Beginning its life as a blogging platform, WordPress has grown rapidly in both popularity and scope, now hosting a wide variety of online businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. While the success of WordPress cannot be attributed solely to its digital marketing capabilities, since the platform offers a range of other benefits, a clear understanding of WordPress and digital marketing can have a big impact on future sales and business growth.
How popular is WordPress really?
WordPress is an easy-to-use website building tool which, along with its reliability, affordability and scalability, make it a hugely popular choice for entrepreneurs, startups and small to medium-sized businesses. However, its popularity is by no means exclusive to smaller or younger companies. In fact, some huge names such as CNN, The New York Times, Bloomberg and Facebook Newsroom currently use the platform. With over 74 million websites having been built on WordPress, it is one of the Internet’s most popular content hosting platforms.
Built-in search engine optimization
One of the reasons that WordPress excels in the field of digital marketing is due to the fact that every website built on the platform will be optimized for search engines. This is because of the way that the code has been written and structured. The code it essentially is built in a way that is easy for search engines to index and crawl. This crawlability means that it is quick and simple for search engines to gather the information they need to include your site within their database. Having a website structured in this way will ensure whatever efforts are made with regards to SEO are not ultimately doomed to fail because of the website’s structure. WordPress also has a range of plugins that can help to inform SEO practices such as customizable site titles, meta descriptions and tags that will indicate how well content is expected to perform.
Customizable design options
As the branding and marketing experts at this New York agency will tell you, for a cohesive brand image, a website’s aesthetics should reflect a brand’s identity. WordPress excels not only in functionality but in website design too. It offers a wide range of customizable templates that you can use to stand out from the competition, reflect your brand, and best display your content.
Integrated social media
A successful digital marketing strategy does not simply involve content development but promotion and relationship management, too. WordPress has been built to enable easy integration of any social media accounts, so that content can easily be shared between platforms and customers can like, share and interact with any updates.
Access to data analytics
Data analytics are one of the most valuable tools when it comes to conceptualizing the best marketing strategy for your business. Since analytics can be used essentially as a means of tracking the response rates of different practices, they offer a simple way of understanding what you are doing is right or wrong. Using analytics to inform future marketing campaigns will ensure that the best decisions are being made to promote business growth. All WordPress sites come with an inbuilt analytics panel that shows statistics such as the number of visitors the site has, and how often these potential customers return. There are also plugins built to help optimize traffic to a site, which can track the success of things like your landing page or your calls to action.
Responsive design and mobile capabilities
Similar to the way in which a website’s code (its crawlability) will affect its search engine rankings, so will its performance across a range of different screen sizes. Since search engines will only want to recommend sites they trust, if your site does not read well across a range of different screen sizes, its ranking will be limited, no matter how much work you put into SEO. Not only are all WordPress sites built to function normally on mobile devices, there are a number of different themes that will automatically adjust to the size of the screen the site’s visitor is using.
It supports both e-commerce and blogs
Since the platform began by specializing in blog hosting, it is not surprising that it is at the forefront of content development. WordPress does not only support blogs, but it has a range of different features, which make it easy to update or change a blog post, set a post to be published at a later date, and publish the post on any social media site.
