Why is WordPress So Beloved? A Guide

WordPress is the single most popular website-creating tool on the market. No, really. It has a market share of 43% of all websites on the internet. Its nearest competitors are Joomla at 2.6 %, Drupal at 1.7%, Squarespace at 1.5%, and Wix at 1.3%. 

Not only that but of the top 10,000 websites in the world – those that receive the most traffic WordPress holds a whopping 38.03% market share. 

That’s a virtual monopoly and it’s a monopoly that isn’t going away soon. 

At every level, WordPress is the most popular website developing tool on the internet bar none. So, let’s take a little look into why WordPress is in the position it is, and why it is that we continue to choose it over the other alternatives.

What is WordPress?

In simplest terms, WordPress is a web content management system that evolved out of a need for people to develop blogs and other website content.

It eventually evolved into a toolkit for developing fully fledged websites, managing and organising mailing lists, constructing Internet forums, media galleries, membership sites, online management systems and even developing into online stores. 

It does this in two ways, by being essentially open source with users able to write in and code their own looks, links and applications, and by being open to the sharing of user-developed content between each other via the use of plugins. 

In other words, WordPress is a toolkit that inherently grows with its community and empowers that community to do bigger and better things with the same tools.

Think of it like a video game. You can buy a game, and play it a whole bunch, but you might think hey, there’s a feature I’d love to see in this game that just isn’t there. But then you see that there is a whole community of people – all fans of your game – who have tirelessly developed additional content for the game you love, including the very feature you wanted to have but didn’t have before! 

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Now, some people might take that feature, use it and enjoy their improved game and that’s that, but others will load in more features, and expand their games further and further. 

But what if your thing isn’t there? Or maybe it is there but it just needs a little tweaking to be just how you want it.

Well, you might have to learn how to make it yourself, but once you do, you can release it alongside everything else and now everyone all over the world can enjoy that game just a little bit more. 

Now, let’s add one more step. 

What if, instead of going online and searching for that fan-created content, the game actively supported that content and actively promoted that community – sort of like Steam Workshop if you’ve ever played with that? 

This relationship is exactly the same with WordPress, and by being so open to community content it fundamentally promotes a community of users who constantly find ways to make it better and better. 

At the end of 2021, WordPress had 59,756 plugins available and that number has only increased since.

What can you do with WordPress?

In a word, everything. Given the sheer volume of WordPress-developed web pages out there on the internet, chances are you’ve visited dozens if not hundreds of websites developed via WordPress. Having begun from a small corner of the internet and slowly expanded, it’s had no trouble retaining all of its core features since conception – it is still just as good at creating and managing blogs as it was when it started. 

But that doesn’t always mean it’s easy. 

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Although WordPress can do just about anything via both user-friendly and complex coding options, the fact is that if you want a website to look exactly the way you want it, or function in the exact manner you need it to, then you might need to do a bit of coding yourself. Or, you could be like me and just have no aesthetic taste whatsoever and so focus way too much on the function and neglect the elements of joy and visual appeal that a good website can bring to the table.

For that, I suggest you might want to look into WordPress web developers who are skilled at not only developing websites, but also at finding or creating custom content that is catered to your website’s specific goals. Trust me, after trying to create a website by myself, I was able to do it, easily in fact. Still, I just couldn’t land the level of visual or interactive appeal that the most popular websites have to offer. 

But, having seen what other websites have managed to do, I’ve been inspired to learn more, develop more and, that’s probably the best thing about WordPress.

It’s welcoming to newcomers and great at stroking our passions to create more of our own content and share it with each other. And for once, there’s no overarching corporate overlord dictating what you can and can’t do or changing it on a dime. Your website is yours, your plugins are yours and your content is yours. 

And honestly, I think that’s probably the biggest reason that WordPress remains to be the most popular community-driven website-building toolkit on the internet. And why it powers even the page you’re reading right now.

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