No matter what type of business you are running, you must have a website. It is a basic prerequisite both for large companies and home-based businesses. The internet is the fastest and most convenient medium used by people to find products and services they need and to purchase them. Many businesses have changed their business model, shutting down their brick-and-mortar stores and operating solely through online stores instead.
I will not go any further with the reasons why you should have a website for your business. Instead, I want to focus on what type of website you should have. As a small business, which you manage on your own or with a very small team, the number one recommendation is WordPress. More than half of all the websites launched in 2015 (and we talk in the order of millions) are built on WordPress.
Why is this site-building platform so popular? We have 5 important reasons, which will convince you to use it as well for your small business website.
1. It Is Free
The source code for WordPress is free. You can download it from the official website and start using it – no fees, no royalties, no questions asked. For other web-building platforms, you will have to pay a fee to use and purchase other plugins which you may need to add functionalities to your website.
This is a very important advantage for small businesses which cannot afford a significant budget for building and maintaining their websites. What’s more, WordPress has thousands of professional-looking themes to choose from, many of them free. This means that you can also save on web design costs.
2. It Is Easy to Manage
WordPress is perhaps the most user-friendly CMS (content management system). Simply put, if you know how to use a text editor to prepare and format an article, you can use WordPress with ease to add articles, blog posts, set featured images, and edit or delete existing articles.
Thus, you do not need to hire someone to manage your website, add more content as you prepare your blogging strategy or add more products to your online store. You can do this all by yourself, with no cost and with minimum training using freely available tutorials.
3. It Is Search Engine Friendly
Simply put, Google loves WordPress. Its internal structure of links, H1 and H2 texts, SEO titles and meta descriptions was developed keeping in mind the requirements of Google spiders for correct crawling and indexing websites. With other website builders, you have to hire a programmer to add lines of code which make your website search engine friendly. WordPress offers this as standard functionality – thus your chances to get found on Google increases tremendously.
4. It Is Safe and Secure
WordPress developers take online security very seriously. Although most of the malicious software and codes are developed specifically to attack WordPress websites (since they are so popular), the integrated defence mechanisms of the platform itself are continually updated and improved to offer you maximum safety and protection from threats and hacking.
5. It Is Versatile
WordPress offers you the possibility to have a website, blog and online store on the same platform and manageable by the same CMS. Thus, you have all the possible functionalities of your website at your fingertips: you can add a product to your store, share a new blog post and add a web page from the same back-end panel, using similar looking buttons and functionalities, with zero hassle and complications.
All in all, WordPress is the best web building platform if you have a limited budget, want to manage your own website, and increase your visibility on search engines without investing a large amount of money.