5 reasons why you should use WordPress for your website build

We nearly always work with WordPress. What began as a simple blogging platform, now accounts for 37% of the market share of all websites.

Ecommerce, membership portals, enterprise – it does it all, and over the years they’ve grown their library of plugins and widgets to the point where the platform can support the simplest of templates, to the most bespoke solutions.

But why do all these people flock to WordPress?
What makes it so popular?
And how can 6B use WordPress to deliver a high-performing website for you?

Here are 5 reasons why 6B uses WordPress as our preferred content management system:

1. It simplifies “bespoke”

WordPress has over 59,000 plugins that we can use to tailor your website to your needs.

This level of customisation and flexibility puts it ahead of its competition in this area, meaning from a blog to an ecommerce store, the potential is almost limitless.

These plugins are also trustworthy, updated frequently, and in no short supply compared to any other CMS – and according to our developers, that’s usually because they’re unsuitable or not built on a wide enough scale.

Take our work with the NHS as an example, and the multisite install we created. Their collection of around 200 websites is all managed from a single dashboard via a WordPress CMS.

The build saves a huge amount of time for their team, who would otherwise have to manage each of these sites individually. (Read more about it here)

Depending on what you need, there’s usually a plug-in to help you strip out the complexity of your project; a few other examples of plugins we frequently use include:

Elementor: This drag-and-drop page builder lets our developers create unique and impressive layouts in a practical, functional way. We use this plugin for a lot of our website projects

Wordfence: This security plugin makes your site much more secure and gives you detailed information on how to maintain your site’s security

Gravity forms: This contact forms plugin is very flexible and time-saving for developers because code is not required

WooCommerce: This ecommerce plugin easily integrates with your shipping services and order management tools so that your website can bring in revenue right away

HubSpot: This marketing plugin helps you build email newsletters, follow leads, track conversions, engage with your customers via forms or live chats and has a powerful analytical tool so you can assess how your marketing is performing

2. It takes SEO into account

There’s no point in having a beautifully bespoke website if no one can find it. Your site should be optimised, and luckily WordPress takes this into account so it’s easy for you to understand and implement quickly.

For example, there’s a free plugin called Yoast that gives great advice on how to tailor content to maximise your website’s search engine visibility.

You may not have used a keyword often enough
Or perhaps your sentences may be too long
Have you forgotten to include meta titles and descriptions?

The Yoast app tells you what improvements need to be made in a clear, concise and user-friendly way – meaning you don’t have to be an SEO-expert to get your site visible to potential customers.

But of course, if you need something specific building around SEO, then WordPress also makes it easy for your technical partner to go a little more customised.

Here’s another example for you from our client base. One of our customers uses the WordPress Job Manager to filter jobs via location, keyword and categories – but there’s no SEO value to the filters.

Our developers extended Yoast without changing the code, so that the client could create unique content for that specific job. By adding keywords and optimising the URL and titles for each job (construction jobs, art jobs etc), the website becomes more visible to search engines.

Our Front End Developer James Schofield explained: “Their SEO value should be massively boosted and the client should start ranking for all sorts of different jobs/job categories, rather than just the one job board page.

“This is all made possible via WordPress’ hooks, which hook into various parts of the plugin’s functionality to extend, modify and add to it, without having to edit the plugin’s core files.”

3. It saves time

Modifying your website needs to be as easy as possible – when you’re running your business, you don’t have time to waste.

No matter what request a customer has, there’s nearly always a WordPress plugin that we can find. This saves our developers a huge amount of time, which means we can get your website live much quicker.

Our Head of Front-End Development Daniel Edwards, added: “There’s a lot of off-the-shelf functionality with plugins. It’s really quick and easy for developers to work with, so it’s typically cheaper and faster to get a site built with WordPress than a bespoke CMS.”

WordPress is as easy to use for tech beginners as it is for experienced developers.

When we’ve finished building your website, we can give customers a tutorial on how the key themes of WordPress works, such as adding blogs or changing prices.

It means that you don’t have to wait for us to make any changes – you can do it yourself (with support available from us if you need it of course.)

Other website builders such as Joomla and Drupal require technical knowledge of HTML, CSS and the programming language PHP. WordPress includes features for beginners, which means no coding or programming is required.

We can build your website faster, and you can make changes that suit your business needs.

4. It has a community

A problem shared is a problem halved.

Our developers are amazing, but even they don’t know absolutely everything about WordPress.

That’s why we often access the WordPress community forums.

Our Front End Developer Dominic Walker, explained: “There’s a wealth of support and examples available online for WordPress. There aren’t many times that you search for a solution to something, and then find there isn’t another example someone has already done for you to work from.

“There are plenty of forums where developers post issues regularly with solutions. It’s a great point of interest for any WordPress developer.”

A great example Dom gives is with post type filters.

6B had several sites that were advertising training courses or programs, and integrating a custom filter required code that wasn’t available in WordPress.

But when we searched the community for examples of how other developers got over this problem, we created a solution that worked. We were also able to use this solution for several other websites we were working on at the time – multiple customer benefits, all from the sheer breadth of knowledge that’s available when you’re plugged into the WordPress community.

5. It’s secure

WordPress is so popular that it gets regularly targeted for hacks.

This sounds like a negative, but it actually has a positive effect for your website.

It’s attacked so much that regular updates are constantly released, making it one of the most robust and secure platforms you can use.

We only use plugins that we know are safe and reliable, and our developers can give you great advice and assistance to keep the site secure, like:

Keeping your SSL certificate up to date
Protecting your login information
Installing plugins that scan your website for malware

It’s benefits like the above that highlight why we use it to produce top-quality, fully-customisable solutions for our clients.

Do you need an experienced team to build your website?

6B builds websites that meet all of your objectives, no matter how complex they are.

Get in touch with us to let us know what you need your website to do.

Talk to us today

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