This post has come about after being sent an article by a friend who was questioning the benefits of using WordPress compared with other content management system (CMS) platforms. This is the article which was shared with me from Medium.com. This is one of many articles you can find online with similar context. My perspective on this article is that they are using it to advertise the other CMS platforms, not necessarily to put down WordPress; but by using this context it will encourage more people to read it.

I personally find that article quite amusing, they are saying they do not like WordPress because its a time-killer for various reasons, but the CMS’s they suggest are much more code-based. If you have a great developer or team or developers that terrific, but how many small businesses or startups have their own developers?! You can install and use WordPress in many cases with very limited or no coding experience what-so-ever. It can then be taken even further using various themes and plugins, limited only by your skills and imagination. There are thousands of themes and plugins available to help customise WordPress websites.

There are many, many CMS platforms out there, some are better or worse than WordPress for varying reasons, but at the end of the day it just depends what is most suitable for the project. I’ve personally also used SquareSpace, BigCommerce, DotNetNuke, Joomla and a few others that have since been discontinued. Each have their pros and cons. A number of factors impact why someone would chooses one CMS over another; ranging from complexity of setup, ease of use, structure of files, time to get the output desired, cost of the system, availability of resources, and much more.

Last but not least, WordPress is pretty much free as a basic CMS platform. Yes excluding your web hosting and domain name costs, various plugins and themes can also cost additional on-top; but you can most definitely get a fully functioning and good looking site for free easily too! CCIgniter.com is one of many sites which offer some free themes, you may even recognise one listed on there.  Many popular plugins are also available for free such as Yoast SEO or All-In-One-SEO for advanced search engine optimisation, Woocommerce for e-commerce functionality, iTheme Security for advanced site security, Image Smush for image compression, Updraft or Backup Buddy for backups; to name a few. Yes some of these have premium (paid) versions available, but the basic free version of many of these plugins may be plenty for your needs initially.

As a developer my strength lies in coding and not design. Having a huge assortment of free and paid themes, plus plugins that add endless functionality to a platform that can be further customised with some basic (or advanced) programming skills is what makes WordPress my top choice.