5 Reasons WordPress is the Most Popular Website CMS in the World | EP 136

5 Reasons WordPress is the Most Popular Website CMS in the World

David:
0:23  Everybody welcome to another episode of WP the Podcast. I’m David Blackmon.

Tim:
0:28  And I’m Tim Strifler.

David:
0:29  Hey Tim! What’s happening?

Tim:
0:31  Not much David. It’s a beautiful rainy day here in Texas.

David:
0:36  Yeah I know! I’m in Texas, my friend. As I was driving to Texas and listening to our podcast and stuff, I decided that the last few intros that I’ve done have been kind of “meh”, as the teenagers would say these days. My son says that all the time. I’ll ask “How’s school today?” “Meh.”
I thought man we got to like pep this up. I don’t want to put our listeners to sleep and stuff, so I don’t really know what we can do different. If we sound bored sometimes, I apologize. Especially in the last month, Tim and I have both been sick at times. Our enthusiasm is still there, even though it doesn’t sound like it at times.

Tim:
1:22  Yeah and on that note. So, you listeners out there, if you are listening to our podcast, and there’s something that annoys you or have some feedback on something that we could be doing differently. Obviously topic ideas too are welcome. This is our first daily podcast and we welcome feedback.

David:
1:40  Yeah we would love the feedback because we’re newbies. Tim’s right. I mean even though we’re 136 episodes in as of this recording today and we’ve done Divi Chat for a little over a year, I still consider us newbies. We welcome any feedback. Pro podcasters out there, if you’ve got some tips, let us know. We’d love to hear from you. 

Today we’re going to talk about five reasons WordPress is the most popular website CMS in the world. I think my good friend Tim is going to start us off today.

Tim:
2:13  Yeah definitely. So we mention this stat quite a bit, but WordPress powers I think 28% of the internet now.

David:
2:23  Yeah it’s 28%.

Tim:
2:24  28% that means 28% of all websites are using the open-source WordPress software and that is just huge. Everyone kind of talks about that stat quite a bit, but not a lot of people talk about the reasons why. It’s we wanted to hone in on some of the reasons why and what we think the helped propel WordPress to become the most popular website platform in the world.

The first reason on our list is the fact that it’s open source. I think that’s probably the biggest reason. That’s why we list it as number one. WordPress is open source, meaning that you can take it and you can do whatever you want with it. Obviously, you can put it on your own servers. It’s free to download. You can extend it. You can change it. You can go into the core files of WordPress and just make any changes you want. That of course is not recommended because it’s going to get overwritten when you update WordPress, but it’s open source and so you can see how it’s done. You can do what you want with it.

And then, it’s extendable as well. We’ll talk more about that in another point, but I think that’s probably the biggest reason why WordPress has become the number one CMS in the world. There’s not one person that’s profiting from WordPress. Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder,  has wordpress.com, which is his business built around WordPress (it uses the same name, which is very confusing). With WordPress the organization, there’s no one profiting and so that’s another reason why the fact that it is open source just has made it so big.

David:
3:49  Yeah. I mean when I, four and a half years ago, got into website development stuff and when I started doing research, it was one of the main reasons why I chose WordPress. It was free, there was an immense amount of support that was already out there, which kind of segways into our second point. Reason number two of why we think it’s the most popular CMS in the world is the community

When I started looking to build a friend a website because I felt like he needed to be blogging or putting content out, he was a children’s book author and nobody knew who he was. I recommended that he just build a website and start basically writing and blogging so that maybe he could generate some interest and people could start reading his work. He’s like “Well I don’t know how to build a website.” So I said, “Well, let me do some research real quick. I’m kind of a technical guy.” I found out that there was this massive community around this free open source software, WordPress.

5:06  There was just a ton of blog posts and content written around how to use this thing called WordPress to build a website and it wasn’t just a blogging platform and stuff. This led me to a Facebook group, which led me to Twitter and Slack groups and WordCamps and meetups. The community around this software is just absolutely amazing and these were people. That we’re trying to profit from this platform called WordPress and they weren’t like hoarding everything to themselves. They were sharing freely and openly and it was a  pretty amazing community. So, number two on our list is community.

Tim:
5:51  Yeah it really is and that’s something I definitely took for granted until I started taking advantage of it and actually getting involved with the community and giving back by going to WordCamps and so forth. It was something I didn’t really understand until it kind of hit me in the face and so if you’re not getting involved with the WordPress Community, we highly recommend that you do.

The next one on the list is WordPress is great for SEO and that’s another reason why it’s become the most popular CMS in the world. So out of the box, WordPress is built in an amazing way that makes it just so great for SEO. For example, with the permalink structure you have some options. The best is post name and that makes the URL keyword rich. And so that helps with SEO significantly.

Some other reasons why WordPress is so great for SEO. It has proper HTML markup, which is huge. A lot of CMS’s output in a really crappy not good HTML markup. WordPress —  puts out really great HTML. The title tags and the headings are great. The way that WordPress produces images that are optimized is really great and those are just the things that are out of the box. When you combine it with some of the free SEO plugins out there like Yoast, for example, or All-in-one SEO,  you can easily have a XML sitemap that is automatically generated and submitted to Google. You can have more control over your title tags and different things that makes it even more powerful and then even better for SEO. Just the fact that WordPress is very content driven and SEO is really all about content these days is just another reason why WordPress is great for SEO.

