What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source website management and building tool. Open source means that it wasn’t just made by one / a set of developers, it can be added to by anyone who has a good idea and knows how to build it. That’s partly what’s great about WordPress, because it’s constantly evolving with new and better features. There’s also a wealth of plugins to choose from to make your website look better or be more functional - as of October 15’, there are 40,000+ plugins with 1,000,000,000+ total downloads.

The most popular plugins help with SEO, analytics, selling (ecommerce) and page speed, with new and better plugins being developed daily. This makes WordPress a great place to build a website, your website will be great today and great throughout the future, and it doesn't cost any extra on top of hosting costs!

Wordpress is a brilliant tool for building a website, but it can be slightly confusing if you're not familiar with the process of building a website yourself. You can find yourself somewhat overwhelmed with the options and tools, it's certainly a lot more confusing than a drag and drop website builder, due to the fact that it's WYSIWYG based (what you see is what you get). Your changes can't necessarily be seen in real time, making it slower to work / progress with.

Unlike other types of website building software, the templates with WordPress are mostly paid, certainly if you want a good looking, original design. If you opt for a free template, it can be quite obvious that you have held back on expenses whilst building the site, painting it in a worse light, especially if you stick with the default option.

If you are computing inclined, you can edit the HTML of the website you are building, which allows for super customisability (that is if you know what you are doing!). WordPress is special in this aspect because on a few other website building services it isn't possible to play with the root code of the website, which is sometimes a vital feature for the more serious webmasters.

It's likely that you've used a WordPress site before, as 19% of the world's websites are built and depend on WordPress. (That's 75 million!) Now is the time to get involved!