Why WordPress

First of all, out of the top CMSs on the market at the moment, WordPress is powering 59.7% of the CMS sites, followed by the next closest open-source CMS, Joomla at 6.7%, Drupal at 4.7%.   Also worth mentioning are the market share of some of the popular “non-self hosted” CMS platforms such as Shopify at 1.7%, SquareSpace 1.4%, and Wix 0.8% (source: opensourcecms.com).

Below are some of the reasons why WordPress is dominating the CMS market:

Open Source

WordPress is free for download and use for designing your website, businesses only need to purchase their own domain names and web hosting services to start building their very first site.  SquareSpace and Wix on the other hand, are not open source, and therefore, all the underlying codes are developed in house that users are not able to touch and fiddle with.  This is not a big issue for everyday users, but when it comes to selection of complimentary tools such as themes and plugins, you’re limited and controlled to the ones that the company provides.

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User Friendliness

WordPress is very easy to learn and use, it started off as a blogging platform with the aim to make it easy for bloggers to create blogs without a lot of web design knowledge.  With the growing popularity, it has developed into a more powerful web design and development platform that is much more than a static tool.  For small businesses that are required to constantly pump information out to the public via their website, but without a powerful web development team in house, WordPress is one of the easiest and most flexible tools for it.

WordPress themes are very well designed especially when it comes to the most popular ones on the market like Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc.  Their WYSIWYG interfaces are powerful, yet, intuitive.  Even if you don’t have any web development experience, you’re still able to create amazing websites.

Support

The learning curve for WordPress isn’t steep not only due to its user-friendly interface, but also thanks to the easily accessible support community.  It’s very easy to get help on the internet about WordPress and all the complimentary tools such as themes and plugins.

Flexibility

Site Migration

This is an important factor to consider especially for businesses that are rapidly expanding their online presence.  With traditional businesses, as they expand, they’ll hire more staff, have more products, and therefore, they’ll need more space.  This is the same case as websites, especially with sites that hosts lots of content.  The hosted platforms are expandable in that sense, it’s just that you’re almost restricted to subscribe for higher plans, and therefore, increase costs.  With WordPress, even for average end users, site migration to another hosting platform is quite a simple process given the tools that are available on the market that helps you deal with it.  Yes, cost would still increase, but this way, it allows businesses to have the flexibility to shop around for better hosting deals rather than being restricted to 1 company.

Customization – Advanced Level Users Only

As for any open source CMSs, for users that have an advanced level of web development knowledge, WordPress also allows them to edit the functionality of the themes and all the way down to functions within any plugins.  It’s not advisable to try to modify them as you would run a risk of breaking the site, but it’s still nice to have that flexibility while platforms like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace are limited in that area.

Availability of Extra Functionalities

As WordPress is a dominant force on the CMS market, that makes it attractive for companies and developers to develop tools and plugins that can complement WordPress and the more popular themes.  Therefore, it is much easier to find tools when you consider adding some extra functionalities onto your sites, and some of those plugins are offered for free or powerful freemium versions.