Why Companies Should Use WordPress… PERIOD!
WordPress, no longer for blogs and small businesses only. Recent core improvements grant users the ability to create unlimited custom content types without the need for an experienced developer. These improvements are rapidly shattering previous notions that WordPress was suitable only for smallish sites focused on blogging. Look below at 6 reasons Why Companies Should Use WordPress.
1. WordPress is Open Source Which Equals Savings
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
Your website should be making you money, not costing you more than you’re gaining from it. WordPress is an open source CMS, for which you will never pay a licensing fee. What does this mean for large companies who are exploring the WordPress platform? The cost of development is significantly lower than comparable proprietary platforms.
For example, if you want to run an ASP-based website, you’ll have to use IIS and purchase Windows. Custom development costs are also going to be higher.
Because of the worldwide popularity of PHP and the WordPress platform, you should easily be able to find developers who can build and maintain your website affordable.
Open source means more than just no licensing fees. It’s a community philosophy that allows programmers to work together to improve each others’ code or change it to do something different. That means that the functionality you’ve been looking for has probably already been created and is available for you to use. This can save your business thousands of dollars in long-term custom development costs.
2. WordPress is the Most User-Friendly CMS in its Class
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
WordPress won the Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100, as well as Overall Best Open Source CMS Award for the 2009.
One of the reasons it has been so widely adopted is that it has a very easy-to-use, intuitive backend. WordPress’ plugin architecture and templating system are also well-known for being simple to customize and build upon.
3. WordPress Has a Thriving Development Community
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
WordPress 3.0 had 11 million downloads in the first 42 days it became available. This is no fly-by-night CMS. Millions of users are actively using and contributing to WordPress development to make it the best open source CMS available.
WordPress is a solid platform for any large or expanding business to build on, and it’s constantly improving. The best part is that improvements to core security, bug fixes, and general upgrades will always be available to you at no cost.
4. The WordPress Platform is Highly Extendable
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
The WordPress plugin directory recently surpassed 100 million downloads. Want social networking? Want forums? E-commerce? Event management? All of these features are available through the WordPress plugin architecture.
Whereas WordPress used to be known as the best blogging platform with the most beautiful themes, you can do virtually anything with it now.
WordPress has evolved into a sophisticated CMS that can handle any kind of multimedia, syndication, and social networking features that you see around the web on large sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
If you’re not fully confident in the free plugins available, there are several premium plugin providers, including WPMU DEV Premium, which houses the largest collection of professionally-supported WordPress plugins.
Premium plugin providers usually offer support and a quality guarantee so that you’re able to depend on that functionality for your site.
This is very important for both large and small businesses that wish to present a professional image. Whether you utilize free extensions, premium plugins, or a combination of both, you’ll always have options in the WordPress community.
5. E-Commerce Solutions are Available for Any Sized Business
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
Whether you need a small corporate store or a large-scale international enterprise with complex selling needs, WordPress has the e-commerce solution to suit your business. Want to set up a network of online stores that share the same central code base?
You can do this with WordPress multisite and e-commerce. Managing a WordPress e-commerce store is just as user-friendly as managing any other type of content.
6. WordPress is SEO-Friendly and Easy to Optimize
– Why Companies Should Use WordPress
Most WordPress development is focused on building websites and web-based applications, which makes SEO a very high priority for the WordPress community. WordPress is built with SEO in mind, but on top of that there are hundreds of plugins available to help promote your site’s content and SEO.
After your business is rocking the search engines and getting loads of traffic, there are many tools available that allow WordPress to scale gracefully. A site such as Edublogs is a great example of a large scale WordPress operation of half a million blogs and 8,000,000 page views per month.
Conclusion – Why Companies Should Use WordPress
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. WordPress is open source and many of the features you’ll need have more than likely already been built for you. The cost of implementation is very low and you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars to make the platform SEO-friendly or scalable.
Professional WordPress experts can provide you with the tools you need to get your brand powered by the most popular open source CMS available. If you have any questions about what WordPress is capable of, let me know and I’ll do my best to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
Big Companies Using WordPress
There are a few blogs and sites on this list that aren’t Fortune 500 companies. But for the most part all these companies listed here use the blogging platform WordPress to manage their sites.
- Nokia
- Honda
- Onstar
- Ford Motor Company
- Samsung
- GE
- NFL
- American Express
- People Magazine
- Harvard University
- Wall Street Journal
- Best Buy
- Coca-Cola
- Ebay
- Xerox
- GM
- Anderson Cooper
This is nice post.Thanks
No doubt in my mind of the flexibility of the wordpress platform. It makes web design so easy and uncomplicated – after an hour of tweaking you can have a professional esign easily
I 2nd that for sure!
I totally agree with you Jarrett.Wordpress is one of the fantastic and very useful platform to work on.Its beneficial for the small and large scale enterprises.
Thanks!
1 – lots and lots of cms are open source … not really an advantage when you could throw a stone any direction and hit an open source cms2 – The technocrati's most popular cms is specifically talking about "cms" used for blogs word press is most know for … blogs3 – Millions of downloads isn't millions of developers, but I have no doubt there is a thriving developer/designer community around it4,5,6 – nothing that wordpress is especially better at than othersI honestly haven't seen major corporations adopting wordpress for the full spectrum of their Internet pages. I see lots of blogs and forums and off-shoot minor sections, but not the whole kit and kaboodle.
It's not a great cms unless you don't really understand what a cms is. In that case go crazy with your wordpress thang.
Great points but I would however love to see a CMS that is highly supported and used as WordPress is.