This is Talk Number 7 in a series that will become the You are a Media Company Course. This is the last that will focus on the website and why it’s important. Today I’m speaking about WordPress and why it’s important and giving 7 reasons why I and a ton of other people think it’s important. As I spoke about during Chat #62, I would argue that the website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy aka your digital storefront. This chat, I will focus on WordPress and why it’s important specifically to CEOs / Entrepreneur and business owner.
Definition of a website: a connected group of pages on the World Wide Web regarded as a single entity, usually maintained by one person or organization and devoted to a single topic or several closely related topics.
What is WordPress? WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app.
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Note there are 2 types of WordPress. There’s WordPress software (WordPress.org) and WordPress.com (community). They both are WordPress but WordPress.com has limits.
Why is this chat focused specifically on WordPress?
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WordPress has 58.55% of the CMS marketshare — more than all other systems (eg, Drupal, Joomla) combined. BuiltWith, attributes 51% of the market share to WordPress. While the numbers may vary depending on the data collected, one thing is certain — WordPress is the top CMS on the planet.
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WordPress powers more than 26.4% of the web, according to WordPress.com and w3techs.
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Considering that the number of total active websites is estimated at over 172 million according to a survey published by netcraft, that means that around 75,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now — with around half of those sites (37,500,000) being hosted on the WordPress.com shared hosting installation. This means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress, which is still huge.
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WooCommerce, the most popular ecommerce software for WordPress, currently runs over 1.5 million active online stores. According to Builtwith, WooCommerce has a 10% share of the ecommerce technology market.
Reasons I’m big on WordPress and I’m not the only one
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Update Your Website: Even though WordPress actively encourages users to upgrade to the latest version, only 27.2% of users have actually done so. More than 10% still use version 4.3.
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SEO Friendly: The former head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, said that “sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.” This means WordPress is SEO friendly. (e.g. Yoast)
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Lots of support: We even have a WordPress 4 CEOs collection of videos we offer for free at WP4CEOs.com.
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Change the look: You can add a new theme that can upgrade the look of your website
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Change the functionality: You can even add plugins to your website to update the functionality / e.g. we have a store, a directory, website and blogs.
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WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress.
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It has a learning curve but it’e easy to use.
Again it’s really important to pay attention to these 10 things while the actually way you approach them might differ see chats 56 & 58, you want to make sure to pay attention to these things. As always, next week we will have a interview and we will dig a little deeper into the future of websites in Chat #66. This is Gresham signing out, please be sure to sign up for the course when it goes live at http://youareamedia.company/ and get free WordPress How-to-videos at WP4CEOS.com