WordPress has been around since the early 2000s and had its humble beginnings as a free, open-source blogging tool. Since then, the platform has grown to become the single most widely used web platform in the world and much more than a blogging ecosystem. WordPress has stretched its reach well beyond bloggers and into small, medium, and enterprise businesses, where it’s deployed for numerous use cases.
Companies like TechCrunch, Bloomberg, BBC America, Sony, Disney, The New Yorker, and bands like The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, and Snoop Dogg all use WordPress as their platform of choice.
According to Kinsta, WordPress currently has a 40% market share of all global websites and a 64% market share in the CMS space. That accounts for everything from single usage small sites to corporate-owned platforms. In other words, WordPress is everywhere. If you point your browser to a random website, there’s a 40% chance it’s powered by WordPress.
WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org
There are 2 different WordPress platforms available, so it’s important to make the distinction between them. If you go to WordPress.com, you can sign up for a hosted instance of WordPress. There you can either make use of a free account or pay for a plan (starting at $4.00/month for a personal plan, going up to $45/month for an eCommerce plan).
One of the biggest differences between the free and paid plans is that the free plans use the wordpress.com domain. So if your business is named MyBiz, your WordPress address would be mybiz.wordpress.com. With the paid plans, you could have mybiz.com as your address.
On the other hand, WordPress.org is where you can download the WordPress source that you can then use to install an instance of WordPress on either your in-house data center or a third-party cloud. Although you could deploy WordPress without much help from a developer, if you really want to make the most out of the platform, you’d at least want a PHP developer on hand.
If you don’t have a PHP developer capable of a deep-dive into the customization of WordPress, you could always turn to nearshore or offshore hiring firms to find the perfect candidate.
To get the most out of custom WordPress programming, your developers should at least know the following languages:
- HTML
- CSS
- PHP
- JavaScript
WordPress Development Services
One of the most important questions you can ask is: What is WordPress capable of? The answer to that is plenty. With this open-source platform, you can deploy a site for things like:
- Blogging
- Content Management
- Artistic portfolios
- eCommerce
- Real estate listings
- Affiliate shops
- Small business management
- Forums
- Directories
- Booking
- Promote a cause
- Client invoicing
- Offer customer support
- Create classifieds pages
- Serve up a jobs board
- Multiple WordPress deployments under a single installation
- Use as an application framework
As you can see, the sky’s the limit with what WordPress can do for you.
To expand WordPress, you and your company would want to make use of the massive library of available plugins. As you search through the library, you’ll find a plugin for almost any features and service. If you want to do it with WordPress, chances are good someone has already created a plugin for it. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, your developers can create the exact plugin you need, thanks to WordPress’s open-source nature.
Many of the plugins found in the WordPress library are also open-source, which means your team can download the source, contribute to the project, or (in some cases) even fork the plugin to create one of your own.
And let’s talk about themes. Even though the default WordPress theme might not be what you’re looking for, there are countless pre-made themes available for the platform. You can choose from the many free themes, do a Google search for WordPress themes and find thousands of available options, or your in-house (or outsourced) team could build the perfect theme to precisely meet the needs of your company.
And with plugins like WooCommerce (a WordPress-specific eCommerce solution), you can ensure that both your regular site and your online shop perfectly match. That level of integration is important if you want your business to come off as professional.
One other thing to keep in mind is that WordPress also includes mobile apps for Android and iOS. You can connect these apps to your WordPress-powered website for easy blog posting, comment moderation, and stat viewing. Beyond that, you should make sure the theme you choose (or build) for your WordPress site is mobile-friendly, otherwise, you’ll find a large portion of your audience doesn’t get the best experience from the site. To that end, you should make sure your developers understand the fundamentals of developing for mobile devices.
Finally, with a little extra work, you can set a WordPress site up to handle multiple vendors. So if your company includes numerous clients that sell products or services under the umbrella of your brand, it’s possible to use WordPress for such a platform.
Conclusion
WordPress is not only one of the most widely-used website tools on the planet, it’s also incredibly user-friendly and extendable. There’s almost nothing you can’t do with this flexible platform. Whether you have PHP developers on staff or not, your business can make use of WordPress for content, products, services, or subscriptions.
