WordPress for Business Websites
Are you intimidated by creating your website? If so, you’re not alone. Most new business owners who are tasked with setting up a website are overwhelmed by the world of web design. It’s easy to become paralyzed by the endless options available.
With so many choices to pick from, it can seem impossible to narrow down the platform you want to build your site on. At Pixel Jar, we make it simple: WordPress is the way to go. We’re so passionate about WordPress that we’ve made it our specialty. If you need a little convincing, let’s dive into why we recommend WordPress for business websites.
Seven Reasons Why We Recommend WordPress for Business Websites
1. It’s Open Source
When it comes to business, it’s all about the bottom line. As a business owner, you’re mindful of every expense, and your website can be a big one. Fortunately, you can save the sky-high costs of some platforms by choosing to build your site on WordPress because it’s open source software. Contrast that with many platforms that have a large upfront or ongoing monthly expense and you have to ask yourself: shouldn’t your digital marketing budget be spent on actual digital marketing and not on simply getting your business online? With such a significant barrier to entry removed, it’s easy to see why so many businesses choose WordPress.
2. It Looks Great
Having a professional looking website is non-negotiable in today’s business landscape. Regardless of your industry, your website needs to look sharp to stand out in a sea of competitors.
When it comes to choosing who to do business with, studies show that 75 percent of consumers judge a business by its site design. If your site doesn’t look trustworthy, you won’t stand a chance next to competitors with more polished sites.
WordPress.org offers more than 10,000 themes to choose from, with thousands more from third-party sites, most of which are customizable to suit your business’ unique needs.
If you’d rather keep it simple, stick to clean and minimalistic themes or sway to the other end of the pendulum with a completely customized theme that’s got all the bells and whistles that your site needs.
Your web designer will help you narrow down your options and create a site that looks as polished and professional as you are.
3. It’s User-Friendly
You don’t need to be a tech genius, know a coding language, or have a Computer Science degree to use WordPress. Even the most tech-challenged business owners can quickly learn to navigate WordPress. It has an intuitive, user-friendly back end.
There’s no demystifying required if you want to post new content, add images, or do just about anything else with your site. WordPress also features automatic upgrades to save you time and keep your website secure. Additionally, it lets you do things like edit images directly in your posts, eliminating the need for complicated processes. Best of all, because the WordPress community is so large, there’s an endless supply of resources and support to offer help if you need it.
4. It’s scalable
Sure, small startups love WordPress because of how easy it is to use, but there’s no need to scrap your site as your business grows. One of the greatest features of WordPress is its agility. It’s an excellent platform for everything from a basic blog to a multi-national corporation’s website.
One of the best examples of WordPress’s scalability is in the retail sector. A small boutique may create a simple site that outlines its mission, target audience, and list of brands that they carry, along with a Contact Us page and a newsletter signup box. It’s a bare-bones style that works well for many retail startups that aren’t yet selling their merchandise online. But what happens when that same business is ready to build an online store? WordPress can handle it.
Some of WordPress’s most widely-used plugins are for eCommerce, with popularity-contest-winners like WooCommerce and Shopify among them. They’re easy to use, responsive, and customizable, giving you all the tools needed to compete in the eCommerce sector. This is only one example of WordPress’s scalability, which extends to all industries.
5. It’s Performance Focused
WordPress sites are fast and responsive, two things that can make or break your business’s online reputation if they’re not optimized. Another deal breaker for your users? Not being mobile-friendly. Sites that are clunky or slow to load are likely to see a high bounce rate as your users click over to your competitors.
WordPress also shows off in the versatility department with more than 55,000 plugins, many of which are dedicated to enhancing user experience and security.
For example, Jetpack is a multi-purpose plugin that boasts support, backups, secure logins, spam filtering, analytics, increased site speed, and more. Other plugins, like Akismet, safeguard your site from contact form and comment spam. Both are free to install and use.
Without security or backup headaches to deal with, you can focus more on your site’s content and stress less about your back end.
6. It’s Shareable
Smart business owners are well aware of the importance of social media sharing for promoting their products or services. Whether it’s sharing a blog post, article, or product, WordPress makes this process easy with the use of social sharing widgets.
Adding social share buttons to your site is simple and allows your users to share across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and more.
With a WordPress site, you can also easily integrate a Google Maps widget or embed other people’s social posts within your site’s pages to create a richer user experience.
Easy social sharing leads to increased site traffic, a stronger social media presence for your brand, and, in turn, more sales.
7. It’s SEO Friendly
Without a lengthy lesson in search engine optimization (SEO) for WordPress, trust us when we say that the WordPress platform has one of the best SEO offerings on the web. This plugin, Yoast SEO, takes you step-by-step through the components required to boost your search engine ranking.
Yoast provides fields for you to enter your keywords and gives you tips on how to improve your site’s readability, therefore improving your ability to rank higher with Google and other search engines.
WordPress automatically generates SEO friendly URLs for your pages and makes it easy to fill in fields dedicated to the alt text, tags, categories, and other elements that help make your site easier to find. WordPress makes SEO intuitive, even for business users who are not necessarily tech-savvy.
Who Uses WordPress for Their Business Site?
We could have easily gone past seven reasons why we recommend WordPress for business, but let’s switch gears and look at some of the best WordPress success stories. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill blogs – these are the biggest, most famous (hello, Beyonce.com), and most powerful sites around today. These corporations have their pick of any platform on the web, and they’ve all chosen WordPress. Here’s a small sample of WordPress-powered websites:
- The New Yorker
- BBC America
- Sony Music
- Vogue
- Hallmark
- Variety
- Time
- Walt Disney
- TED
- Etsy
- Home Depot
- UPS
- Yelp
- Microsoft
- The Dallas Mavericks
WordPress for Business Praise
Today’s biggest online players have a lot to say about their choice to build their sites using WordPress.
Content marketing expert, Neil Patel, built his business advising companies on how to increase their SEO and sales through their websites. Above any other platform, Patel touts WordPress as the “world’s most popular system for managing content.” He goes on to say, “WordPress is awesome. First of all, it’s “open source.” That means the original source code is freely available and you can modify and redistribute it to your heart’s content. That makes WordPress a flexible and customizable website builder.”
If the heavy hitters listed above who use WordPress aren’t enough to convince you, here are some WordPress stats that are impossible to ignore:
- WordPress sites power more than 1/3 of the entire internet.
- Every second, 17 posts are published on WordPress sites worldwide.
- Each month, WordPress.com gets more unique visitors than Amazon, at 126 million/month vs. Amazon’s 96 million.
Let’s assume that it’s safe to say that you’re ready to get started with a WordPress site of your own! Get in touch with our team to give your new site all the benefits of WordPress. Your business deserves the perfect website, and our expertise not just around WordPress but also around driving the best possible business outcomes to help bring your goals to reality.