The Wonder of WordPress

At Picture & Word, WordPress is our CMS of choice and I’m going to tell you why.  First, here are some numbers.

  • WordPress powers 62% of all CMS websites, making it the most used CMS worldwide
  • WordPress powers 33.72% of the top 1 million websites
  • WordPress has over 54,000 plugins to aid content management.
Those are some seriously impressive figures, but popularity doesn’t necessarily mean that something is the right tool for the job, after all you wouldn’t buy a Toyota Corolla for off-roading just because it’s the world’s most successful car.  In fact for augmented reality and AI projects we generally wouldn’t use WordPress at all, but for 90% of our work we rely on it.  Why?

A Web Swiss Army Knife

WordPress is a CMS at heart, but can be persuaded to do pretty much anything.  To see it at it’s content-management finest take a look at The New Yorker or Vogue, however it also makes a really solid web shop.  You won’t be surprised to know that WordPress/WooCommerce is the world’s most popular e-commerce platform.  Even if you are building something quite unusual, WordPress provides a nice solid foundation to build it on while only using the parts you need. Just need the login system?  No problem, you can connect into it with zero hassle and code the rest yourself.

Customisability

Automattic, the developers of WordPress, have intentionally built the CMS to be customised and extended.  Hundreds of points exist which allow developers to attach extra functionality without needing to alter the core code.  This means that even after extensive customisation, WordPress will continue to update itself and install security patches and upgrades in the background, without anything breaking.

Support

Can’t quite figure something out?  WordPress has literally thousands of dedicated websites, forums, podcasts, Youtube channels, courses, books and anything else you can think of to help developers of all levels, from the newbie to the seasoned old hack. Then there’s all the debugging tools, performance plugins and hosting platforms that have grown up around supporting WordPress.

Security

The ubiquity of WordPress means that a WordPress site is always under attack somewhere.  Two decades of hackers looking for vulnerabilities and the WordPress team closing them off means that WordPress is now highly secure and very hard to break into.

In Summary

WordPress is so much more than a CMS. When I start cooking a meal, nine times out of ten I start by frying some chopped onion.  When we start a new web project, nine times out of ten we start by installing WordPress.  Unless we’re cooking a metaphorical dessert. 

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