50 Reasons To Choose A WordPress Website

If you are looking to start your own web site, or are frustrated with your existing web presence and want to take things to a whole new level, then here are 50 reasons you should choose WordPress.

1 – WordPress Blog is the most popular content management system (CMS) worldwide. It’s a proven software trusted by large companies, small businesses and millions of site owners. It powers around a quarter of all new web sites today and has been continually refined and improved for over eight years now. New versions of WordPress currently get over 10 million downloads each time a new version is released.

2 – WordPress is extremely easy to use and requires no coding experience or expert knowledge. If you have ever used Microsoft Word, then the WordPress interface will be familiar. In fact, WordPress itself refers to the ease of use of its application as giving you “the power of Microsoft Word with the intuitiveness of an iPhone.”

3 – WordPress was designed for publishing content online. It is not just a website application, it’s also a powerful content-publishing platform.

4 – WordPress has features that automate the process of sharing content online and attracting readers and visitors to your site. Some of these features include the ability to automatically notify social networks whenever new content is published on your site, optimizing your site for best search engine results, and giving your visitors the ability to subscribe to your content via RSS feeds or email.

5 – WordPress is standards-compliant and provides you with a fast, light and free content management system that has sensible default settings and features and an extremely customizable core.

6 – WordPress typically releases a new version with security updates, bug fixes and improvements made to the previous version every 3-4 months. It’s a robust and fully-supported application that is continually being improved.

7 – It is backed and supported by a vibrant community of thousands of users and hundreds of web developers who continually work on improving and refining the software. This means that most bugs, errors, challenges or vulnerabilities get picked up quickly whenever new versions are released and are then addressed in the next version.

8 – WordPress Website can handle your entire workflow, from initial draft to publishing. It has a built-in features that allow you to collaborate with others and review your content, spelling, grammar, etc. without the need to send e-mails back-and-forth or use expensive desktop software.

9 – WordPress has a drag-and-drop media file uploader that lets you effortlessly integrate rich media, images, videos, music, audio and documents into your content, and a media browser to help you store, organize and find your files.

10 – WordPress provides a “distraction-free” writing platform, allowing you to focus on your ideas and concentrate on creating your content without getting sidetracked by distracting features like texts, tweets and status updates.

11 – WordPress automatically saves your work as you type, so you won’t lose any of your content if your computer crashes or you make a mistake. It also allows you to restore previous versions of your work with a single click.

12 – With WordPress, you can schedule your content to be published on any date and time you specify, giving you full control over your publishing timeline.

13 – WordPress lets you publish anywhere and everywhere with mobile applications for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Phone 7, WebOS. and even by e-mail.

14 – WordPress provides several levels of password protection for your site and content. You can protect individual posts or just parts of your content from public viewing, or even make your content completely private and accessible only to individual authors, members, or registered users with assigned roles or privileges.

15 – WordPress lets you split long content into multi-paged posts for easier reading.

16 – WordPress lets you save your content as a draft. This means you can save any unfinished articles or posts you are working on without publishing them (i.e. making them publicly visible), then come back and improve or rework your saved drafts later and only publish them when you’re happy to make your content public and visible online.

17 – It allows you to preview your posts “live” just as they will appear when published, without requiring you to publish your content first. This means you can get your content looking exactly the way you want it to look to your readers before publishing your articles, pages or posts live.

18 – The WordPress content publishing platform is designed to make your site conform to your content, not the other way around. This is achieved using a powerful feature called “Theme” – a full theme system which allows you to quickly and easily change the entire design of your site with a single click of the mouse without affecting your content. With the Themes, you can literally change the look and feel of your entire site instantly and as often as you like.

19 – WordPress allows you to organize your content by day, month, year, author, tag, or category. It creates browesable archives dynamically to display your past content and provides a number of features to help keep everything looking up to date. Regardless of how much content you have on your site, you can keep it organized and easy for your site visitors to find.

20 – WordPress has a powerful built-in search function that allows your site visitors to quickly find the relevant content they’re looking for. It is also flexible when it comes to giving site owners search functionality. You can use the  built-in search box, or choose to use an external search engine like Google instead.

21 – WordPress has a built-in feature that automatically converts your new posts and pages URLs into “human-friendly” and “search engine-friendly” URLs that describe what your content is about.

