While many people still think of WordPress primarily as a blogging platform, the popular CMS has evolved to offer much more than that. Sure, WordPress may have started out as the answer to every blogger’s needs, but today it is so robust that even major sites like TIME and Mashable use the platform to manage their digital presence. In fact, as of January 2015, over 20% of the top 10 million websites are using WordPress.

So if big name brands like TechCrunch, the New Yorker, Variety, Quartz and Fortune are using this CMS to manage their sites, why shouldn’t you?

Using the Web to Grow Your Business

In today’s market, there is no question that you need to have an online presence – no matter what type of business you manage. Being online is important because it has become THE biggest gateway to a global audience. It’s also the ideal place for building your brand, managing your business’s reputation and interacting with customers and prospects in a timely, efficient manner.

But don’t take our word for it:

• As of August 2014, over 2 billion people were using social media.
• As of September 2014, over half the world’s population owned a mobile phone.
• As of November 2014, over 3 billion people were regular web users.
• As of December 2014, active mobile connections actually surpassed total world population.

Your customers are online. And these days, having a website is simply not enough. You have to have a great website with current, accurate information that is useful to your audience. You also need to help your audience discover that information, so practices such as SEO (especially Local SEO) and Social Media Marketing are an important part of getting the word out about who you are and what you have to offer.

So how can you use the web to grow your business? WordPress is the perfect platform for helping you achieve all your goals online.

How WordPress Can Help Your Business

WordPress makes it easy to manage your website. It cannot be overstated how important this is. Managing a website can be extremely tedious and gets to be quite difficult depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. WordPress does a great job of taking the guesswork out of this so that anyone can manage his/her own site effectively.

Of course, it’s important to understand what your audience is doing online. People tend to take to the web to find specific information. Your business can benefit from this, as mentioned above, by taking the necessary actions to help your audience find that information on your site.

But sometimes potential customers want to do more than simply discover information. What if someone wants to learn more about your company by joining your mailing list? What if someone wants to request more information from someone in your business? What if someone comes to your site ready to purchase something? WordPress has quick and easy solutions for each of these scenarios and more.

So What Can WordPress Do?

In addition to managing the information published on your website, it’s also important to note that WordPress offers many other benefits and functionalities to help your business grow online. Here are 5 of the most noteworthy:

1. eCommerce: One of the biggest achievements that the CMS platform has made is the integration of eCommerce functionality. This can be achieved through the use of special plugins or themes, each designed towards making eCommerce an easy (but effective!) addition to your site. Some of the leading plugins, such as WooCommerce, are designed to be incredibly user-friendly so that you are able to set up your online store in just minutes!

2. Security: WordPress takes security very seriously. Since 2003, WordPress has been taking the necessary measures to ensure that its core software is able to address and mitigate common security threats. Regular updates are performed to ensure that no vulnerabilities are left unaddressed and each of these updates is free to end users. There is no reason that a WordPress site or its data should ever be compromised!

3. SEO: WordPress is a very SEO-friendly platform. The way that the platform itself is coded means that sites will be built in such a way that search engines can easily recognize and crawl, which means that WordPress sites are likely to do well in search engine rankings. In fact, all the way back in 2009, Google’s (now former) Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, praised WordPress for being such an SEO-friendly platform.

4. Ease of Use: Have we mentioned that WordPress is easy to manage? We can’t seem to say it enough! With this platform, you don’t have to be technically savvy to make updates to your site. In fact, the WordPress Dashboard is designed in such a way that anyone can quickly learn how to navigate it and manage their own site. Whether you’re looking to change text, add images, or even gain new functionality, it’s all very simple with WordPress!

5. Contact Forms: Most people fail to realize the value of direct communication – especially online. One of the most valuable – but under-rated – features that WordPress has to offer is the ease with which site owners can add Contact Forms. These forms are easy to set up and enable your users to interact with your business directly, which you’ll no doubt find many users appreciate. Contact Forms also allow site owners to capture the information that their visitors choose to share, so it’s easy to stay in touch and follow up with these visitors even after they’ve left your website. This is great data for building your business online!

Moving Your Site to WordPress

If you’ve been thinking of ways to improve your business’s website, one of the strongest recommendations we can make is to move to WordPress. The functionality WordPress offers, along with the ease of use, will completely change the way you manage your website. This added flexibility will make setting your site up for success easier than it has ever been before!

Did you know that HostandStore.com can help you with this? If it’s time for you to move your site over to WordPress, email us at support@hostandstore.com to learn exactly how we can help. Remember, at HostandStore, we’re more than a web host. We want to be a partner in your online success!