As you know, there are plenty of content management systems out there in the web, but WordPress seems to have conquered the market. Have you ever though why?
In this article, we’re going to bring forward the reasons of WordPress’ success.
WordPress Is Free
Free isn’t always the most popular option in some cases, but in the case of CMSes, it is.
Matt Mullenweg created WordPress by forking b2, “a classy news/weblog tool“, which hasn’t been maintained for a couple of months by the beginning of 2003. He decided to make this new blogging tool free by licensing it with GPLv2 (like b2) so that everyone can contribute to improve it.
WordPress is still free (and seems like it’s going to stay that way), but it created one of the largest financial ecosystems in the web design world, which only added more value to WordPress.
WordPress Is Extensible
Making WordPress free allowed many to contribute. After a plugin system has been introduced in 2004, and a theming system has been introduced in 2005, WordPress quickly gained momentum among web developers who created the first plugins and themes for WordPress. You know the rest: WordPress has now the largest databases for both plugins and themes among all content management systems.
WordPress Has a Gigantic Community
You know who developed all those plugins and themes? I did. And some of my friends did. And hundreds of thousands of others did.
Without the community, we can safely say that WordPress (as we know it today) wouldn’t exist at all, because nobody would have improved it. (Well, probably Matt would, but it would be nothing more of a pet project of his.) With the always-growing community, tens of millions of people is using WordPress as of today.
Seriously now, how cool is that WordPress is being used at least one of every five website in the entire web?
WordPress Is Easy to Learn
WordPress has a great codebase, but probably not the greatest one among other CMSes. Having said that, it’s probably one of the easiest content management systems to use and develop.
The team behing developing WordPress core has been mindful of user experience for a long time. Thus, WordPress became easier and easier to use over the course of its history. And it also has a relatively easy learning curve for geeks as well, allowing more and more developers to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem.
WordPress Is Compatible With the Web
As of 2015, PHP is used by four of every five websites in the world. Now, that’s a big success. And WordPress runs on PHP and MySQL, meaning that (potentially) it can be run on all servers that runs PHP.
You know what, scratch that. With the integration of the WordPress REST API in the near future, WordPress will evolve to be an application platform rather than a content management system, meaning that (potentially) it will be run on every server in the world. Now, that’s a big success too.
Conclusion
There’s no denying that WordPress has disadvantages along with advantages, but a constantly-evolving platform with an enormous community, like WordPress, will work out to be better in every new version.
What do you think about the reasons that make WordPress the best CMS in the web? If you have anything to add to this article, don’t forget to share your comments with us!