Every so often you come across someone who says, for whatever reason, “I don’t like WordPress”. It’s usually because they’ve found a new alternative which unfortunately probably won’t last very long. I’m here to tell you why I think WordPress is not only the best Content Management System (CMS) but the best platform to build your dental website on and why over 35% of all websites are built using it.
A CMS is a piece of software that can be used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. If your website has an area for you to change the text of a web-page without the need for you to edit any HTML code then you are more than likely using a CMS.
WordPress is easy to customise just like your smartphone
A WordPress website is constructed with three main aspects. WordPress itself, plugins and themes. Think of WordPress like a smartphone. When you first get your smartphone it has a few basic apps so you can text someone, call someone or update your calendar but, if you wanted to upload a photo to Instagram or buy something from Amazon then you’re probably going to need some more apps. Apps relate to a smartphone the same way plugins relate to WordPress. You can have as many plugins installed on your site as you want but beware, the more plugins you have, the slower your site will load. Plug-ins are built by 3rd parties including companies such as Google and Facebook as well as some built by WordPress and as with a smartphone updates are issued fairly frequently which we need refreshing.
Functionality is almost limitless
As 60% of all websites built with a CMS are built with WordPress it means that there are more people building plugins and themes for the platform than any other CMS.
WordPress can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. You have the option to just use the basic version of the platform to publish blog posts. Or you can build a custom theme for your dental website and add plugins and third-party applications to add features and functionality. Nearly anything that you want to do with your website can be accomplished with WordPress.
To use the smartphone analogy again, if WordPress is the Smartphone and the plugins are the apps then a theme is like the operating system (e.g Google’s Android or Apple’s IOS). The theme determines how the website looks and feels to the user visiting your site.
WordPress is SEO Friendly
WordPress is very SEO friendly even before you install any plugins. This is because WordPress is written with standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup, which Google and other search engines love. Therefore with the right SEO strategy in place your dental website can rank highly above your competitors in your catchment.
Safe and secure
In general, WordPress is a safe and secure platform and it’s very easy to enhance your site’s security. Keeping your WordPress version up to date will help fight off bugs and potential security threats. It’s also easy to enable an SSL certificate. Furthermore, there are additional steps you can take to beef up your site’s security and we recommend a website maintenance plan to keep everything in order.
There really isn’t any other content management system I would recommend as highly as WordPress. If you’d like to find out more about dental websites built with WordPress please get in touch.