22 – WordPress automatically typesets every letter you write, working seamlessly in the background while you work on your content to provide your posts and pages with seamless typography. It uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert web-unfriendly characters like quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands into typographically correct HTML entities.

23 – WordPress has been translated into more than 70 different languages. You can create a site that is localized for a specific international audience and delivered in a language of your choice.

24 – WordPress uses powerful “drag and drop” features to help you administer and fully customize just about every aspect of your site – from site menus to site layout and dynamic functionality on individual pages.

25 – WordPress lets you assign multiple users on your site and define different roles and privileges for each of your users. You can also configure your site to let users register themselves and either publish content on your site, or require content to be submitted for review and approval by the site administrator or other users before publishing.

26 – WordPress Website provides extensive functionality by default and can be used right out-of-the-box. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. With a little customisation, however, you can truly unlock the power of WordPress and create a unique online vehicle adapted to your specific needs.

27 – WordPress source code is open and transparent. The code is free. This means that anyone can take the code apart, use it to build new applications and improve any existing feature in the software. Add to this the fact that the software is built by a dedicated community of professional developers, academics, and enthusiasts, and you have a powerful online publishing platform with a rapid development cycle, frequent updates, software that is always up-to-date, no licensing fees or direct costs, and ongoing support from an international community of professional developers.

28 – Unlike many other publishing platforms, WordPress does not lock you into using proprietary data formats. WordPress believes that you should do what you want with your data, and relies on open standards that enable you to take your data with you. WordPress even makes available tools that allow you to seamlessly import data from other popular platforms like Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, b2, Nucleus and pMachine.

29 – WordPress offers users a fully hosted option, as well as the option to run the software on your own domain. If you are planning to run a commercial website or blog, we recommend hosting WordPress on your own domain, as this gives you the most amount of freedom and flexibility. WordPress was designed to be installed on your own web server, in the cloud, or in a shared hosting account. You can even install the software on your personal computer, or on a corporate intranet. Wherever you choose to install it, you have complete control and are able to access and modify everything related to your site.

30 – WordPress offers multi-site technology. This technology allows you to control one or thousands of WordPress sites from one administration panel, and is currently used to power over 20 million sites on WordPress.com and global sites like CNN and the New York Times, as well individual sites in networks, organizations and universities. Multi-site technology allows each individual user to have full administrative control over their own site without any security concerns. Each site can also have its own design (theme), individual functionality (using plug-ins), and manage its own users. Super administrators can implement network-wide policies and deploy security, plugin and theme updates at the click of a button from one central location.

31 – WordPress updates content displayed to visitors on your site fast. It uses dynamic page generation technology to generate page requests by viewers on your site directly from your database and templates. This uses minimal server storage space and makes updating your site, or your site design extremely fast.

32 – WordPress uses templates to generate your site’s pages dynamically. You can fully control how your content is presented, therefore, simply by editing your site’s templates (or hiring someone with basic knowledge of PHP to do this for you!)

33 – With WordPress, you don’t have to mess at all with design templates if you don’t want to. You can just browse thousands of ready-made premium quality themes from professional design companies that already have the look and feel you have envisioned for your website (most premium themes offer built-in features that allow you to further customize the theme) and purchase the theme for just a few dollars (most premium themes can be purchased for anywhere between $10 – $100).

34 – WordPress software is stable, secure and robust. Because of such a wide user-base numbering in the millions and a dedicated open-source community, vulnerabilities are quickly discovered and patches are developed and often released by a dedicated security team within hours of being reported. There’s an integrated core-update system, which means that patches are deployed at the click of a mouse button. Additionally, WordPress sanitizes all user input, restricts URL access, has an extensive user permission system and never stores passwords in an unsecured format. Because WordPress offers a hosted option (at WordPress.com) it can use the site’s 20 million users as beta testers before releasing a new version, so when new versions are released, users can be confident that the new version is quite stable.

35 – WordPress is highly flexible and adaptable. The core application relies on its own extensive APIs (Application Program Interface). This allows developers to quickly and effectively modify and customize the application to suit their unique needs, and helps WordPress integrate seamlessly with other existing systems.

