What is WordPress?
If you’ve ever looked into building a site, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. You know it’s a popular platform that’s supposed to make getting online easy. But what exactly is WordPress? And how do you use it?
Take a minute and let us walk you through the basics of WordPress and what makes it the most popular website creation tool in the world today.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is one of the world’s most simple and popular content management systems, or CMS for short. This means you provide the content while the platform does all of the coding and organizing for you.If you’re looking for the right web builder to get your website started, WordPress is the way to go.
WordPress is an open source website creation project, which means there are hundreds of volunteers all around the world working to improve the platform every day. It also means it’s free to use without paying a licensing fee.
There’s an important difference between using WordPress.com and the self-hosted WordPress.org. We recommend using WordPress.org because although it requires you to use a domain and web hosting site, it means you’ll be in complete control over your content. You can use custom themes and plugins, your site will be ad-free and you can use custom analytic tools that work better than the ones that come with WordPress.com.
Getting Started
One of the major benefits of using WordPress is its versatility. You can use it for your portfolio or for your Fortune 500 business – it’s that flexible. The key to this flexibility lies in the themes you can choose. Themes are free templates that give your site the certain look and feel you want to achieve, and there are thousands to choose from.
WordPress is also extremely user-friendly. It’s easy to change something on your site, and you won’t need to rely on a webmaster to make the changes on his or her time because you can do it yourself in seconds. Also, you don’t need to learn the programming language HTML css because the WordPress software script does that for you!
It only takes a few minutes to install the WordPress software script on your computer. Make sure that you have the newest version of WordPress installed. Once it’s installed, you can create your webpage quickly without needing to learn HTML – something that would have taken you months, if not years, to perfect.
After you pick a free theme, there are thousands of plugins you can choose from in order to further customize your site. There are premium themes available if none of the free versions suit your needs. Plugins are pieces of software you can install to add functionality to your site. Some of the best and most common plugins we recommend include Akismet, BackWPup and All in One SEO. Akismet ensures the comments you receive on your site aren’t actually harmful spam! BackWPup allows regular backups of your site so you don’t lose any precious content in case something goes wrong. All in One SEO helps optimize your blog posts or content for search engines. There are thousands of useful plugins available through WordPress, so feel free to browse and choose which functions will work best for your site. In addition to free plugins, there are premium plugins to choose from, too.
Because WordPress is open source, there are new advancements and improvements daily. This constantly evolving system was created by a community of members devoted to making the platform the best option bar none for people who want to start their own website. If you use the self-hosted WordPress.org, you will be responsible for the updates, but they only take one click. Easy enough!
