Why WordPress is a strong start to your digital project in 2023

The range of content creation, management, service integrations and artificial intelligence services available for curating your digital presence are plentiful these days. The phrase “there’s an app for that” is replaced by “there’s an API, or service for that” is all too commonplace.

We wanted to share 7 reasons why WordPress provides the best starting point for digital projects in 2023. We say starting point on purpose, as the delivery of a digital platform or website is only one piece of a digital strategy – it is no longer enough to consider “site launch is the final stage”. A digital platform like WordPress can grow and shift with you as the market, or your ambitions evolve over time.

WordPress has unparalleled global adoption

With 43% of the world’s websites powered by WordPress – almost every technical challenge in a website has been addressed by a global community of developers, users and agencies all giving back their expertise to the project. WooCommerce offers accessible e-commerce solutions for millions of online stores.

This level of adoption really indicates that WordPress is here to stay and grow.

The WordPress project is much more than just code

The ecosystem supporting WordPress runs the full gamut of professional services. There are community builders, WordPress Meetup organisers, developers, testers, designers, copywriters, hosting companies and agencies all growing the ecosystem. Whether its a new feature, a plugin to help you offer restricted content online or faster way to deploy and manage servers – it’s easy to see that WordPress is much much more than code.

Sidenote: If you are in New Zealand, Ralf and Tarei will be co-organising upcoming WordPress meetup events in both Auckland and Wellington – come along and say hello!

Continuously delivering value to users

The WordPress core project at the time of writing has version 6.1 available. Which in its own release schedule included 800 people in at least 58 countries coordinating, testing, building, documenting and improving the core platform within the release cycle.
Most interestingly, anyone can contribute – if you find a bug in your WordPress setup, you can create a ticket an it might be picked up in a future release. You don’t even need to know the basics of how to code – all are welcome.

WordPress release cycles are typically every 4 months and led by one or more of the core WordPress developers – giving more value to every WordPress installation on a predictable cadence.

No longer just a content management solution (CMS)

While it’s humble initial releases were largely about easily writing blog posts for everyone, it has grown into a digital platform – capable of extending well beyond it’s humble beginnings.

With WordPress we can install and setup any size of e-commerce websites, delivery millions of news articles globally and integrate with almost any software as a service platform available online.

It’s native-API (application programming interface) allows extension well beyond a humble CMS and forms are strong foundation to build anything we can imagine.

Its SEO friendly

Companies like Yoast SEO enhance the WordPress core platform with easy-to-use and free features, that ensure your data is ready for search engines like Google and Bing to start sharing with the world. Even something as simple as a site-map, which tells search engines what your site contains – is available out of the box with a new installation.

Where there isn’t a plugin specifically available for your data entities, the WordPress API allows extensible new features to be supported.

AMP and OpenGraph support are but a single plugin away – which allows your content creators and editors to do what they do best, create content and allow WordPress to serve the data in open-sourced microformats or similar.

As an aside: WordPress can be extended to serve news-feeds for something as obscure as TV news tickers on cable networks.

Total ownership of your digital assets*

Because WordPress licensing is based on GPLv3 license, you own the source code – you can change it, augment it and re-distribute it as you like. In a situation where you self-host your WordPress installation, you also have full ownership and governance of the data you collect within WordPress. You don’t need to sign contracts with long T&C’s which block your data and ownership when you no longer wish to pay for them.

The data and installation of WordPress is yours and in general – this is critical when handling user or sensitive data that you can’t or do not wish to share with a third-party.

This level of freedom is built within the core foundations of the WordPress plugin and extends to every project or plugin created – the GPL v3 license forms the very contract of ownership in a clear and open way.

There are some exceptions to this, typically ownership of design elements in themes and any ownership detailed in contracts for work under taken with third-parties (developers, agencies etc).

WordPress editing experience is only getting better and better

From a personal note (Tarei), I have been privileged to see the effect the Block Editor and WordPress editing experience has on large publishing teams used to using large, monolithic alternatives to WordPress. When you can demonstrate how to use blocks to create engaging and vibrant content in a matter of minutes, not hours – the editor is simply a delight.

It is under constant development and improvements with collaboration features scheduled for the next phases of the Block Editor project – creating content is getting so much more intuitive, that other CMS’s will be lagging behind.

In the interest of open source however, the block editor (codenamed Gutenberg) project is portable and completely open-source, so these other CMS’s can adopt the block editor for themselves too.

Wrapping up

Before considering your next digital platform, ask yourself – Why not WordPress instead? There are more reasons than not to consider WordPress as the foundation – and if you find a good reason why not to use WordPress, we’d be more than happy to hear from you.

If you have any questions about the feasibility of using WordPress in your next project – reach out to us, we’d love to talk too.. we believe in WordPress, not just as a project dependency, but the community it continues to grow as well.

May your 2023 digital aspiration be built upon the thousands on worldwide contributions that is the WordPress project.

Image credit
– Featured image by fauxels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-doing-handshakes-3183197
– SEO photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/advertising-alphabet-business-communication-270637/