36 – WordPress is “enterprise-ready.” WordPress has already been adapted to perform in various enterprise environments. It provides support for a number of enterprise-centric features such as Active Directory authentication, user management, work-flow integration, scheduled backups, and more!

37 – WordPress allows you to connect to other systems. WordPress uses XML-RPC, which is an open XML standard that allows different systems in different environments to talk to one another. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while also allowing complex tasks to be performed. It supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and the MovableType API. You can also use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.

38 – WordPress makes installing, upgrading and maintaining the software simple and easy. You get notification whenever there are new updates to the software, plugins and themes, and these can be performed with a click of the mouse.

39 – WordPress lets you specify which HTML tags users are allowed to add when posting content on your site. WordPress also provides you with a built-in default list of safe HTML tags users can add in their comments and posts, so that the safety of your data or server is not compromised by malicious users.

40 – WordPress code is fully compliant with the standards of the W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. Being standards-compliant is important not only for interoperability with current internet browsers but it also ensures forward compatibility with future tools and technologies.

41 – WordPress is so much more than just a blogging tool. The most widely distributed content management system (CMS) technology in the world today, and is used to power millions of commercially-driven websites. With WordPress, the distinction between a “blog” and a “website” is becoming increasingly blurred, especially since most of the time WordPress isn’t even used as a blog. In fact, chances are that many of the sites you are probably visiting right now are powered by WordPress.

42 – WordPress makes it easy for users to subscribe to your content using “rss feeds”. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and WordPress website fully supports protocols such as RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0 and ATOM specifications. Almost every page on your site has an associated feed that your readers can subscribe to (e.g. latest posts, categories, comments, etc.). WordPress also fully supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures, which allows you to mp3 files such as podcasts to your RSS feeds.

43 – WordPress helps you create maximum exposure for your sites online and in search engines automatically. WordPress comes with two ways of automatically connecting your site to other sites (and enabling other sites to do the same to your site), called PingBack and TrackBack. You can also configure your WordPress site to automatically notify dozens of blog directories as soon as new content is posted using the PingBack function.

44 – WordPress promotes interactivity and community-building on your site. You can interact with your site visitors through the use of built-in features like comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Visitors can leave comments on individual entries on your site, and you can then reply to their comments. You can also delete inappropriate comments, and enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.

45 – WordPress helps you manage and eliminate comment spam on your site. WordPress comes with default tools to help you fight spam. You can also control spam using plugins and by moderating your “comments” settings. For example, you can moderate all comments before they appear on your site, block comments with specific words in them, block comments posted from specific IP addresses, and block comments containing more than a number of specified links.

46 – WordPress can send out automatic notifications. For example, you’ll get a notification via email each time there is a new comment or a comment awaiting moderation.

47 – WordPress has a built-in user registration system that you can configure to allow people to register, maintain profiles and post comments on your site. You can decide whether registered users can leave authenticated comments on your site, and you can also choose to close comments for non-registered users. Additionally, there are plugins you can use that will hide posts from lower level users.

48 – WordPress development is guided by a set of unwavering principles. These principles include being able to work right out of the box, designing for the majority (but being mindful of the vocal minority), striving for simplicity, and keeping the code clean, lean and mean, among other things.

49 – WordPress currently provides users with access to more than 20,000 free, open-source plug-ins and themes. This library is growing every day. This means that your site can do virtually anything you can imagine or want from a website in terms of functionality, and look as unique as you want it to in terms of design.

50 – WordPress is 100% free to download and use. You can install WordPress on your own domain and do whatever you like with the WordPress code. You can extend or modify WordPress however you choose, and use it commercially without licensing fees or restrictions. WordPress is “free” not just in terms of price, but also in terms of the amount of control you have over using it. For example, you have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose, the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish, the freedom to redistribute the application, and the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

(article source: WordPress Codex)

With literally tens of thousands of free plugins that extend what WordPress does and free themes that completely change the way WordPress looks, all you need is WordPress, a domain name and web hosting. Most of the power of WordPress is available to you for little to no cost.

Doesn’t it make sense, therefore, to consider using WordPress to power your new web site, or switch your existing web site to WordPress and start growing your web presence using an online vehicle that is more powerful, more flexible, more scalable, less restrictive, cheaper to run, easier to use and fundamentally “smarter” than any other online publishing platform or content management system available?