For years, WordPress has been the golden standard for web development platforms, up to the point of becoming almost synonymous with the industry: good WordPress web developers can bring pretty much any idea to life. Almost half of the internet is built on WordPress. The ease of use, built-in scalability and a wide array of plugins and apps that are compatible with WordPress make it the first and last platform that most web developers will ever need.
Accessibility
Despite competition from Squarespace, Wix, and other beginner web design platforms, WordPress is still the industry standard for accessible full-scale web development. Even beginner web developers will find WordPress easy to navigate and can make full use of the wide array of features and plugins it provides access to. It’s also an extremely forgiving platform, providing features like automatic updates, easy backups, and easy “rewinds” to cached versions of in-progress sites to ensure that things can only go so wrong. Guard rails like this make WordPress very accessible, and a great place to begin learning web development.
Training wheels are great, but free lessons are even better, and the WordPress community makes it easy for anyone to begin learning how to build websites. Anyone can hop on YouTube, watch a few videos on WordPress web development, learn the basics of HTML and CSS, and begin creating websites within a few days, or even hours. Like anything, it takes time, patience, and hard work to become proficient, but anyone can get started at any time.
On top of tutorials, WordPress community forums are very accessible, and are home to over a million users, many of whom are active and will answer questions (even tough ones) for free, and often pretty quickly! In addition to the WordPress home community, there is a sizable WordPress community on StackExchange, an external developer community of hundreds of thousands of users, who also happily answer questions of varying difficulty at no charge.
Next Steps
And it’s just as easy to get serious as it is to get started. WordPress is designed with scalability in mind. A WordPress site can start as just a page or two, and develop over time to include massive catalogues of products, enormous volumes of blog posts, news articles, forum posts, or all of the above. This is largely thanks to WordPress’s highly modular design: WordPress makes it easy to add, remove, or modify individual pages using built-in themes and templates, pre-programmed elements, original code, or new plugins.
Beyond making pages easy to build and modify, it’s easy to host a WordPress site. You can host your own site on a server you control, or choose from a seemingly never-ending list of hosts who support WordPress sites, including cloud-native providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. While most hosts can handle the traffic expected of a small business, if your site or company experiences rapid growth, migrating to one of these “hyperscalers” can ensure security, functionality, and speed even at enormous volumes of traffic, and being able to use your original WordPress site at scale means you don’t have to build a new site just to accommodate new growth.
Certain plugins and platforms make this process even easier. WordPress contains native SEO capabilities that make optimising your site for search engine performance extremely easy – something that becomes more and more important as your site grows. Plugins like Hubspot, Yoast, and Rankie make normally complex tasks like data collection, lead conversion, and manipulation of site metadata easy enough for any business owner to manage.
World Wide Open
But arguably the most crucial element of WordPress’s success has been its open-source foundation. As an open-source platform, any developer can develop plugins that are instantly compatible with most WordPress sites. This has enabled a massive expansion of the capabilities of WordPress, at almost no cost to the actual developers of WordPress themselves, and often at no additional cost to the user. With over 70,000 plugins, 55,000 are free, and nearly all are just as user-friendly and easy to use as WordPress itself – in fact, they’re usually easier since most plugins are basically just shortcutted that you can use to add functionality to your site without having to code it from scratch!
All of these factors combine to make WordPress the dominant force that it has become in modern-day web development. To this day, no platform offers the combination of functionality, ease of use, and scalability that have made WordPress the backbone of modern web development.
