The benefits of using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress is the worlds most popular open source platform. It is simple, easy to use and provides a super friendly interface making it one of the most user friendly content management systems on the planet.

WordPress started life as a blogging tool way back in 2003 and since then has evolved as open source software through its developer community.

There are thousands of WordPress developers out there who have created hundreds of thousands of plugins for WordPress. What this means is that pretty much any functionality you can think of for your website is already available, to install, at the click of a button. Pretty incredible!

The importance of WordPress as a Content Management Tool

Your website can be one of the trickiest and time consuming elements of your day. As a business owner you need to spend your time strategically thinking and not stressing about changing or breaking your website. There is no point having a beautiful website that you cannot update when you want or is volatile and risks being broken when updated.

With WordPress all of that risk, stress and pressure is taken away. The ability to update your website using a content management system such as WordPress is made easier by its super user-friendly interface.

When you go to update your website, you should not feel any anxiety, that’s why with WordPress you can easily add new text, images and pages to your website.

A WordPress checklist makes it even easier – Click here to read one from our partners.

If your website is set up correctly, then using WordPress you can update your website using a visual editor. What this means is that you can enter your writing into little pre-coded boxes which will then display on your website in the correct style and formatting giving you minimal risk of breaking your website. Your content can always be pre-defined, as can your images, changed at the click of a button, giving you full predictability.

And what’s best? Is that should you have zero experience in updating websites or web coding, then you no longer need any! The visual editor can work from something as simple as copy and paste meaning you can change a page of text and imagery in minutes by pressing just a few buttons!

ALT – WordPress experts in Birmingham, really love WordPress, it has provided the foundation to some of our most popular websites, take a look at them in our Web Design Portfolio, In the meantime here are some of the best key benefits and features from WordPress:

–        Minimal Cost! WordPress it’s self is free. Many of the available plugins for WordPress are also free or at best minimal cost making WordPress Content Management System one of the cheapest and most affordable to use.

–        Easy to Use. WordPress has been refined over the years to become one of the easiest Content Management Systems available. Designed for simplicity, a feature that runs through every part of the WordPress Content Management System, you can easily update any part of your website with a few simple clicks of a button.

–        Huge open source community – Premade templates and plugins are available by the hundreds of thousands. The WordPress community consisting of tens of thousands of people is dedicated to making a beautiful platform and this means that you can purchase and integrate mobile responsive templates at the click of a button. Should you wish to add functionality to your website, such as a password protected page or create a social network style website, then plugins are available to install at the click of a button with no technical experience required.

–        SEO Friendly – When it comes to Search Engine Friendly Content Management Systems, WordPress leads the way. One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress is a plugin called Yoast SEO. And this enables you to enter your SEO friendly URLS, meta data and a keyword to optimise your page around ensuring you get the most out of the platform.

 

WordPress Content Management System and SEO

WordPress is one of the most user friendly content management systems that there is available on the market today.

By default, as an option WordPress allows you to select SEO friendly URLS. These URLS can include, the data, month or just simply keywords. This allows Google to index your website far easier and gives you a little boost in the Search Engine Rankings.

WordPress also writes extremely clean code. This makes your website easier to crawl and understand by Google and in turn helps you get indexed in the search engine results much quicker.

You can also index your images far easier with WordPress as the Content Management System allows you to optimise your images for search engines. This includes setting your ALT tags (a SEO benefit) and provide descriptions and keywords for your images which will rank your images in the google search results.

You can also install third party plugins via your content management system. Wordpress has hudnreds of SEO friendly plugins to ensure you get the most out of Wordpress, but the most popular and well known plugin is Yoast. Yoast is a free SEO plugin for Wordpress and it allows you to set a keyword which it then automatically searches for and gives you a step by step list on where your keyword is missing from and where to add it to get the maximum onpage SEO. Yoast works on a simple traffic light system Red, Amber Green, the closer your traffic light is to Green the better your page is optimised for SEO.

Wordpress also allows you to set tags and categories for your content, whilst more suitable for blogs, you can still add this data that will get picked up by search engines and help you rank better.

WordPress is quick… very quick loading and there are ways to make it load much quicker to ensure that your visitors don’t bounce, here is 22 ways to speed up your WordPress website – If it wasn’t quick enough already!

 

WordPress is highly recommended and as Birmingham WordPress experts, ALT can guide you through every step of the process should you be looking to use WordPress as your Content Management System.

If you are interested in learning more about WordPress, the benefits of it and it it’s the right Content Management System for your website then please give ALT Agency a call on 0121 663 0202.