At Servebolt, we find it very easy to see why so many businesses & people all over the world choose to build with WordPress. As the statistics continue to support year after year, it dominates usage across every imaginable category.
And let’s be real, that isn’t changing anytime soon.
For a good reason – WordPress is open-source, lets you own your data, is flexible, and so, so much more. So, in this post, we’ll be covering why WordPress remains the best choice to this day and why it’s only going to get better from here:
Why WordPress? The Numbers Speak for Themselves
Here’s the thing: numbers don’t lie.
Almost 15% of the top sites in the world are now powered by WordPress. This includes big names like CNN, NBC, and the NFL. A ton of Fortune 500 companies use WordPress, too, including The Walt Disney Company, Sony Music, and the PlayStation Blog.
Here are some stats about WordPress from W3Techs that show why the use case for WordPress remains stronger than ever to this day:
- Since 2011, WordPress usage has increased on average by 12%.
- Today, 65% of all websites that use a content management system use WordPress. Shopify, which comes second, has a meager 6.6% of the market share.
- WordPress is translated into more than 160 different languages.
- There are around 60,000 free plugins available in the official WordPress plugin repository.
- You can also find more than 10,000 free themes in the official WordPress theme repository.
Here’s why WordPress is the best choice for businesses:
WordPress Is Open-Source
WordPress is an open-source content management system. Free to download, use, and customize as you see fit. This also means that you always have complete control over your site, content, and where you host it. It’s been around since 2003, with contributors from around the globe who have participated in its development.
What this means to you as a business owner is that there are thousands of people thinking about things like security and new features, which you do not pay for, they just happen.
A closed system normally has just a handful of people focused on testing security, and new features will always come with a huge upfront cost.
It’s Great for SEO
If you talk to any marketer or SEO expert, we can almost guarantee they’ll all agree: WordPress is the best CMS by a mile for SEO.
There are a number of reasons why:
Most of the technical setup is ready to go straight out of the box (with most of the configuration being handled by adding a free SEO plugin)
But let’s be specific. What does this actually mean?
Everything from configuring sitemaps – including separate video, image, news, and post sitemaps – is something that you can do without being a developer. With the help of plugins including, but not limited to:
And better yet, when conventions and best practices change, you aren’t the one that has to adapt and spend time figuring out what you need to modify. Let the experts that are dedicated to building SEO software for WordPress handle it for you.
The workflow is made incredibly easy.
Unblock your team and make it easy for them to move things forward without the constant need for handholding.
Building incredible user experiences and fast websites is possible as you have complete control over choosing your favorite WordPress hosting provider.
Today, SEO is so much more than just writing content or stuffing your pages with a bunch of keywords. Your team should have the ability to build the best possible user experience for your website visitors. And without the right workflow, you limit what your team can do.
Without WordPress, basic changes become difficult, and iterating on simple ideas often takes days to get approval and finally make it to production.
WordPress Is Great For Website Security
There is a lot of misinformation surrounding the security of WordPress.
It’s no surprise that as the most widely used platform to run websites in the world, of all sites that are targeted, the chances are it’s likely to be a WordPress website.
The real reason some try to paint the perception that there are security issues with sites running WordPress is simply that many sites run WordPress, and things are entirely flexible, so of course, you can build or install something that isn’t reliable. The same is true; however, if you build with virtually any other stack, let alone more likely if you build something custom and don’t know what you’re doing or have the resources to maintain it.
When you work with a WordPress hosting provider that brings competence in security, scaling, and performance the way we do at Servebolt, you can easily keep WordPress secure. We take your security seriously, with constant monitoring of your website and active adaptations to your security to protect you when nefarious things are happening.
Doesn’t Require Technical Knowledge
Arguably the best thing about WordPress is that it doesn’t require any serious technical knowledge to use it. You don’t necessarily need to be a developer in order to build and make changes to sites with WordPress (this is not to say that you cannot build better sites if you or someone on your team is a developer, in fact, this would be recommended).
There are tons of guides available online, so your team will find it incredibly easy to get up and running with WordPress. After spending a couple of hours in the dashboard, they’ll already be familiar with almost everything they’ll need to know.
In addition to the official support forums, there is also a whole range of Facebook Groups where others in the community will be willing to share anything from a quick answer, recommend a solution as well as take the time to write a complete explanation of how something can be achieved with WordPress.
Some of our favorite groups include:
It’s Incredibly Versatile
You might have heard people say that WordPress is mainly designed for blogs. When it originally launched (in May 2003!), that was probably the case. However, WordPress has evolved drastically in the 19 years since then, and today you can use WordPress to build virtually any kind of site.
Interested in launching an eCommerce store? You can use the WooCommerce plugin to set it up and customize it however you like. Or, if you want to sell digital products, another popular choice is Easy Digital Downloads.
Thanks to its roots as a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved to be the only solution that is truly designed to be the best way to build websites and the best content management system. No other platform can come close to nailing those two together in the way that WordPress has and consistently proves it is better at.
Scalability When Done Right – The Choice for Enterprise Brands
There’s a reason why larger organizations move back to WordPress, despite having spent six-figure amounts on building their sites on different tech stacks.
Scalability is a major benefit that WordPress offers.
Even as you grow, the question will always be whether you want to have your team spend time trying to build (and maintain) the best platform or, instead, focus on building the best possible experience for your website visitors on top of what is already the best platform.
When you host WordPress with Servebolt, your site is hosted on infrastructure engineered from the ground up to maximize raw performance across every level. We own, operate, and maintain all hardware that powers the Servebolt Cloud.
And the result is: WordPress hosted with us is faster than it ever could be anywhere else. As has been proven with us being awarded top tier in every single price tier, we compete in the WP Hosting Benchmarks Awards.
