WordPress is a popular term when it comes to blogging or website. Most small websites and blogs are built on WordPress. There are also several popular blogs such as Microsoft’s official blog, Mashable, Techcrunch, and more are powered by WordPress. As per a report, more than 43% of websites on the Internet use WordPress. This shows how popular WordPress is. People who don’t know about WordPress usually ask about it. So, I thought to write a detailed guide on WordPress. In this article, I will talk about WordPress and will explain why WordPress is used to build websites and blogs.

What is a WordPress?

WordPress is easy-to-use content management for creating a website or a blog. The first version of WordPress was released back in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress is released under the GNU Public License. It means WordPress is free to download and use on any kind of website. WordPress is written on PHP and uses the MySQL database. As WordPress is open-source software, it is being maintained by a large community of developers and designers. This is the reason WordPress is still gaining features with every version and is growing.

WordPress was originally developed by blogs but expanded to be a flexible content management system for any kind of website. Now we can use WordPress to create a business website, online portfolio, e-commerce store, real estate website, coupon websites, and more. There are several translation plugins that help you create a multilingual website on WordPress.

WordPress can be downloaded from WordPress.org. There is also WordPress.com which is basically a blogging platform built using WordPress. Here, you just need to register and start your blog. In simple terms, WordPress.com is a free managed WordPress hosting to start a blog with WordPress. I have already explained the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. In this article, I am talking about the WordPress software platform that can be installed on any web host to make a website.

Reasons why WordPress is popular?

WordPress is simple and easy to use. It is free and can be installed on any web host in less than 5 minutes. You keep getting security updates and features with each new WordPress update. Even if you don’t know how to code, you can still use WordPress to make any kind of website.

There are thousands of WordPress themes to get an appealing-looking blog or website. WordPress itself has a repository of free themes where different developers and designers upload their themes. You can also get paid themes to get the desired website. Developers also keep working on plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. With different plugins, you can achieve a lot more on WordPress. Currently, there are more than 5000 free WordPress themes and more than 50,000 free WordPress plugins. Several paid themes and plugins are also available to achieve a lot of things.

WordPress also has a built-in user management system. You can easily create a multi-author blog with different capabilities of each author based on their roles. If you are making any other kind of website that require user registration, you can also have that by extending the user management system given by WordPress.

Another good thing about WordPress is the existence of mobile apps. If you make a website on WordPress, you can download WordPress mobile apps that are available on Android and iOS. Then you can directly use the app to update the content of your blog from your smartphone, moderate comments, and reply to comments.

The flexibility of WordPress makes it possible. You can use the bbPress plugin to make a forum or install the BuddyPress plugin to make a social network. WoCommerce plugin can turn WordPress into an e-commerce store.

How much does WordPress cost?

As I already said, WordPress is completely free to download and use. You just need to pay for the domain name and web hosting. You can keep using WordPress for free and will keep getting all the new features and security updates.

I personally use WordPress for my blogs and other websites. When I thought of starting a blog back in 2010, I began with blogger.com. In a few months, I realized the potential of WordPress and moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress. WordPress gave me the flexibility to customize the design, freedom to optimize my blog as I wanted, SEO-friendly structure, Caching, and a lot more things.

Wrap Up

If you are looking for an easy-to-use tool for making a website or a blog, WordPress is the best option. You just need to invest in a domain and web hosting. Then Install WordPress on your web host to make the website. Now the next step should be the selection of the right theme. Get a theme that gets your job done. If you want a real estate website, get a theme made for real-estate needs and install it on your WordPress. You can check CodeCanyon.com for paid WordPress themes for any kind of website.