WordPress Powers On
What does WordPress mean to you? Is it a blogging platform? Certainly, that’s how it first came to public attention, and in the early days at least, how many users got their first taste of it.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t still serve that purpose. There are currently around 70 million new WordPress posts made every month, and if you multiply that by the average number of words in a post, 300, then it’s apparent that it’s still powering on, enabling a lot of people to get a lot of thoughts out into the world.
And that’s not even counting the comments.
But away from blogging, the platform has expanded far beyond what it once was, and is now a formidable, firmly established tool for enterprise.
Dominance by the numbers
To get a sense of WordPress’ success, let’s consider some more numbers.
As a CMS (content management system), WordPress has staked claim to a 61.8% market share. To appreciate how far in the lead of its competitors that places it, bear in mind that the number two CMS, Joomla, has a market share of just 4.7%.
Think about brand recognition, too. A significant number of people who have no interest in website building will at least have heard the name WordPress. On the other hand, they’re unlikely to know what you’re talking about if you mention Joomla or Drupal.
An even more remarkable statistic is that 35 – 40% of the web is run on WordPress, depending on who you ask.
This number really underscores the distance WordPress has travelled from its initial days as, primarily, a platform for blogging.
There are now a multitude of businesses, from vast, world-famous corporations, to SMEs and sole traders, whose online presence has a WordPress engine room.
Powering business
Over the years, using WordPress for enterprise has become a smart move. One of its most striking characteristics, when you start working with it, is its combination of usability, flexibility, and scalability.
WordPress is user friendly, quick, and never intimidating. If you know how to build and design websites, then great, there are opportunities to use those skills, but essentially, at smaller scales, WordPress requires zero coding knowledge and minimal time investment.
Having said that, WordPress scales. As your project grows, you can utilize whatever you need from the tens of thousands of plug-ins, allowing you to implement new schemes and grow your business.
At a certain scale, and with a lot of plug-ins, you will have to start making sure all your code is calibrated to work efficiently, but by that stage it would be usual anyway to employ staff who can deal with specialized tasks.
SEO and API
Moving into the realm of initialisms, WordPress continues to deliver, straight out of the box.
If you’re creating content, it automatically structures your posts according to SEO best practices, and it features a host of easy-to-use SEO plug-ins.
Technically, it’s quick loading, social media integrated, the code is clean, and its themes are all mobile responsive. These are factors that Google likes when it’s crawling websites, and are exactly the types of details that it’s a great relief to have automatically optimized.
Getting a little technical, WordPress’ REST API makes WordPress sites very accessible and easy to integrate. If you’re unsure, API means Application Programming Interface (and REST means Representational State Transfer, which is a style of software architecture), and the API functions as an interface through which external developers, on other sites, can interact with and pull information from a WordPress site.
Basically, with the organized SEO and clean API that WordPress provides, a website is optimized to be discovered, accessed, and interacted with, which is exactly what any commercial enterprise would hope for.
An open-sourced future
Looking to the future, WordPress evidently has a lot working in its favor. Firstly, there is its status as an established go-to. But working in accord with this, is the fact that it’s entirely open source, meaning its code can be distributed and modified.
When a project is open source and gains momentum, it tends to build a community, which will be constantly pushing in new directions and bringing in new features, improvements and additions.
Such ecosystems are extremely responsive to user demands, reacting organically to engineer solutions as new needs arise. At the kind of scale WordPress is now operating at, there is endless innovation and support, making it an extremely robust, but enduringly flexible platform.
Where it might it go next?
Looking to the future, and if current trends, such as shifts to remote work, are anything to go by, then ecommerce will be an area of growth, along, possibly, with the integration of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
In 2018, WordPress included something called the Gutenberg Editor, which allowed for drag-and-drop content editing. It’s likely that this will be developed further, and facilitate no-code site modification.
In the WordPress ecosystem, though, anything is possible, and it will be fascinating to see what the platform’s continually developing story leads to next.