Front-end builders like Wix and Weebly make it easy to build an entire website. You don’t have to know coding or programming to get a site running quickly. But an easy build on the front end isn’t always a good thing. As the region’s experts in content, media and searchability, Duneland Media broke down the top three benefits of using WordPress – and they might make you rethink the alternatives.
But first, what is WordPress? WordPress is a website-building tool, referred to as a content management system (CMS). WordPress is free to use, though there are many packages available for purchase to gain advanced features. It’s also self-hosting, which means that you own the content and site itself. This isn’t the case with other website builders. If you stop paying for your subscription to a hosting platform, you lose the content and rights to your own site. These facts alone are already benefits of using WordPress, but there are even more to consider.
Benefit 1: Searchability
Your website looks beautiful. The content is strong. You’ve got all the right words and calls to action. Your business domain is claimed and updated. But if no one can find your website when they search for your service, product or business, what was all of your hard work for?
Your website ranking is the page your website shows up on in a search engine (like Google or Bing), and how far up or down that page it is. When it comes time for people to find your website, there are many factors that influence your ranking. Keywords, business details and location tagging are just a few pieces of the equation. But another aspect that is often forgotten about is the coding itself.
When individuals search for specific keywords, locations, services and businesses, Google and other search engines look at the content and codes, or program languages such as Python and HTML, on potential websites. This process is called “crawling” and takes place before search page results are displayed. While front-end website builders may look pretty, they often have issues in their coding that decrease their searchability. WordPress is a preferred platform for major search engines such as Google and Yahoo due in part to its coding and programming. While coding a website in WordPress may take a bit of time, it’s well worth it for your business and services to show up higher in the search results.
Benefit 2: Plugins
Plugins are additional tools and features that can be added to a website. Plugins make your site more interactive, user-friendly and valuable to your customers and site visitors. Because WordPress is open-sourced and not bound to specific deals and contracts, the plugins are endless. If you need to integrate a shopping feature to your site, you can choose exactly the shopping features, functionalities and payment methods you need. If you’d like to add a feature that enhances your SEO, Yoast and other SEO tools can easily be plugged into your site. You can even use plugins like Askimet, which all WordPress users have access to free of charge, to filter out scams and spam comments on your website. Ultimately, plugins make your website entirely customizable and more user-friendly. And search engines consider how user-friendly your site is when giving your ranking, too!
Benefit 3: Design
People love front-end builders like Wix and Weebly because they can create beautiful websites from standardized templates. But because these tools use very structured templates, there are limited opportunities to design truly customized websites. This means you can’t showcase your brand and services. Using the templates can also be a bit clunky. If you’d like to move an image from one column to another, you may have to redo the entire page.
With WordPress, you can choose from themes, which are more customizable and adjustable than other builders’ templates. You can also design from scratch, which is what we at Duneland Media love to do. Designing from scratch means putting your images, text, links and logos exactly where you want them. That gives you more control over the brand and image you display to customers, which helps your business in the long run. If you aren’t a website programmer or coder, there are features in WordPress like Elementor that make it easy to update and edit your pages over time.
Is WordPress Right For Your Site?
If you aren’t familiar with coding or programming, you might find front-end builders appealing. But for years, we at Duneland Media have seen how WordPress outperforms front-end builders in almost every capacity. Using WordPress will ultimately increase your business’s searchability, showcase your business to your customers and provide all of the tools you need. And if you’re not comfortable programming or coding, our team is happy to help! We can build your website and give you the tools you need to update it and keep it running or manage it for you long-term.
