WordPress. What? Why?

So we use WordPress for most of our websites and web development. But Why?

Over the last few years we’ve being making the majority of our websites on the WordPress platform, including this website. We began using WordPress to build our websites for client for a number of reasons. I’m going to try and go into a little more details about WordPress and why we use it.

We’ve found that WordPress sites can be as simple or as complex as you like and will work for many different business types and website needs. There are many other similar platforms put we’ve found this is the one that suits our needs best.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a CMS (sorry I mean a Content Management System), but some people may be more familiar with it being blogging solution. In the early days of WordPress it was primarily a blogging tool but now it’s become much more than that. WordPress is now used as the starting platform for many different websites with many different purposes. It’s global usage is huge and so many sites use the WordPress platform.

Today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. ^[1]

The online community for WordPress is massive which is a huge benefit for anyone needing a website because if you get stuck with your site. I would put pretty sure that someone has had the same issue and there will be either a video, blog or forum that will you fix the problem. On top of this there is the thousands of plugins that are available for WordPress, free and paid. These plugins help you easily expand the possibilities of the basic WordPress platform. These vary from online event ticketing, SEO optimisation to quiz makers. You really can add anything to your website using the WordPress plugins.

And then you have the vast amount of themes available for WordPress. These can help you take you site from a basic text site to an amazing website within a few clicks. Although I would say to make your site look awesome you need photos and text to match, sometimes a theme can look great in a preview but not so good with you’re own content. These are great for anyone wanting to get their own site up and running quickly but here at Hullabaloo we have a set workflow for any WordPress. We only have one theme we use that we rely upon so we can quickly debug any of our websites because they all work in very similar way. This means we can jump into any of our sites and quickly find and fix any issues.

To summarise WordPress and what it is for us, a reliable, dependable and expandable platform for our clients online needs.

Why use WordPress?

Over the past 5 years we’ve created websites for selling trucks to interior designers and everything in between.

There are many reasons why to use WordPress for your next website but for us these are the key reason we chose to go down this route for our web development.

Firstly, WordPress is open source which means that this platform is licensed under the GPLv2 act which gives the freedom to use the code and edit the code. This means it’s free to use and use however you like, and this is one reasons there a large WordPress community.

The world’s most popular content management system has benefitted from the input of literally thousands of people, from its inception and through to present day, in such a way that simply isn’t possible with proprietary software. ^[2]

The flexibility and the documentation of core WordPress functions makes it ideal when creating specific functions for the sites we build. At the core of WordPress it already has a user management system and a create, read, update and delete (CRUD). From this point it gives us a great place to build and expand upon. The data management also makes it easy for our clients in the future add and edit their own content totally independent from us.

Since we’ve been using WordPress as our primary CMS we have learnt a lot, seen our fair share of white screens of death and fixed them for our clients. We’ve made custom plugins to learnt about speed optimisation for WordPress and this platform just works for us and our clients. There are other CMS systems and there is nothing wrong with them, but we have the experience with WordPress to deliver an awesome site for your business.

So why wouldn’t you use WordPress?

Now from reading the previous text in the blog you are probably thinking “but you said WordPress can do everything”. Well it certainly can do most things it’s just whether it truly is the best solution for your problem.

So WordPress is popular, but doesn’t that make it a target for security breaches? Well to be blunt, yes it does! But that’s only if you aren’t careful and don’t prepare for that.

For example, the login to your website is one of the most important aspects to your security, so before even looking at the WordPress settings you need to make sure you’re using strong passwords. (I know it goes without saying and I hope you already are using strong passwords for all your online accounts!)

But you can also make it harder to find the default login page. This will help reduce brute force attacks on your website. With the popularity of WordPress, all hackers (and when I say hackers I mean anyone trying to access your site with bad or even just mischievous intentions) know the login url that WordPress uses by default. If you simply change the login URL of your website it makes the login page harder to find and just adds another layer of security making it more difficult to login to your site. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it harder for bots (automated ‘robots’ designed to hack websites) to brute force attack your website. There are many other security plugins and settings like this that can help create a secure environment but it’s important to make sure you have the basics in place to prevent any hacks.

As mentioned earlier, we make our WordPress websites easy for our clients to manage totally independent from us, but this does have it’s issues. All this power does come with great responsibility. Clients can accidentally break a site when they add plugins etc. but we are always there to help and we try to limit access and minimise possible issues, but without restricting the clients ability to edit their content.

Can Hullabaloo help your business and their website?

Here at Hullabaloo we can create websites for pretty much any business, we have a wide range clients in many different markets. From small informational sites to huge Ecommerce websites, we can help from design right through to delivery. When we deliver a website it includes training so you know exactly how to use your brand new website.

We’re based in Loughborough, Leicestershire but we clients throughout the UK and we’re always just a phone call away when you need us.

If you’d like to know more, then you can get in touch with us here.

References

1. Colao, J. (2019). With 60 Million Websites, WordPress Rules The Web. So Where’s The Money?. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/09/05/the-internets-mother-tongue/#661aa36669f6 [Accessed 10 Jul. 2019].
2. Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting. (2019). WordPress and GPL – Everything You Need to Know. [online] Available at: https://kinsta.com/learn/wordpress-gpl/ [Accessed 10 Jul. 2019].