What is WordPress Used For?
Having your own piece of the internet has been your dream for a while? You want to have your own website, blog, online portfolio, store, or online magazine but you are neither a programmer nor have any IT background whatsoever? WordPress was created precisely in response to the needs of people like you.
The Unbearable Lightness of Creating a Website
WordPress is the easiest free way to create a website or blog of any kind. And more importantly, you can learn how to use WordPress for free. To be more precise, WordPress is an open-source content management system that allows you to create a website without any coding knowledge. It was conceived in 2003 as an open-source project by a team of developers and quickly grew into an international venture. The fact that it powers more than 30% of websites, and that well-known brands such as BBC America, Sony Music, MTV News, Microsoft News Center and many others use it, explains both its quality and popularity.
7 Reasons Why WordPress is a Top-Drawer Consideration When Building a Website
Now, let’s briefly explain why WordPress is a great CMS:
Although millions of people use this software, your website can have a unique look and style thanks to numerous plugins and themes that are easy to install. This way you can completely change the site’s design and customize it to your needs. You can achieve even more authenticity with the support of various add-ons that will enrich the site’s functionalities. Best of all, many add-ons and themes are available completely free of charge.
WordPress is SEO friendly at its very core. It allows you to fully control all aspects of the site and implement well-known SEO plugins with ease. This can be a huge advantage in creating your SEO strategy which is essential if you want to achieve good ranking. Applying SEO rules in every detail from the very start of creating a website helps you set a sound foundation for your websites’ success.
Special attention is paid to the behavior of the site on mobile devices, as well as to the page loading speed. This is extremely important because a large number of users use mobile devices (primarily phones) to surf the Internet. With that in mind, it is crucial how your site behaves on “small screens”.
Bearing in mind that WordPress currently powers 75+ million websites all over the world, if you run into any kind of issue while using it, the chances that someone else had the same problem and solved it are huge. There are plenty of online WP forums and communities where you can get help when needed, share experience, and learn more about WordPress.
10 + Great Ways to Use WordPress
If we told you that you could use WordPress for everything, we would not be too far from the truth. WordPress has an extremely wide application. It is used for building all kinds of websites, ranging from personal blogs to corporate sites. One of the reasons for its versatility is that it is made in such a way that by adding a specific WP theme, plugin or addon you can entirely personalize your websites’ looks and purpose. But, even when used without any kind of supplement, WordPress still offers tremendous possibilities within its basic version. To have a more accurate picture of what you can do with WordPress, we have singled out several most popular types of websites that you can build using WordPress:
While today WordPress can provide you with much more than a blog, let’s not forget that it was originally created as a blogging platform. During the 17 years since its release, all these blogging elements have not only been preserved, but have been diligently perfected and adapted to the needs of modern blogging. Whether you want to start a personal or professional blog, pretty advanced features are at your disposal today. Some of them include various SEO functionalities that are one of the top priorities for any blog. And if you want to personalize the look and feel of your online space, there is a simple and easy solution for that too. WordPress is very extensive and flexible which means that you can easily add any WP theme, plugin, widget, and addon to it. If, for example, you are starting a personal blog, you can easily install a personal blog WP theme and thus enrich and improve the content of your blog. If you use a blog mainly for professional purposes, you can choose a specific plugin such as Visualizer for example, and add nice tables and graphs to your site. In any case, make sure that your core content such as text and images is of good quality, and WordPress will help you with all other issues.
If you are making a career as a designer, photographer, artist, or creative of any kind, WordPress can be your greatest ally. It will provide you with the perfect tools to build a website based on gallery pages and portfolio sections that focus on your work. As a creative, you will probably be naturally drawn to some of the beautiful portfolio WordPress themes that will seamlessly complement your work. Plus, if you want to sell your work, these types of websites allow you to easily integrate WooCommerce features.
The fact that world-famous brands like The Walt Disney Company or Mercedes-Benz use WordPress for their business purposes says a lot. It is incredibly easy to create a professional-looking business website with WordPress, no matter how big or small your business is. With a cleverly chosen business WP theme and well-used plugins, you can create a high-quality, functional business website that looks amazing all by yourself.
If you are starting an online business with a focus on sales, an e-commerce website will cover all your needs. WordPress is a great platform to sell both physical and digital goods thanks to easy-to-add e-commerce functionalities. Setting up an online store with WordPress is practically child’s play. WP’s compatibility with leading e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce or WPEcommerce, paired with a good choice of an e-commerce WordPress theme, will transform any WP site into a full-fledged online store in no time. Managing payments, shipments and other aspects of running an E-shop is as simple as it can get with WordPress at its base.
