I have been working with WordPress for more than 6 years now, and I am completely in love with it because of the flexibility it offers for customization. Believe me, if you have a good knowledge, you can customize WordPress to the way you want. No Restrictions at all. However, for basic set up of WordPress site doesn’t require much knowledge.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source CMS (Content Management System) that you can use to create blogs and websites. This is heavily used for creating blogs mainly because setting up a blog using it takes not more than 5 minutes. Further customization may take more time though.
WordPress is written in PHP. To use WordPress, Linux web hosting with MySQL as database is the ideal environment. Moreover, it can work on Windows web hosting server too, but Linux is the best supported.
The best thing about WordPress CMS is that it is free which you can download from its official website www.wordpress.org. Another great thing about it is the plugin support; there are countless free and paid plugins available online that help you extend its functionality in many ways. Similarly, there are lots of free and paid themes available to use on your WordPress site to make it look the way you want. If you are someone who has a good grip on HTML, CSS, and little bit PHP, you can even customize a theme’s look the way you need.
I think, now you have a better idea of what WordPress is all about. Now let’s take a look at its history to know when and how it was developed.
History of WordPress
b2/cafelog was a blogging software which was left without developer/owner because the guy who developed it had left it because of some personal reasons.
Matt Mullenweg who was a college guy installed b2/cafelog for his personal use, but he found that the creator is not updating it. So, he created his own version by forking b2/cafelog with the help of his developer friend Mike Little.Christine Tremoulet – Who is Matt’s friend, named this website creation tool, WordPress in 2003 which is the same year when the very first version was released. It was 27th May 2003 to be exact when Matt announced the first version of WordPress.
On Wikipedia or WordPress Codex, you can see how WordPress has been updating consistently and launching new versions.
WordPress Statistics
Currently, around 28% websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. WordPress has 59.2% market share which is too higher from its closest competitor CMS, Joomla which has only 6.9% market share. So, you can imagine how popular WordPress is. To check out the Market Share trend of various Content Management Systems, you can click here.
Some Amazing facts about WordPress
- The most amazing fact is despite having so much options, flexibility, and consistent updates, it is completely Freewhich you can download from wordpress.org and host it on your web hosting server.
- More than 45,000 Free WordPress Plugins are available to use on your WordPress Powered sites. Plugins are the set of codes to form programs that intend to do specific jobs.
- WordPress is available in around 70 languages.
- Over 60 Million people have chosen WordPress to create their blogs and websites.
- WordPress is older than the social giants Facebook and Twitter.
Why is WordPress so popular?
WordPress offers so much for free, and even they keep upgrading the versions with new features and security patches.
It offers flexibility that allows you to create any kind of websites using it. A huge number of free/premium plugins and themes are available that can be used to make the site look and work the way you want.
Multiple language support makes it reach to even those people who are not using English. Above all, it is very easy to setup and use. What else we need from a free software?
Creating from a simple to the complex website is easily possible with WordPress.
Gravatar support is an awesome thing too as you just have to sign up to Gravatar and add your image there. And, your image will be fetched automatically on every WordPress site when you enter your email address either while creating an account or posting a comment.
Free support from WordPress forums where you can ask the issues related to WordPress, and get replies from experts.
These are the reasons which make WordPress the most popular CMS. I have many sites online for various purposes, and I use it everywhere as I find it quite easy to setup and handle.
Why should you use it?
Needless to mention that WordPress is one stop solution to all your needs if you want a blog, a business website or even an e-commerce store online. WordPress fits the best for all. All you need is to know how to customize the site. For creating a blog, there is not much customization needed but if you want to create an online store you would need to customize it to the core or some plugins may help you do the job easily.
Thus, there is no reason for not using WordPress if you are thinking to get a website online.
As I said earlier, I have been using WordPress on multiple websites of mine, and I am quite happy because I don’t need to spend a dime for getting my sites ready. Point to note that, we need to pay for domain registration and to get web hosting. It is just that you don’t need to spend anything for designing or developing the site.
Also, WordPress is quite SEO friendly, and plugins like Yoast SEO can help further optimize the content pages more for search engines. So, basically, there is less effort you have to put for optimizing your site’s pages and posts when you use WordPress.
If you go to a web design & development company, they charge you for creating a custom website which is good in many cases, but if WordPress can do that task with a little customization, then why to pay?
Moreover, WordPress is heavily used for creating blogs, but you can create all kind of websites using it. Sometimes you need a WP expert to get things done.
Frequently, the guys at WordPress keep upgrading the system that offers you experience new features. As I mentioned that I have been using WP for more than 6 years now, I witnessed a lot of additional features and upgrades in the WordPress CMS. The best thing is most of the new stuff are great and makes our lives easier.
How to Create a Site Using WordPress CMS?
You have to register a domain name of your choice and get Linux Web hosting with MySQL support. Once you have these, download WordPress CMS from wordpress.org. Once downloaded, extract the downloaded compressed file. Now, upload the files to your Hosting server and create a database. I will be sharing the detailed guide on these soon on this blog in which I will share how to setup WordPress using cPanel and FTP.
In this blog post, I have just tried to aware you more about WordPress and its capabilities.
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