10 Money Saving Reasons to Add WordPress to your Website

WordPress web software is being used by more and more people around the world to create their website or blog.

• WordPress is the most widely used web software, used by over 14% of all websites
• WordPress is the dominant Content Management System (CMS), used more than 54% of the time where a CMS is used in a website.

People use WordPress because it is easy

And I mean “wow”, really easy.  Sure, there are some tricky things that are best left for a developer, but once your website is set up, if you have a bit of knowledge and the ability to search for information online, the WordPress sky is the limit!

I have always been happy with this website, it was set up with a Content Management System that made it easy for me to make and publish updates to the copy.  But as I used WordPress for two other websites, I became aware of some of the things that I couldn’t do easily with my previous Content Management System.

I worked with Tessa Needham Creative to recreate the look and feel of my website in WordPress, which now gives me access to the extra functionality that I want.

Use WordPress for your whole website, or if you need a new blog added

If your website has limitations in terms of you being able to update and optimise your copy without involving your web developer, you could either move all of your website to WordPress*, or, you could add on a WordPress* blog to make it easy to create and share new content.

* There are two different kinds of WordPress website. WordPress.com and WordPress.org  In this article I am referring to WordPress.org

Read more about the different types of WordPress here.

Adding WordPress to your Website makes it easy for you to do things yourself (instead of paying someone else!):

1. Update your copy and add new articles whenever you want to
2. Optimise your copy to help increase your web traffic from Google
3. Embed videos from YouTube so that they can be played directly from your website
4. Add forms from that let people subscribe via email to your updates
5. Make changes to the items that you have in your side column, add things and take things away
6. Let other people share your articles and content via Facebook, Twitter and other social media
7. Add new links to your Main and Secondary Navigation
8. Add a Twitter or Facebook feed to your side column
9. Create “Categories” and “Tags” to help people find your articles based on the topic they are interested in
10. Add Google Analytics to collect data that helps you improve your website.

A lot of the things mentioned above are done using “Plugins” which can be easily added to WordPress to give specific functionality.

WordPress even makes the tricky stuff easy

Because my previous website was quite well established, we also had to do a few tricky things.  So that none of the inbound links I have been building to optimise my website will be broken, we had to redirecting URLs from the old website to the URLs in this website, which are slightly different.  Once Tessa found the right Plugin, this was a straight forward process.

Once you’ve decided that WordPress.org is the right platform for your website, there are a lot of options to choose from, depending upon your expectations and the functionality that you need.  Find out more in the article on Which WordPress website is right for your business.

Granted it took me a while to move all my content to WordPress, but now that it’s done, I couldn’t be happier!

What’s your experience with WordPress?  And what do you love most about what it lets you do easily?

Until next time

Melinda