David:
7:27  Yeah and you know Tim mentioned a couple of plug ins there Yoast and an All-in-one. Our fourth point and fourth reason is there are thousands upon or even tens of thousands of third-party products out there that support WordPress. Take a SEO for example we’ll stay with Yoast and All-in-one SEO that Tim was kind of referring to at endpoint number 3.

I don’t have to be an SEO expert, I can download a plug-in from WordPress, install it on my website, and these plug-ins are going to perform tasks that normally a developer would need to perform. And that’s huge. So, if I’m scaling a business or my budget’s tight or I’m a a small mom-and-pop shop and I know the importance of having a website online and having a digital presence. I may not have the funds to hire a full-blown development team to put in everything that I’m going to need for my business into my website. With wordpress.org, there are thousands upon thousands of third party plugins and products that support WordPress that will add functionality and features into your website without hiring a developer to build it for you because it wouldn’t be cost-effective to do it that way. So, it’s just a massive market and stuff.

Tim:
8:52  Yeah and one other point to add to that is the fact that WordPress is open source. I think that is the reason why there are so many thousands of plugins. Plug-in developers, when they develop plug-ins for WordPress, by default that the plug-ins that they develop have to be open source under the same open GPL license structure. And that’s great because what that means is other developers can see how they did certain things and they can you know take certain things and add into their own plugins and so forth.

That’s you know the community aspect of open source development. It doesn’t stifle innovation like when people are holding onto their own ideas and not letting anyone know how they achieve certain things. When its open, it makes the innovation flourish and you see WordPress just  booming and propelling to become the number one CMS in the world. The fact that is open source and has thousands of plugins that kind of go hand-in-hand are definitely huge reasons.

David:
9:49  Yeah and I think I’m going to jump in here real quick Tim before you dive off into the last point. It goes back to the community. Obviously, being a software developer that may scare you. Holy crap it’s open source and other people can take my code and use it, modify it, and fork it (as we say in WordPress). But, there’s like a level of respect in WordPress where it’s not done that often. To have a platform that is definitely monetized in many many many ways. There’s just this level of respect in the WordPress community to not do that. I don’t know if I’m being clear enough, but it’s just not done. It’s pretty awesome.

Tim:
10:34  Totally. Oh yeah, absolutely. Just because technically you legally can take say one of the popular form plugins out there, fork it, put a different name on it, and that’s technically legal. It’s unethical and just don’t do that. What I mean though in terms of the fact that it’s open source is like say for example a form plug-in finds a way to do something within WordPress to change a setting in a certain way. Well, someone that has maybe a slider plug-in can say “Hey that was really cool… How they were able to do that? I could see that same method working over here in my slider plug-in.” Now their ideas are helping each other out and not in a way that they’re competing and stealing from each other, but basically their code is helping each other. The fact that it’s open and they can see it, helps feed that innovation.

David:
11:27  Thank you for cleaning that up, Tim.

Tim:
11:32  Thank you for jumping in because I realized the way I said it made it sound like anyone can just steal each other’s code and that’s that’s not what it’s about it. You shouldn’t do that. It’s frowned upon and the community will kind of basically blackball you if someone comes along and tries to steal code and profit from it. So getting to our last point here, which I think is a pretty big one…

David:
11:52  Huge.

Tim:
11:53  WordPress has become the most popular CMS in the world because WordPress is extremely easy for non-technical DIYers to be able to manage their own website. Yes, there are definitely big enterprise companies that are using WordPress, but I would say the majority are the small mom-and-pop websites out there. They hire a professional or they build it themselves using a theme or whatever. And then they can go in and they can manage that themselves. They can add their own blog post. They can go in and update their about page when they add a new team member. So, I think a huge reason why is the backend. It is very easy to use. I think that kind of wraps it up in a nice way — the fact that it’s so easy to use.

David:
12:37  Yeah I mean that’s one of the things that attracted me to it originally was having zero understanding or technical knowledge of how to build a website. Here was this piece of software that was hugely supported, had a massive Community with lots of tutorials and lots of information out there. I could not only build it and take care of it I could manage it myself and stuff that is a great great point. So, I hope you enjoyed this episode I feel like Episode 136 might be the episode where we are kind of turning the curve, Tim. Only 136 episodes in!

Tim:
13:18  Exactly and on that note to our listeners out there. That’s what helps us as a podcast is when you go in and you leave us reviews on iTunes. If you’re listening on Stitcher radio, give us a thumbs-up. And just sharing it too. Give us feedback. We definitely want to continue to create content out there and then share it with the community. Cause again Community is why WordPress has become so popular. So, if you find this podcast helpful, share it, like it, and review it. Did I leave anything out David?

David:
13:49  No I think you covered it really really well. I do want to give a shout out to our podcast editor, Kelsey Henry. She is phenomenal. Just want to let her know that we really appreciate her.

Tim:
14:04  Absolutely.

David:
14:05  She’s responsible for post production on this podcast and stuff so.

Tim:
14:10  Yeah and she listens to every episode.

David:
14:12  She does! She’s our biggest fan. Head on over to our website for WP the Podcast. We’re going to have show notes for this episode just like we do for all others and it will have these points in there. Leave us some comments on our website. We would love to hear from you. I think we’re ready to ride off into the sunset, Tim. I think that’s about all for me.

Tim:
14:34  Yeah absolutely.

David:
14:36  All right. Until tomorrow! We’ll see you then.

Tim:
14:39  Take care bye bye.