As a small business owner, you’re probably aware of how important it is to have a blog or website. Your choice of a platform for your site can make a big difference in your results. If you do this, you still have many options, such as building a static website or using a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and for many good reasons. The following are some of the leading benefits of WordPress for small business owners.
Introduction to WordPress
When building your website, you first have to decide whether to use your own domain or use a third-party site such as Blogger, Wix, or Squarespace. Even WordPress gives you this option at WordPress.com. There are definite branding advantages to using your own domain. Just to avoid any confusion, WordPress also provides a third-party blogging service at WordPress.com. However, the following will focus on WordPress.org, where you build your own site and use your own domain.
WordPress is an open source application that’s a content management system (CMS) as well as a blogging platform. Open source means that it’s free and that developers are constantly adding helpful updates such as bug fixes, themes, plugins (though not all of these are free) and there’s always plenty of support available if you have any questions or issues. WordPress powers millions of sites around the world, including personal blogs, small business sites and websites for large companies and organizations.
Why Use WordPress?
Here are some of the advantages small businesses enjoy with WordPress:
1. Easy to install. All major web hosting companies provide easy WordPress installation using a script installer, which doesn’t require any coding knowledge, just pressing a few buttons. You can find this information in your cPanel or web hosting dashboard. Contact the company’s support if you’re not clear about this.
2. Highly customizable. You don’t want your website to look exactly like anyone else’s. WordPress has a vast number of themes or templates available, many of them free. If you want a premium theme, you can get them at a reasonable cost, often for around $39. Theme settings also make it easy to customize elements such as layouts, fonts, and colors.
3. Plugins give you many capabilities. One of the best features of WordPress is that there are a huge number of plugins that help make your site more powerful. These are simply applications that you can easily install and activate. Some you have to pay for, but many are free. There are plugins for SEO, security, graphics, analytics, e-commerce, and many other purposes. Many plugins are particularly useful for small businesses, such as one for setting up contact forms or opt-in pages.
4. Makes SEO simple. As noted, some plugins help you supercharge your SEO (search engine optimization), so your website gets a better search engine ranking. However, even without plugins, it’s simple to optimize your posts and pages for the search engines. When you create a post, for example, there’s a place to type in keywords and tags. You can also create SEO-friendly permalinks for all your posts and pages.
5. It’s an efficient blogging platform. WordPress is more than just a blogging site, but that’s certainly one of its fundamental uses. A blog is one of the best tools for small businesses, giving you a way to reach a targeted audience and get recognized by the search engines. WordPress has a user-friendly interface for blogging, letting you schedule your posts and set up preferences for commenting, RSS feeds, subscriptions to your blog and more.
6. It’s flexible and scalable. WordPress provides a highly flexible platform for any business. You can start with a few simple pages and, as your business grows, build hundreds of pages. If you change directions with your business, you can change your WordPress site accordingly by using a new theme or adding the appropriate plugins.
WordPress is an excellent choice if you have a small business, whether you’re ready to start a website for the first time or you want to move your existing site to a more user-friendly platform. It is easy to customize for any purpose and is the perfect vehicle to help you build your business.