A Vibrant and Active Community
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world by a mile. As a result, there’s a vibrant and active community where you can get support and discuss the latest releases.
The WordPress forums are full of topics about everything that you can think of. Almost any question you could possibly have is likely to have already been asked & answered.
And, if you have a question that doesn’t appear to have previously been posted, you can always create your own thread and get instant replies.
WordPress is Easy to Maintain
Designing and building your site, regardless of what content management system you use, can vary in cost. But with WordPress, once it’s built, assuming the people that built it have done their part well, the reality is that maintaining the site is easy.
Compare that to building with another content management system that requires a completely custom frontend that lives separately (i.e., with headless WordPress)
You’d constantly need to pull development resources away from what they really want to be focusing on to help with the most simple changes.
The Content Management Functionality (especially for teams) is Undefeated
At its core, WordPress is a content management system, and there really is nothing that comes close to competing with the experience they’ve built. Some developers have mixed opinions about developing and extending WordPress, but almost every website you can imagine, from Healthline to TechCrunch, runs WordPress for its content operation.
New Staff Rarely Need Training
Most people are already familiar with WordPress, which means there is little to no learning curve for editors, content writers, and others on your team that should be able to work on the site without having to go through other people constantly.
On top of that, to make this all possible while making sure that people only have access to what they should have access to, there is powerful user permission and role management built right in, with the option to control this further based on the plugins that you use and the areas that you wish to grant users access to.
Hiring A Developer Is Not Absolutely Essential
With WordPress, you can use various page builders to set up your website quickly. It’s incredibly easy since almost all the top page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Brizy feature drag-and-drop functionality.
This means you don’t have to hire a developer or worry about writing code. Though, if you do want to hire a developer, there are more WordPress developers out there than there are developers for any other content management system. There are likely even more WordPress developers than there are users of most other content management systems!
Hosting Where You Retain Full Control
Building a website on hosted platforms like Shopify or Webflow can seem like an attractive option for smaller businesses. But ultimately, there are limits.
You are tied to their limitations.
You are tied into their ecosystem.
You are at the whim of their pricing.
Every Webflow and Shopify site performs about the same as the others. You can’t switch to better hosting. Webflow raises its prices, and you’re locked into the increase unless you decide to rebuild and move your site elsewhere.
While we can’t speak for Webflow (but imagine the same will be true, simply by the nature of how these platforms operate) – Shopify can choose to shut down your site without notice at any time (with an entire forum thread in their community of people describing having their sites shut down, not knowing what has actually happened).
In short: The real issue is that when you host on such platforms, you never truly have full control or ownership of your site. It’s essentially a rental. The moment you stop paying the monthly fee, the hosted platform can revoke your privileges.
Even worse, as a byproduct of being tied into an ecosystem, what if you want to customize your eCommerce store’s checkout experience? Not possible. With WordPress, all that and more is doable. With WordPress, that’s not an issue.
Your content is yours. You can move it whenever and to wherever you want. And doing so is actually relatively easy to do.
It’s Only Going to Grow
The world loves open-source software. As mentioned, WordPress isn’t managed by just one person – there’s an entire community of passionate developers who contribute to its growth. If longevity is your main concern, WordPress is the easy winner.
In the unlikely event that WordPress suddenly disappears, anyone can use the open-source code and then launch another version within minutes. The open-source software itself is managed by the WordPress Foundation, which is a not-for-profit organization that focuses on its growth. Whereas the website-building software that is around now could be shut down and no longer supported at any moment.
There are forums, dedicated support groups, and platforms where you can find answers to virtually any query you may have regarding WordPress. As a business owner, future-proofing is important. With WordPress, it’s safe to say that it’s here to stay.
Performance Optimization Is Actually Possible With WordPress
Optimizing your website, especially if you’re using WordPress, becomes incredibly easy. Why? Well, for starters, you have choice. You aren’t locked into hosting in an environment where the infrastructure ultimately isn’t the priority.
Simply put, in WordPress, you have us! A team that’s engineered the Servebolt Cloud from the ground up, maintaining the world’s fastest hosting – as opposed to using off-the-shelf solutions like the Google Cloud Platform) – allowing us to maximize raw performance across the stack.
PHP-Based CMSs Can Now Compete with Node.js-Based Systems
If performance is your primary reason to switch from a PHP-based content management system to a Node.js-based one, you no longer have to worry. Performance-wise, both are now almost on par, so that – in our view – is a costly decision that is no longer worth justifying, especially with what can be achieved with proper caching in place.
Comprehensive Documentation
Because of its popularity, the documentation for WordPress is incredibly detailed, both on its Developer Resources page and on the web. You’ll find hundreds of training videos for all things WordPress, making it very easy to learn.
More and More Enterprise Brands Are Moving to WordPress
Some of the biggest names in the industry now use WordPress – the platform powers big names like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Even companies like Spotify, Xerox, and TurboTax have migrated to WordPress.
When paired with Enterprise WordPress hosting, you’ll be able to run a website that delivers exceptional performance for your end-users at scale.
Sold on WordPress? Well, we are & you should be, too
Now that you know WordPress is the way to go when you’re ready to launch your new site, we’re here to help – with managed WordPress hosting proven to be the fastest. Try our approach to WordPress hosting today:
- Scalability: In the real user workload tests, Servebolt delivered average response times of 65ms, 4.9x faster response times than the second best.
- The fastest global load times: Average page load times of 1.26 seconds put us at the top of the list of global WebPageTest results.
- The fastest computing speed: Servebolt servers provide previously unheard-of database speeds, processing 2.44 times more queries per second than the average and running PHP 2.6 times faster than the second-best!
- Perfect security and uptime: With 100% uptime on all monitors and an A+ rating on our SSL implementation, you can be assured your site is online and secure.
