WordPress is a open-source and free content management system (CMS) and is used for website creation. It’s written in PHP and uses a MySQL database and makes adding website content such as products in an online shop or blog posts easy for everyone. You don’t have to be able to program in order to change/add content to your WordPress website. It was developed in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little and was released under the GPLv2 license.

Why use WordPress?

Building a website has never been easier and WordPress is the most popular CMS system worldwide.

It’s open-source and free

Open-source means that the software is free and usable for any type of project you may have – commercial or personal. The fact that it’s open-source gives you the possibility to take a look into the CMS system and change every aspect of it. You can add custom functions to your WordPress site or edit/remove functions that are already there.

It’s for every kind of website

You may have heard in the past that WordPress is popular for bloggers and bloggers only. This is a big misconception about the CMS system, it’s great for every kind of website. It was developed as a blogging platform but since then there are many use cases for a WordPress website, such as: online shops, business pages, chatrooms, membership sites, portfolios, galleries, etc.

The list can go on with many other examples. There are many developers that publish tools for WordPress, so called plugins and this gives a great pool of extra functionality for every website.

It’s easy to use

As mentioned earlier, you don’t have to be a programmer in order to add content to your website. It’s easy to pick up, even when you haven’t worked with anything like that before. To get started all you have to do is to pick a template, install a plugin or two and start getting comfortable with the interface. After you get the hang of it, you can dive deeper and add more functionality.

The WordPress community

The popularity of WordPress also brings a huge community who uses the platform. People support people, if you’re facing issues, there is a huge amount of content and help out there and there are even events where you can sign up and network with WordPress enthusiasts and listen to very experienced people in this field.

Scalability

With more content comes more traffic and using WordPress for your website can help with maintaining a good service and serving people with the content they want to see. Let’s say you have an online shop and tons of registered users, without a CMS this can be hard to manage. Surely, you also have to choose the right hosting service to handle a big number of users, but WordPress also plays a role here.

Regular updates

Even knowing, that WordPress was developed in 2003, they are still rolling out many updates. From security updates to small releases and new versions of WordPress, the development and improvement is continuously. Using WordPress ensures access to updates any time to make your website more secure and powerful.

Conclusion

WordPress is a popular, open-source content management system (CMS) that is free to use for any project. It is versatile, suitable for various types of websites, and does not require programming skills to add or change content. The platform has a large supportive community, offers scalability for growing content and traffic, and provides regular updates for security and functionality enhancements.