Online magazines take a special place in today’s world. Unlike print media, they don’t require you to break the bank to create them, and their distribution is much easier. Thanks to the sheer versatility of WordPress, you have full creative freedom when coming up with the concept of your magazine. Even if the core platform doesn’t support some of your ideas, chances are there’s at least one plugin out there that does. So whatever idea you can think of, you’re going to be able to implement it without any necessary coding knowledge. If you plan on sending newsletters as part of a magazine marketing campaign, there are plenty of newsletter WP plugins like Mailpoet or SendIn Blue to help you with that. And as for the look of the magazine, in particular, you can easily achieve the image that you aim for with a stylish magazine WP theme. Plus, you can also monetize your online magazine by becoming an affiliate for the brands you feature, or you can adopt a sponsorship. The more popular your magazine gets the more companies will consider your site as a good opportunity to advertise on. Even big-name brands such as The New Yorker, Vogue and People Magazine use WordPress as their platform.
WordPress is, among other things, a rock star. Musicians and bands often choose WordPress to build their websites. Katty Perry, Rolling Stones, Beyonce and many other famous musicians opted for WordPress. That is no wonder, as WordPress allows you to entirely focus on making important choices. Once you decide what type of site you need, what you’d like it to look like, and what functionalities it has to have, you can easily implement everything thanks to the sheer power of WordPress and the variety of music themes and plugins available.
The digital age introduced plenty of new professions as well as innovative ways of advertising jobs. Many people today find their jobs through job boards. This is a type of website that gives you an overview of job offers by category. WordPress makes managing these kinds of websites simple, and what’s more important you can even profit from building a platform that connects professionals with potential employers. Due to the great variety and specificity of jobs today, niche job boards are very popular. Luckily, thanks to some great WordPress job directory and job listing themes, you can easily and quickly set up a fully functional job board of your own.
One of the main reasons why WordPress is an excellent choice for building fundraising, charity, and non-profit websites besides the fact that it is free, is that it allows onsite donations. That means the donors stay on your website when they click to donate. All you need to do to have this feature is to install the right WP donation plugin. Pair it with a graceful charity WP theme, and it will be much easier to make this world a better place.
Podcasts are a very engaging form that is only becoming more and more popular with every generation. Many companies use them as they are a great way to attract consumers. Their commercial potential is enormous.
If you want to create your own podcasting website, WordPress is an excellent choice for many reasons. Many podcasters choose it because it comes with a built-in RSS feed system for blogs and a wide choice of both free and premium podcasting plugins. It also allows you to maintain complete ownership of your podcast content, unlike the traditional podcast hosting services. Furthermore, you can create better podcast archives with WP, which is important as it makes it easier for new listeners to get onboard.
Online education is on the constant rise. While classic face to face teaching will never go out of fashion, online learning provides many people with opportunities that they could have never had otherwise. WordPress powers many online school, education, and learning platforms thanks to its integration and compatibility with excellent LMS plugins. These plugins are easy to install and provide you with a bunch of handy features that turn your website into a powerful education establishment.
Thinking about becoming an affiliate marketer? The first thing you should focus on is the content on your website. When you have quality content that attracts your target audience, creating a niche affiliate website is a piece of cake. In that case, all you need is an affiliate marketing plugin and an affiliate marketing WP theme. If you also plan to sell products, consider installing the WooCommerce plugin. It’s a free tool that enables you to easily manage products and payments on your website.
If you have a specific interest that you would like to share with like-minded people, you can easily turn your WP site into a niche online community, a forum, or a social network by adding a social media plugin to it. To see how it could look like, check out the Facebook Newsroom. The plugins that will be of great help when building these kinds of websites are the BBPress and BuddyPress plugin, while plenty of other forum plugins are at your disposal too. Of course, a beautiful community theme will contribute a lot to the success of your website.
It’s obvious by now that WordPress makes it easy to set up a site, but did you know that it can even help you create an interconnected network of websites (or multisite network). This is a great solution if, for example, you want to build a publishing platform but also want to start another project under the same umbrella for completely different purposes. The multisite functionality allows you to use the same username and dashboard to manage multiple websites whose content and data are completely different. Many universities, schools and corporations use WordPress, powered with adequate multisite and database plugins for creating this kind of website network.
In Conclusion
WordPress is a true, modern superhero. It helps everyone for free, and over time, it only becomes better. The uses of WP that are listed here are the most common ones. This in no way means that you couldn’t use it in some other way. Thanks to the abundance of different addons, you can create any kind of website with WordPress. In a nutshell, you can use WordPress to promote your business, express your artistic talents, create an amazing platform to share ideas, expand your online presence, start fundraising, and much much more! We hope we inspired you to make that first step towards creating your little piece of heaven in the online world. If you have a different idea of what WP can be used for, feel free to share it with us in the comments section. We look forward to your feedback.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!