Every business has a website featuring details such as about the company’s background, mission, vision, offered services and available open positions. Companies like NBC, USA Today, Disney, Airbnb, Spotify use WordPress. WordPress is a content management system that helps simplify the process of website creation, by minimizing technical complexities. Even with no coding skills, one can have a website up and running in almost no time.
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little launched the first version of WordPress on May 27th, 2003. WordPress is an open-source platform making it accessible for everyone. Implying, it is free to use. Moreover, users also have the opportunity to contribute to its development.
The platform serves as a repository to store all the text, images, videos, documents of a website. Through the platform, one can edit, publish, then alter again the content of the website.
What are the main features of WordPress?
- User Management – managing users and assigning them suitable roles like subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and administrator.
- Media Library – centralizing the management of all media files like images, videos, and audio in one place. Media files also organize into folders. Moreover, adjustments to images sizes can be done instantly. It’s easy. Additionally, it’s simple for WordPress developer to embed media files into posts and pages. Users can upload various file formats through the media library. These include:
Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP
Audio: MP3, WAV, and OGG
Video: MP4, MOV, and WMV
Documents: PDF, DOC, and PPT - Theme System – a theme is used to ‘skin’ a website. Skinning means altering only the design aspect of a website. A WordPress theme is a collection of files that work together to create a unified graphical interface design for a website. Another name for theme files is template files. A theme adjusts the website’s display. Theme files include customized template files, tailored pages, images files in formats such as .jpg, .png, .gif, style sheets in .css format and any code in .php format.
WordPress includes twelve default themes. The Twenty Twenty Two theme stands as the initial default block theme ever introduced. - Addition of Plugins – Multiple plugins are available, offering tailored functions and features to meet user’s requirements. The plugin ecosystem is vast. Curious what exactly a WordPress plugin is? A WordPress plugin is a tool that adds new features to a website or extends its existing functionality. For example, there are plugins that can transform a website into a complete eCommerce platform, while other plugins optimize a website’s performance. Using a multitude of plugins may result to an increase in the website’s loading time and performance issues.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO refers to techniques that can be used to ensure that a website ranks high in search engine results such as Google and Bing. Search engines index publicly accessible websites. To adjust the search engine visibility mode, navigate to the website’s reading settings at Settings → Reading (refer to the image below). It usually takes four to six weeks for search engines to find newly launched websites.
A search engine controls a website’s ranking in their search engine results page, based on specific rules and criteria. - Multiligual Plugin – Implementing a multilingual website can boost the SEO ranking of a website, by expanding its audience reach. The creation of a multilingual WordPress website can be done either manually or by using plugins such as Weglot and PolyLang. To create a multilingual website, it’s essential to translate all of the content. Additionally, verify that the formatting, units and currencies match the intended language. Moreover, the translation of meta titles, meta descriptions and alt text of images is crucial.
- Importers – transferring data from one website to another through WordPress importer. Importing data from an already existing website is easy. Simply open the WordPress dashboard and navigate to Tools -> Export. Then select the content to export (see the image below). The exported data is stored in an XML file. Afterward, install the WordPress importer and run it. Lastly, import the exported XML file and assign the authors.
The upcoming sections will outline the benefits and drawbacks of using WordPress.
Benefits of Using WordPress
- WordPress is a freely available software, along with numerous free plugins and templates.
- It’s simple to edit the content and upload media through WordPress.
- There are many SEO plugins for WordPress, these include Yoast, Rank Math, Squirrly SEO, SmartCrawl, The SEO Framework, and Slim SEO.
- Proficiency in PHP is not necessary to create a WordPress website.
Drawbacks of Using WordPress
- PHP knowledge is essential, if a developer wants to create their own WordPress plugin or theme.
- Customization necessitates coding skills in HTML, CSS and PHP.
- The platform relies on themes and plugins. And the original developers should maintain the designed themes and plugins.
Initial Steps for Beginning with WordPress
Among the simplest methods to install and set up WordPress is configuring a WordPress instance on Lightsail. As a first step, set up an AWS account by learning about the process. Then, sign into the Lightsail console and create a WordPress instance. When selecting the instance image, opt for Linux/Unix as the platform and WordPress for blueprint.
Next, configure the WordPress instance. A registered domain name for the WordPress site is essential and specifying the domain name server (DNS) zone that will manage the DNS records of the domain. Moreover, assign a static IP address to the WordPress instance, so it’s not changed each time the instance is restarted.
Finally, to access the administration dashboard, the default WordPress admin password is mandatory. The password can be found in the instance management page.
The article discusses the well-known content management platform WordPress, emphasizing its ease of use even without any coding skills. Main features include user management, media library, theme system, plugins, SEO tools, multilingual support and website transfer. Additionally, it outlines the benefits of using WordPress, including its free accessibility, simplicity in content management and the availability of SEO tools for SEO optimization. However, the article also mentions the drawbacks, such as the knowledge of PHP is necessary in case of customization and the maintenance of themes/plugins is important. Finally, the article provides the steps for configuring a WordPress instance on Lightsail.
References
[1] What is WordPress? An Intro to The Most Popular Website Builder (elementor.com)
[2] Work with themes – Documentation – WordPress.org
[3] What is And How To Use a WordPress Importer + Bonus Plugins (hostinger.com)
[4] Tutorial: Launch and configure a WordPress instance in Lightsail – Amazon Lightsail