What is WordPress?

WordPress is one of the most prominent content management systems (CMS) available today, with many of the worlds most prominent websites built using this platform.

WordPress now powers between 25-30% of the worlds websites, according to various reputable sources and is constantly being updated.

The list above demonstrates the variety of industries that utilise WordPress, outlining the versatility of the platform.

… but what is it actually?

In it’s simplest form, WordPress is a secure, back-end to your website, allowing you to manage content such as page titles, links, content and imagery.

It provides a clean, simple and hugely customisable (more on this later) way of managing all the main components of a basic website; pages, posts and images.

You can also manage users, restricting certain areas and editable fields based on user ‘roles’, manage site URLs, and numerous other settings.

Editing

One of the major benefits of a CMS is that it allows users to update content on their site without needing to learn code. As shown in the image below, WordPress provides a much more user-friendly way to change page titles, descriptions, body text, images and numerous other aspects of the page.

Plugins

The thing that truly allows WordPress to become anything you want it to be is it’s vast plugin library.

For those who don’t know, a plugin is effectively an add-on that can be installed on your site, that will add new functionality to your site.

The plugin library boasts a catalogue of over 50,000 available plugins, a mixture of free and premium (paid) options.

Examples of the functionality plugins can bring includes:

• SEO – Optimising your pages for search engines
• Security – Improving the safety of your site, from hackers, spam, malicious code etc.
• Visual – From image gallery light-boxes, to sleek slideshows through to full page editing overhauls.
• Location – Map and geolocation functionality
• Contact – Forms, email signups, document submission.
• E-commerce

This short list doesn’t come close to covering what is available.

There can however be some downsides to using plugins. Websites can become overloaded with many different plugins that can cause page load speeds to be much slower than accepted average. Also, plugins are often designed to provide functionality to cater to every single possible requirement, whereas the standard user may actually only require 25% of what is being offered, which again provides wasted code and unnecessary features slowing down the site.

Gravity can help by utilising our knowledge to select plugins that will only benefit the site and can weigh up the trade-off between the performance impact and functionality provided. Also, where appropriate, we will write our own code, which is almost always a lighter, faster and more streamlined solution to using a plugin.

E-commerce (WooCommerce)

WordPress provides a simple and robust starting block for a full e-commerce website.

WooCommerce is a plugin that allows you to manage everything you would need to for an online business selling products and services.

• Product portfolios
• Stock levels
• Orders and payments

All of these can be handled with WordPress and WooCommerce working together.

Gravity and WordPress

Gravity can assist you with an existing or new WordPress website, and have vast experience of developing bespoke website themes for many clients.

We know the ins-and-outs of what WordPress can do, and have the knowledge to help you utilise the platform the best suit your needs.