WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. Of all the existing sites on CMSs known to Google and not online stores, 39% run on WordPress. Despite criticisms of the platform for its sluggishness and architectural imperfections, its popularity continues to grow globally. Let’s explore what makes it so attractive and what features it offers.
The History of WordPress from 2003 to Today
In 2003, American programmer Matt Mullenweg created the first version of WordPress based on the b2 CMS. The project was born out of the idea of creating a platform for his blog, but it quickly grew beyond a pet project and caught the attention of the then incredibly popular CNET. Matt worked at CNET for some time before founding his company Automatic and diving into the popularization and development of WordPress.
The CMS gradually gained more features:
- In 2004, plugin support was introduced;
- 2005 — themes;
- 2007 — autosave and spell check;
- 2009 — widgets, auto-updates, nested comments, API;
- 2010 — multisite, post settings, menus;
- 2011 — core overhaul, noticeable performance improvements, and radical changes to the interface, focusing on users without development experience.
From 2012, updates began to be released more frequently, each with dozens of new features that could be listed for a long time.
The support for plugins and extensions allows for nearly limitless customization of WordPress, although it’s still better not to use it for online stores — there are more suitable solutions for that.
According to w3techs, as of December 2020, 39.4% of all websites running on CMSs worldwide are powered by WordPress.
The Most Popular Open-Source CMS
Out of the box, WordPress is a fully functional blog with an extremely simple interface. As a result, digital beginners sometimes mistakenly believe that this platform is not suitable for large projects. However, major brands think otherwise, as evidenced by the fact that WordPress was used for projects by brands like Coca-Cola, Samsung, and Mercedes-Benz. The official websites of Sweden, LinkedIn, WSJ, Forbes, Toyota Brazil, Vogue, and hundreds of other resources known to most active internet users were also created using WordPress.
Interest in WordPress is evident from the steady growth in branded queries on Google and other search engines. There is data that version 4.6 was downloaded 3.8 million times. Version 5.6 was downloaded approximately the same number of times. The new version of WordPress 5.8 was released in July 2021. Now imagine how many websites have been running on the top CMS for a long time and simply updated in 2022 without downloading and reinstalling the platform.
Approximately 4% of websites in the top million of the Alexa Rank are built on WordPress, which indicates good prospects for the platform in SEO promotion of commercial websites. At least 15% of the resources developed on WordPress also rank at the top of Google search results for various queries. This is noteworthy considering that in recent years, the top positions in search results for commercial queries have been consistently occupied by marketplaces and other large projects developed from scratch without a CMS. So, corporate websites on WordPress have every chance of reaching the top if they are promoted by a competent specialist with relevant experience.
WordPress remains both a convenient platform for beginner developers and a flexible, customizable platform for commercial developers.
Overview of WordPress 6.5.4
From the very first public version, WordPress has adhered to the idea of accessibility and a user-friendly interface. Its logic is built so that installing and using the platform doesn’t require reading multi-page guides. Indeed, the menus, blocks, buttons, and widgets of WordPress are predictable and logical: they do what they say.
The WordPress visual editor allows you to create a website without writing a single line of code. For the average user, the architecture somewhat resembles a children’s construction set: there are blocks from which pages with any logic can be constructed.
To create the simplest template website on WordPress, you can do without programming, design, or layout. The default themes in the CMS are responsive, and if nothing is radically changed in them, the pages will be equally convenient on all devices.
Features that are not included in the basic version of the CMS can be added through plugins. There are more than a million plugins in the official catalog, and they can be installed directly from the interface — no extra steps required.
A complex infrastructure and a multi-million-strong community of developers and users have formed around WordPress. It is thanks to this active community that the system continues to develop actively, keeping pace with web development trends.
What WordPress 6.5.4 offers for website development:
- Built-in customization options — block templates, improved theme editor;
- Support for REST API for integration with third-party applications and simplified authorization through social network accounts or Google services;
- Compatibility with PHP 8, the latest jQuery, and other updates to the software stack;
- Updates to external libraries;
- Optimization that significantly increases page load speed;
- Improvements to the Gutenberg block editor, including a significant boost in its performance.
WordPress 6.5.4 Features and New Functionality
In July 2021, another WordPress update was released. Version 5.8, as expected, introduced new, convenient functionality:
- 3 new sections: templates, template parts, patterns (block patterns);
- If templates were previously written in code, they can now be created in the admin panel;
- All basic widgets work as blocks;
- The Gutenberg editor has been improved.
Learning to work with WordPress at the level of site administration doesn’t take long. It’s entirely possible to figure out how to add, edit, or delete something in just a few hours. Of course, you won’t become a developer in a day, no matter how hard you try, despite the system’s simplicity, but that’s usually not necessary for businesses.
Some functions can be implemented using the platform’s standard tools, while others must be written from scratch in the form of connected plugins and widgets. But even when complex customization of the out-of-the-box system is required, choosing an open-source system is often more economically feasible than developing from scratch.
SEO Features on WordPress
WordPress, as one of the most popular platforms for creating websites, offers many opportunities for SEO promotion. However, to make the most of WordPress’s potential for SEO, it’s important to consider its unique features and correctly configure key elements.
