I bet that you have heard about Microsoft PowerPoint.
Powerpoint is software that will help you craft beautiful presentations.
Adobe Photoshop is software that helps you craft creative images and website mockups.
Similarly, WordPress is a software that helps you create a website. That’s all.
For example, you can create a website like whitehouse.gov with WordPress.
Another excellent example of a WordPress site is news.microsoft.com
Not just them; if you visit the showcase on wordpress.org, you’ll notice that popular brands like Vogue, Walt Disney, Bloomberg, etc., are also using WordPress for their websites.
Why?
What makes WordPress used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet?
Every website contains pages like About Us, Contact Us, and blog posts, right?
The success of WordPress is because it makes it really easy to create those pages and add content to them in a reliable way.
That is the core functionality of WordPress.
Because WordPress makes it easy to create and manage the content of a site, it is considered as a Content Management System (CMS).
Here are few more things you need to understand about WordPress.
WordPress is a software written in PHP programming language.
Although there are many great programming languages for writing website software, PHP is still a strong choice for building websites as it is receiving continuous updates.
WordPress is great for building a blog or a business website.
Except for a contact form, WordPress ships with the core functionality for building a blog or a business website. For the contact form functionality, we need to install a plugin like WPForms or Contact Form 7.
Anyway, RollingStone and Vogue are classic examples of a blog built with WordPress.
Similarly, Capgemini.com stands as a classic example of a business enterprise website powered by WordPress.
A lot of people use WordPress use for building membership, education, and all kinds of e-commerce websites.
Similarly, Yashodha Hospitals, a famous hospital in India uses WordPress appointment booking functionality.
Simply put, with WordPress, you can create many kinds of websites.
You can see an impressive list of sites built with WordPress by going to wordpress.org’s showcase.
Although WordPress can help you build a business website or a blog out of the box, it doesn’t support building any other kind of website out of the box.
So, if you want to build a eCommerce website, you need to rely on a third-party plugin like Woocommerce.
And if you want to build a community forum or a membership website, you need find rely a plugin for them on WordPress.org’s plugin repository.
Using plugins for such functionality is bad because most plugins do not follow performance or security best practices. Simply put, these poorly-coded plugins could slow down your WordPress website and put them in a hackable position.
So, I would recommend using WordPress building a business website or a blog only.
If you want to use WordPress for not its intended purpose, then choose lightweight and tightly-secured plugins to achieve the desired functionality.
Anyway, that’s pretty much what I wanted to convey about WordPress. And out of the box, it is much more powerful that I described in this lesson.
You will agree with me once you’re done with this course.
Anyway, in the next lesson, we will learn about the ecosystem of WordPress.
