features to your needs within the WordPress Dashboard.
SEO and optimizations
WordPress is an amazing content management system, but that does not mean you cannot do anything to make your website even better and improve search ranking and performance.
I would avoid going deep into this topic, but I will mention that an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO can help you dramatically improve your website content SEO quality, by optimizing it for search bot spider crawling and search engine algorithms.
Let’s conclude with an important remark
With a self-owned website, you will have total control and ownership over your online presence, versatility to change and adapt your visual presentation as well as content, and improve your local or global online presence authority within your business niche.
While third-party sites may have a higher authority and will make your content appear at the top of search results, they always lead to other people’s sites and not to yours. Never forget that!