Why WordPress :: Fifteen Reasons

1. Specialization. If you drive a Honda, would you prefer to take your car in for service to a generalist or to a Honda specialist? If it’s a matter of routine minor tune-up most mechanics would probably do. If the matter is more complex, such as a timing belt replacement, you probably want to go to someone who knows the Honda engine very well, uses genuine Honda parts or their true Japanese off-brand equivalent, has all the service manuals for your car and can inspect related equipment with thorough knowledge of your car’s standards. Similar to car service, it pays in the web development world to specialize in a more specific set of technologies. This is useful to capture economies-of-scale in both production and marketing efforts.
2. Popularity/Community. The open-source project website WordPress.org is the 50th most popular website whereas Joomla! and Drupal rank neck-and-neck 353rd and 358th, respectively in the United States as of April 9, 2011. Magento, a highly popular commercial CMS, ranks 779th. If you check the podcasts directory in Apple iTunes, WordPress is on fire with dozens of free podcasts compared to the handful for other systems. The number of free and commercial themes, plugins and frameworks available to WordPress starts with around 14,000 free plugins and 1,300 free themes on the WordPress.org official community repository alone.
3. Ease of Use. WordPress is commonly referred to as the most easy to learn and maintain. Why? Because it’s a breeze to install, configure, update and publish content to relative to the competition. We say this from personal experience with which we consider ourselves adequately informed on the current editions.
4. Customization. Popular open-source CMS platforms have more similarities than differences, and are all quite customizable. WordPress as a platform can be used for pretty much anything. Why not adapt the easiest and most popular open-source platform for your client’s specific purposes? After all, adaptations are required for whichever CMS is chosen in order to truly meet the requirements of any good sized project.
5. Architecture. WordPress has a vast API that supports several different types of custom coding. These custom plugin coding options, such as widgets, dashboard widgets and meta boxes, allow for clean, efficient and modular extendability for adding various functionality to many parts of a website. As a framework, WordPress provides many abstractions that free the developer from reinventing the wheel. This includes the database, users/roles, menus, URL mapping, emailing, templating, administrative settings and more.
6. Market. WordPress grew from a popular tool for bloggers and has shown exceptional growth for being used for a wider variety of purposes. Bloggers are content people. Content is king on the web in terms of SEO because that’s mostly what search engines see. The biggest battle content people have with building websites is getting a good design installed, being that they don’t typically like to work with much code. Therefore, WordPress has evolved to think like a writer and a designer.
7. Great for SEO. Using WordPress for your website can be extremely effective when it comes to search engine optimization. The main reason why this is true is because the WordPress platform itself is extremely SEO friendly in terms of how search engine spiders crawl a WordPress website. The WordPress platform offers a built in structure that guarantees online success if followed correctly.
8. Secure. As far as online business is concerned, security is of the greatest importance. If your platform is insecure, this is a threat to everything you do and you just can’t afford to go for an insecure platform. Fortunately, in regards to security, WordPress tops the list. It is true that there is no hack-proof software and nobody can guarantee you that even with the most stringent security measures your WordPress site will never be hacked, but due to the large number of WordPress developers whom are concerned with security, one can dramatically minimize risk. Read about WordPress Security Hardening »
9. Highly customizable. You will certainly want your online platform to have a unique look. With WordPress this is easy to achieve. There are thousands of themes you can choose from and thousands of plugins to add in order to get exactly the functionality you need. If you are a web designer and/or web developer, you can also use existing themes and plugins and modify them exactly to your liking. Not many other CMS offer such customization freedom!
10. Great community. Last, but not least, another reason why WordPress is such a great online platform is its community. The forums at WordPress.org and the other WordPress-related sites contain tons of threads about everything WordPress-related. Additionally, almost always when you are stuck with a problem and ask for help, knowledgeable and skillful WordPress gurus rush to your help. The WordPress community is simply great and you should experience it yourself.
11. Respects Web  and Typographic Standards. I can write in XHTML, knowing the CMS won’t mess it up. Or I can write in text, knowing it will get converted to standards-compliant XHTML, complete with typographically correct punctuation. Some other high-end blogging software does this, too, but you have to install plug-ins to make it work. WordPress does it out of the box.
12. Pretty in Print. Even though this is the web and not print, as a designer I still care how the type is going to sit in the page. Over 90% of web users never change the default font size. WordPress’s live preview, continuously updated as I write and save, shows me what most readers will see, and lets me revise for better copyfit with one tenth the effort I used to make. Even if you’re not a copy-fitting freak, there’s something about previewing your writing in your layout that’s better than seeing it in someone else’s. There are other great web writing tools out there, but this is the first I know of that lets me see my site as I’m writing. It helps layout, it helps tone, it helps everything.
13. The Need for Speed. WordPress has the potential to run extremely quickly. HQ Secure loads in roughly one and a half seconds and there are a couple of little tricks I use to deliver my customers content quickly and securely. The chief “trick”, if you can call it that, is to use W3 Total Cache. It’s an absolutely brilliant plugin which caches your site, thus reducing the amount of “work” that has to be done each time somebody loads your site.I’ve often heard accusations levelled at WordPress of the code being “bloated”, but I’ve never seen anything to back this up nor have I seen this reflected in load times. WordPress can be slow if used irresponsibly, but a couple of simple steps and you’ll be flying.
14. Spam Protection. Owners, users and search engines despise blogs or sites that are affiliated with spam activity. Sites or blogs with spam activity can be penalized severely. They will get low rankings or they will get sand boxed. Low rankings mean that a site or blog will not get a sufficient amount of organic traffic (traffic from search engines). WordPress provides plenty of spam protection to help blog masters avoid falling into this pitfall.
15. Social Media Capability. All WordPress Blogs come with social media capability. Social Media is one of the easiest ways of getting thousands of people to visit your blog. There are dozens of social media sites in existence today. Taking advantage of one or several social media mediums can help you get thousands of visitors to your site with ease. Simple integration using a rich theme or a plugin can help share your content easily and get it to reach thousands of eyes.Your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn social accounts can easily be connected to your blog. More social interaction such as comments and email sign-ups will take place. Your blog can be a social medium for visitors from all over the world.

Any CMS system is a good idea to keep design, content, and logic separated and optimized for your website. Many of the CMSes out there run on modern technologies such as PHP and MySQL that can be affordably scaled to suit sites of all sizes. Some of the CMSes are so popular that you can easily find plugins, themes, and training materials for them. While all of this is true, specializing in the most popular, flexible and open-source CMS is a good way to go.