In this section, we’ll take a closer look at how content structure, permalink settings, and the use of specialized plugins can help your site rank at the top of search results.
- Permalinks and Their Impact on SEO
What are permalinks?Permalinks are the URLs of pages and posts that remain unchanged. The correct URL structure is important for SEO because it helps search engines better understand the content of the page and its hierarchy on the site.
Setup Recommendations: In WordPress, permalinks can be configured through the admin panel. It is recommended to use “human-readable” URLs containing keywords, such as:yourwebsite.com/blog/article-title.This not only improves SEO but also increases the click-through rate of links in search results.
SEO Effect: A logical URL structure helps search engines index pages and users better navigate the site, reducing bounce rates and improving behavioral metrics. - Content Structure and Its Importance for SEO
- Headings and subheadings: WordPress makes it easy to structure content with headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.). This is important for SEO because search engines analyze the structure of headings to determine the topic and hierarchy of the content on the page. Headings should contain keywords and logically divide the text into meaningful blocks.
- Image Optimization: WordPress makes it easy to add and optimize images. Using alt and title attributes for images helps improve the visibility of the site in search engines and in the image section. It’s important to monitor the size of images so that they don’t slow down page loading, which also affects SEO.
- Microdata: Adding microdata (schema.org) to a site helps search engines better understand the content of pages and improves how they appear in search results (e.g., as rich snippets). WordPress supports the implementation of microdata through plugins or custom code.
- Technical Aspects of SEO in WordPress
- Robots.txt file: WordPress automatically generates a robots.txt file that controls which pages of the site will be indexed by search engines. It’s important to configure it so as to exclude unnecessary pages (e.g., admin pages or shopping carts) from indexing.
- Sitemap: Generating a sitemap helps search engines quickly find and index all pages of a site. WordPress makes it easy to create an XML sitemap using plugins like Yoast SEO.
- Page Load Speed Optimization: Page load speed plays an important role in site ranking. In WordPress, loading can be accelerated through various methods, such as caching, image optimization, and using a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
SEO Plugins for WordPress
- Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress, offering a wide range of tools for site optimization. It includes features for setting up titles, meta descriptions, keywords, XML sitemaps, and much more.
Setup Recommendations:
- Focus keywords: Yoast allows you to choose focus keywords for each page or post and offers recommendations on how to improve their use.
- Meta descriptions and titles: The plugin simplifies the setup of SEO titles and meta descriptions, showing a preview of how they will appear in search results.
- Content analysis: Yoast analyzes the content of a page for readability and keyword density, offering suggestions for improvement.
- Rank Math
Rank Math is another powerful SEO plugin for WordPress, offering advanced optimization features such as integration with Google Search Console, detailed meta tag settings, indexing control, and much more.
Setup Recommendations:
- Multiple keywords: Unlike Yoast, Rank Math allows you to optimize a page for multiple keywords at once.
- SEO analysis: The plugin performs a detailed SEO analysis of the page and provides detailed recommendations for improvement.
- 404 error monitoring: Rank Math tracks pages that cause 404 errors and helps redirect them to the correct pages.
- All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is the oldest SEO plugin for WordPress, offering both basic and advanced functionality for site optimization.
Setup Recommendations:
- XML sitemaps: The plugin automatically generates XML sitemaps and submits them to search engines.
- Social media integration: Supports integration with social networks, improving content visibility when it’s shared.
- WooCommerce support: This plugin is also suitable for optimizing sites using WooCommerce, enhancing SEO for online stores.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Despite its popularity, WordPress is far from perfect. Interestingly, the constantly growing number of websites developed on this CMS is almost its biggest drawback. Every vulnerability discovered by hackers becomes a weak point in the security of millions of websites simultaneously until it’s patched in the next update.
WordPress out of the box is quite slow and bulky, so a good reserve of site capacity is required to deploy it. However, a number of optimization actions can significantly boost performance and speed up the platform, provided you know what to optimize and how.
The shortage of specialists can also be considered a weak point of the platform. The average salary of a WordPress developer in the US is $20–25, which is not much, so programmers quickly outgrow this specialization and develop in other directions. If you manage to find a good WordPress developer at an affordable price, it’s better to hold on to them, as they are a valuable asset these days.
The platform’s strengths are more impressive:
- Flexibility,
- The ability to implement almost any design and redesign the site without downtime,
- Unlimited scalability,
- Multifunctionality,
- Support for plugins and themes for basic customization without programming,
- Regular updates,
- Large community,
- Relatively low cost of SEO promotion,
- Stability.
Moreover, developing a project based on WordPress takes significantly less time than if you were to create a site on a framework or Bitrix.
Prospects for WordPress Sites
In Ukraine and worldwide, every third site created on a CMS is built on WordPress. WP supports as many, if not more, features than all popular content management systems, and creating a site is easy. Most importantly, this platform is stable, and sites on it rank well in search engines. What more could you want from a CMS for a commercial site?
Our team has been developing WordPress-based websites for many years, and the combined experience of the agency’s in-house specialists spans decades. We not only create but also optimize and redesign WordPress sites to make them more effective in search engine promotion and generate more leads for your business. Our manager will provide more details during a consultation. Leave a request on the site, and the manager will call you back and tell you more.
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