There are a lot of questions to think of when you want to start a blog. What platform you build your blog on is a big deal. After all, what platform you start with is probably the one you’ll keep using. That’s because switching over means learning an entirely new way of doing things and getting used to a wide range of new apps. Today, we’ll explore the top seven reasons why you should start your blog using WordPress.
That’s a lot of work. Add in that we’re pretty conservative, and most of us prefer sticking with what we know, and you can start to see that your choice today is probably your choice for life.
So, we shouldn’t choose lightly without considering which platform we’d like to use. We should weigh up the pros and cons and decide based on that. If you do that, you’re most likely to come down on the side of WordPress. Here’s why.
7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Blog with WordPress?
It’s free and open source
The first significant advance is that you don’t have to pay to use WordPress. It’s an open-source platform that can be downloaded from the builders at wordpress.org.
Of course, not all of the plugins (or extensions that you use to specialize your website) are free, but as you can choose which ones you wish to install, that’s not a drawback.
It’s easy to use yet flexible
WordPress is something that you can use almost immediately out of the box. After making a few selections, your website can be up and running. That’s a big difference from other platforms, where it can take several hours to do the same.
At the same time, just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean you can’t do much with it. Quite the opposite. You can easily enhance the primary platform with a number of other features and factors using the many pieces of additional software (or plugins) that have been developed for the platform.
This gives the platform tremendous scalability and potentially makes it incredibly robust.
There is an ocean of plugins out there
Because WordPress is the most popular platform, there are more plugins for this platform than any other. That means whatever you want to do with your website, be it creating an e-commerce website or building a straightforward blog. There are going to be apps out there to help you.
Here, one drawback does come in: when you’ve got so many options, you might suffer from what is known as the tyranny of choice. You don’t know what chance to go with and therefore might not go with any.
Fortunately, tons of websites will review the best options for you to make the vast range of apps a little less intimidating. If you read a few of those, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where to begin.
Skills can be carried across to other sites
As WordPress is the most common platform out there, if you learn how to build a blog with this website, you will find it a lot easier to work on other websites in the future. This goes in the other direction as well.
If you bring on board experienced writers and other people to help you create and manage content, then that will be easier with WordPress as the chance they’ve worked with it will be much higher. That makes bringing in new people a cinch.
It works well with Google and it’s a big reason why start a WordPress blog
WordPress and Google get along very well. And that matters if you’re trying to draw people to your website organically and don’t want to spend all your time on social media.
The essential compatibility between Google and WordPress is further enhanced, but a range of different plugins will help you make your blog content even more, Google-friendly. First and foremost among these is probably Yoast, which gives you a handy checklist of things to do if you want to make your site appear in the Google ranking.
Yes, it’s free.
It’s secure (enough) and keeps receiving security upgrades
WordPress has a high standard of security. It isn’t all good news, though. For a while, WordPress has worked hard to protect itself, and there are a number of plugins to help in that regard. As it’s the most powerful platform out there, it gets attacked a lot. Hackers are constantly trying to find loopholes to crack open websites.
And as there are many moving parts, it’s hard to feel entirely safe. Fortunately, there are a number of things to do that will reduce the risk and the damage. Many platforms out there will back up your site for you so that even if you are hacked, you can quickly restore your website.
And one person’s problem is another person’s opportunity. In this case, the opportunity has been realized by a bunch of security companies who have made high-quality plugins to help protect your site.
There is a massive community working on the platform that can help you to start your WordPress blog
And then there is the community. It is, to sum it up in one word, huge. That means there is a lot of support to help you with whatever problem you might be facing. That’s a lot of help!
But that’s hardly the only advantage of a big, active community. They’re also making this open-source product better and better. That means WordPress is drawing further away from the rest of the pack.
That means that your choice for a platform that’s only going to get better as time goes on and where the advantages of using it are only going to get bigger. It’s like seeing a social media network effect in action. The more it gets used, the better it gets, and the more it gets used.
So why would you go with anything else?
Leona Henryson
Author Bio: Leona Henryson is a seasoned blogger and UX designer. When she is not writing or designing, she is swimming, hiking, and, weather permitting, snowboarding.