These days owning a business is synonymous to having a website. If you don’t have a website for your business, you’re simply missing out on the wealth of opportunities the online world offers. The problem however, is that “making a website” seems complicated to most, and once you start exploring the options…it can only become more complicated to an unsuspecting business owner.
This is precisely why we have created this comprehensive list of benefits for small business owners and why WordPress should be their preferred content management system.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) which essentially acts as the “machine” behind your website. It’s the back end of your online business. This is the space where you’ll be creating your web pages, blog posts, manage your sales, track performance and much more.
The beauty of the WordPress platform is in its simplicity. Many people compare it to the MS Word of the CMS world. Its intuitive interface takes the hassles out of web development and gives you the power to create your virtual presence quickly.

In addition, WordPress is one of the most trusted CMS’ out there and is the platform for many major brands including the Rolling Stones. It does well with search engines and has quick loading times, and seeing that it is open-source, there’s plenty of additional “extras” you can get for free. Below we’ll dive into a bit more on these added benefits of the WordPress platform.

Giving your Website the “look” you desire

As mentioned, WordPress is almost like a “Shell” to your website. The standard look of the site is incredibly basic lacking the “wow factor” you’d expect in an online portal. However, this ‘shell’ is merely just a place holder.
The power of the WordPress site comes with Theme Selection. With literally thousands of Free and Paid themes to browse through, you can find a template that reflects your vision of how your website should look like. With a simple install, you can give your WordPress site any “skin” you desire. More importantly, once you have installed your theme, you can begin tweaking it exactly to what you want it to be.

Many other platforms like Wix is incredibly limited in terms of customization. WordPress gives you free reign to tweak wherever you deem necessary.

You can find Free Themes on the WordPress Official site or you could browse for “paid themes” on sites like Themeforest and so forth. The difference between the “paid versions” and the “free versions” essentially comes down to ‘technical support’, added plugins and more customization features. However, don’t knock the free versions either as many of them are highly responsive and incredibly flexible as well.

Do what you need to do

Perhaps you need to generate leads or push sales. With WordPress, this is very easy to achieve. Along with the Theme option within your WordPress site, you also have access to hundreds of thousands of “plugins”.

These plugins/widgets have a wide range of functions including opt in forms, ecommerce capabilities, social networking capabilities, forums, FB integrated comments, social media sharing, protected downloads and much more.

For the most part plugins come in two versions: Free and Paid. Most plugins however are Free with paid premium features you can acquire a-la-carte.

To give you an example of the power of WordPress plugins, I’ll talk a bit about Facebook. There are many businesses that would like to sell ‘affiliate products’ however, Facebook doesn’t allow affiliate links to be posted on their site. WordPress users can simply download a “link cloaker” for free on their WordPress site such as Pretty Link, and work around this issue. Pretty Link essentially hosts the affiliate link on your site so that it complies with Facebook policies, but re-directs it to your affiliate offers.

This is just one example of the power of WordPress plugins. I could write for days on the different plugins and their functionality.

Ecommerce

For many business, selling is important. There are some ecommerce platforms out there like Joomla, however for the inexperienced web master, it can become quite a complicated platform. WordPress has a plugin to solve this problem for you.

Woocommerce is a plugin that is your “e-store on the go” which you can install with one simple click. This fully functional ecommerce store is completely customizable, meaning you can create a store that looks ‘exactly like you want it to look’.

Within minutes you can have a fully functional e-store including everything from “stock”, Sales dashboard, Messages, pricing, discounts, coupons and much more. It integrates seamlessly with Paypal or any other payment processor you may want to use.

As mentioned, you can tweak the design of the plugin to fit your custom theme and while it’s not entirely complicated, if you don’t know enough about FTP installs and so forth, you could always hire someone to do this for you on the cheap. A bit of elbow grease and you can figure it out yourself, especially since WooCommerce includes extensive tutorials.

SEO is a Breeze

Another aspect that many business owners think about is their SEO. While most don’t truly understand what or how SEO works, WordPress helps you out on this end. With an awesome free plugin by the name of Yoast, you can set up all your SEO in a simple manner. The plugin will give you a score to indicate how good your on page SEO is and provide you with suggestions to improve it.

Bottom line

If you have a small business and are thinking of getting in on the online action, then WordPress is one of the best options available. With amazing flexibility and ease of use, you can get your business online in no time whatsoever.

If you need any assistance in your online endeavors, be sure to reach out to us and we can assist you in anything you need. We hope that this small guide on WordPress sites helped you make an informative decision in regards to your business website.