Seven reasons why WordPress is great for small businesses
There was a time when business owners couldn’t build a website, get it online, or make minor changes to it without the help of a web developer. Fortunately, those days are gone and one of the reasons for that is WordPress.
If you’re not familiar with WordPress, it’s a content management system (CMS) that makes it easy for anyone to create a site and manage every piece of content on it without needing to know, edit, or write a line of code. And that’s exactly what makes WordPress so popular.
It’s intuitive, powerful, and you can do just about anything you want with it – build a website, change how it looks, add and edit content. All without needing to have any special technical skills. This makes it a particularly useful tool for Self Starters who mainly do everything themselves.
Read on as we look at the seven key reasons why we believe WordPress is perfect for creating and managing a small business website.
1. WordPress is the most popular CMS on the web
According to w3techs.com, “WordPress is used by 64.2% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 43.1% of all websites.”
Not that popularity should be the main reason to choose it, but having almost a quarter of all websites on the web powered by WordPress is a strong testimonial to its capabilities.
It also means there’s a big community around WordPress, which makes it easier for you to find help if you need it when you want to add a new feature or change something on your website.
2. You can use WordPress for any type of website
One of the best things about this CMS is that you can use it to create just about any type of website. For example, if you’re a food or music critic, you can start with a simple blog to share your knowledge, expertise, and reviews, and build a readership.
If you’re a plumber, you can create a small business website with a few pages where you present your business and services. You can also add a booking form to encourage visitors to reach out to enquire about your services, prices, and availability.
What if you sell physical or digital products online? WordPress is widely used as a CMS for online shops too. So, whether you’re selling tea pots, ebooks, or online courses, you can use WordPress and its many plugins to create a fully functional ecommerce website that meets your needs.
3. It’s easy to set up, use, and learn
WordPress is incredibly easy to use, even if your technical skills are fairly basic. That’s what makes it a great option for small business owners who might not have the budget to hire a developer or IT support. With WordPress, you don’t need to learn HTML or touch a line of code (unless you want to) to create and manage your website.
You can choose a great-looking WordPress template from the vast collection available online. You can also customise the look and feel of your website with ease, add new pages, and edit any piece of content directly from your CMS. Want to take it one step further? There’s a vast collection of plugins you can install to customise your site even further, without needing to change any code yourself.
And if you get WordPress hosting from 123 Reg, you won’t need to worry about any of the technical aspects of installing WordPress or setting up your site. We manage everything for you, so you don’t have to. This includes installing WordPress, optimising speed, taking care of important updates and security work to help ensure your website runs as smoothly as possible.
We’ll also be on hand to support you if you need guidance on anything related to your WordPress website.
4. WordPress is made for search engine optimisation
As a small business owner, one of your top priorities after creating a website and getting it online is to ensure it’s found quickly by potential customers. WordPress can help you achieve this goal.
Why? Because this CMS is regarded as one of the most search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly solutions available. The default settings for WordPress tend to mean that your website will be structured in an SEO-friendly way, meaning you search engines should find it easier to locate your content.
You can learn more about WordPress and SEO in this guide.
If you need further help with SEO, a tool like the 123 Reg Search Engine Optimiser can help you identify the keywords you should be targeting and monitor your Google rankings for you.
5. You can assign different roles for different people
You might want to outsource some of your writing, promotion, order handling, or comment moderation tasks to a freelance professional or a new employee. With WordPress, you can assign specific access roles for people who work for you.
For example, while you always have total access to everything that’s on your site, you can choose to give other people limited access to publish content or moderate comments on your blog. Read this post to learn more about the different user roles you can assign for your website.
6. You won’t need to worry about spam comments
Want to prevent inappropriate or irrelevant comments from showing up on your published blog posts? Easy. With WordPress, you can choose how you moderate comments and which ones to approve. It’s a great way to build a community around your posts while keeping the spammers at bay.
7. It’s scalable so it can grow with your business
With WordPress, you can think big without having to worry about the technical aspects of it. Want to add a few extra pages or a dedicated page for a new product or service you’re launching? You can. How about a booking form that visitors can fill out to hire you on the spot? You just need to find the right plugin. Or maybe you’re thinking about adding a blog to attract more potential customers to your site? Well, WordPress was built for blogging.
With WordPress, it’s all possible. No matter how successful your small business becomes, you can rest assured you can update your website to reflect your growth and new business goals with little effort.
You should consider using a WordPress hosting company, like 123 Reg, that makes it easy to upgrade your package when you need to, so you’ll be able to access more hosting resources as your website grows.
Wrapping up
Long gone are the days when WordPress was just a simple tool to create a blog. Now it’s one of the most widely used content management systems for many online businesses, big and small. And that’s because it’s powerful, flexible, and easy to use no matter your technical skills, the type of website you want to build, or how successful it becomes.
So, if you weren’t very familiar with WordPress, hopefully this article helped you learn more about the many benefits of using it as a content management system for your small business website.
