WordPress, a titan for setting up users easily on their own blog immediately on the WordPress.com domain, has also created the most widely used content management system in the world on WordPress.org. There is a big distinction. Today, nearly 40% of all of the websites in the world are built in WordPress, which is absolutely astronomical. Essentially, the days of website updates manually through source code are over. This is a huge benefit for business owners that don’t want to hire a webmaster for every web update they want, and for their employees to learn how to operate and keep their website fresh in as little as week.
If you are shopping for a new website and a company you go to tells you they are going to build it out using WordPress, they are more than likely aren’t setting you up on a blog. They are saying they are going to use the WordPress content management system, or CMS, as the “behind the scenes”, or back-end of the website. This is basically the standard, and should actually be a priority when asking about how the website itself will be built out. Take a look at how I’m updating our blog right now below:
(edit, this will be going in as a post so it feeds into the blog, for anyone that noticed it says “add new page”) Pretty trippy huh? Other popular CMS’s include Joomla and Drupal, and all of them have different pros and cons depending on the site you’re making. For example, we’ve experienced some difficulty with WordPress when the website starts exceeding 100 pages. Other CMS’s are designed for handling huge websites, and often times large companies will commission programmers to develop proprietary CMS’s for either internal usage or eventual implementation for their clients’ websites.
Traditionally without CMS, every new page of the website will have to be a page written in HTML and uploaded to the appropriate directory on your server. You could have a WordPress blog technically piggyback off your site and feed into a desired part of your original site using PHP, but that only will take care of your posts. The nice thing about a CMS like WordPress is that it can add both posts and pages to your website.
Even with this content refresh in 2018, it is safe to stay WordPress is still dominating, and DotNetNuke, Joomla, and Drupal are definitely out of the race for market share. Even SquareSpace, Weebly and Wix, which are the front-runners for website builders, will never match the customization and uniqueness and support of a solid WordPress website.
So don’t be worried when someone tells you they are building your website out in WordPress most of the time. The capabilities are much greater than the limitations, though most websites you’ll see by major companies won’t use WordPress (mostly because they have adept in-house developers). If you’d like to learn more about WordPress websites, don’t hesitate to contact the experts over at Market My Market today!