10 Reasons to Use WordPress for a Small Business Website
There are many reasons to use WordPress for your small business website, and a lot of benefits you could enjoy. In fact, an entire book could be written on the subject (and rest assured, we are working on that book). But for this article, we will examine 10 specific benefits of using WordPress for a small business website.
WordPress Benefits for Small Business Websites
It’s free to use. It’s powerful enough to support your entire website. And it allows you to take control of your own site, even with little or no technical knowledge. Those are three of the biggest benefits of using WordPress for a small business website. So let’s explore them.
1. WordPress is open-source software (i.e., free to use).
As a small business, you probably don’t have a huge budget for website design and development. So let’s start with what is perhaps the best news of all. The WordPress content management system is open-source software. That means you can install it, customize it, and use it however you want — at no cost whatsoever.
As it states on the WordPress.org website: “Open-source software is software whose source code is available for anyone to view, modify, and enhance.”
Granted, you might have to hire someone to help with design and development. But even on that front, WordPress offers powerful features that can help you minimize your expense. For instance, you could install a pre-made website design (known as a “theme”) to get a huge head start on the design process.
We will talk more about these themes in a moment. For now, just know that WordPress is free to use, and that’s a good reason for small business owners to consider it.
2. It’s powerful enough to manage your entire website.
WordPress is often referred to as a “blogging program.” And yes, you can use it to publish a business blog. But it’s also a sophisticated content management system (CMS) that can power an entire website. You can use it to create product pages, contact forms, blog posts, and just about any other business purpose you can imagine.
3. It has search engine friendly features built right in.
As a small business, you can probably benefit from having people find you through Google and other search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO, can help small business owners connect with a large audience online, even with a small budget.
This is another reason why you should consider using WordPress for your small business website. It offers a lot of search engine friendly features right out of the “box.”
For instance, it produces clean code that search engine “spiders” can easily crawl. It automatically organizes and categorizes your blog posts, with interconnecting links. It also enables you to publish a lot of content relating to your products and services, without the hassle of traditional website coding.
For these and other reasons, WordPress can help you achieve your small business search engine optimization goals.
4. It gives you the ability to launch a business blog.
Business blogging is a great way to share informative and useful content about your products and services. It can also help you attract new customers through search engines, by creating content that aligns with their questions and searches.
If you use WordPress to power your small business website, you will have blogging capability built right in. As mentioned above, WordPress is both a full-featured content management system and a blogging platform. You get all of these great features (and more) with one program.
5. You can integrate it with e-commerce platforms.
If you have an e-commerce type of business (meaning you sell products through your website), you’ll be glad to know WordPress can help you here as well. This program can be integrated with all of the popular e-commerce platforms, including Shopify.
So if you use WordPress to run your small business website, you’ll still have the opportunity to sell your products online. In fact, it might become even easier to do this, because of the user-friendly features mentioned throughout this article.
6. It simplifies the website design process.
In the old days of website development, a small business owner would have to pay a web designer a lot of money to create a design from scratch. In addition to being a big outlay, this process could take weeks or even months.
And here again, WordPress comes to the rescue.
Do a Google search for “WordPress business themes,” and you’ll see there are literally thousands of pre-designed templates (known as themes) available for purchase. For a small price, you could have a professional-looking website up and running in no time. You could then customize the theme with your business logo, content, product pages, etc.
7. Most WordPress themes are mobile-friendly.
Most of the WordPress themes available today offer responsive designs that look good on all devices, including mobile. A responsive business website will function properly on desktop screens, iPads and other tablets, and mobile devices. This is a big deal for small business owners, since so many people use their phones to research products and services.
8. You can customize it to suit your needs.
When it comes to developing a small business website, WordPress is incredibly flexible. There is really no limit to what you can do with it, within reason.
You can see this in action by previewing WordPress themes specific to your type of business. For example, an event planner could Google “WordPress themes for event planners” to see the many design options available.
And that’s just for starters. Any WordPress theme can be customized further, to give you the exact look and feel you’re after. You could also pay a developer to create custom features for your site.
9. You don’t need any coding or tech skills.
Once you’ve installed WordPress on your website, you can manage your site and publish new content with no coding skills whatsoever. That’s why they call it a “content management system.” It helps you manage your small business website — and all of the content it includes — with relative ease.
Want to create a new product page for your site? It’s as easy as clicking the “new page” button, creating a title, and typing in the content. If you have the technical “skills” to send an email, you can create website pages and blog posts using WordPress. It really is that simple.
The installation process can be a bit tricky, but there’s an easy way around that as well. These days, most of the major website hosting companies will install WordPress for you. So don’t be intimidated by any of of the installation instructions you might see online. Ask your hosting provider to do it for you.
10. You can manage your own website.
For small business owners, WordPress gives you the opportunity to take control of your own website. We’ve touched on this already. Once the program is installed, you can update existing pages, create new ones, publish blog posts, upload and share photos, etc. You don’t need to send an email to a web developer and wait days for them to get back to you. You can take charge of your own website — and your success.
These are not the only benefits and reasons to use WordPress for a small business website. I’ve handpicked what I feel are the 10 biggest benefits this program offers. But I think we can both agree that this list makes a strong case for choosing WordPress over other options.
