If you run a small business, choosing the right platform to build your company website is a crucial decision that will impact your ability to attract customers and grow online.
With over 60% market share globally, WordPress dominates the content management system (CMS) landscape. But what specific advantages make it the top choice for small business owners and entrepreneurs?
Below we’ll explore the 10 most compelling benefits of using WordPress as the foundation for your small business website:
1. Extremely User-Friendly Interface
For small teams and bootstrapped startups with limited technical resources, choosing a website platform with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface is key.
WordPress delivers hands-down the most user-friendly backend of any major CMS. The learning curve is gentle even for total beginners.
With just a few hours of training, non-technical users can comfortably:
- Install and setup WordPress
- Choose a theme
- Customize design settings
- Create content pages and blog posts
- Add plugins
- Manage menus
- Update settings
No coding expertise is required to build, manage and maintain WordPress-based sites. The admin interface uses clear language and provides helpful tooltips throughout.
This simplicity empowers businesses to take full ownership over their websites without relying on outside web developers for every little change.
2. Customize Your Site With Themes and Plugins
Every small business has unique needs and branding. Having flexibility to tailor your website to your specific audience, industry, products and services is crucial.
WordPress’ open architecture supports endless customization with free and paid themes and plugins.
The WordPress theme repository contains over 8,000 free, open-source themes to choose from. Premium themes start around $59 for a one-time purchase. With themes for every sector and niche imaginable, you’re guaranteed to find templates that align with your brand identity.
Plugins allow you to extend WordPress’ functionality to include things like:
- eCommerce stores
- Booking systems
- Memberships
- Webinars
- Forms
- Review management
- Social media integration
- SEO optimization
- Security
- Speed optimization
- Analytics
Top plugins like WooCommerce have millions of active installs. You can build a fully customized website aligned to your business needs.
3. Optimized for Search Engine Visibility
SEO can make or break your website’s success. If customers can’t discover your site through search engines like Google, even the best content won’t be seen.
Fortunately, WordPress sites are highly SEO-friendly out of the box. The platform outputs clean, semantic code that search engine crawlers can easily interpret. URL structures are SEO-optimized with keywords unreadable slugs.
Because over one-third of all websites now run on WordPress, search algorithms are highly tuned to work with it.
Plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath make optimizing your site for search engines even easier. With WordPress you get built-in SEO advantages that other platforms can’t match.
4. Responsive Design for All Device Sizes
In 2022, over 50% of website traffic comes from smartphones. Another big chunk comes from tablets. Having a mobile-responsive site that adapts to smaller screens is now an absolute requirement.
With WordPress, responsive design comes standard. No extra configuration or development work is required.
Leading commercial themes use responsive frameworks like Bootstrap to dynamically scale down site layout based on a visitor’s device screen width. Your WordPress site will look great on phones, tablets and desktops out of the box.
Compared to legacy platforms, WordPress’ mobile-friendliness provides a huge competitive advantage for local search rankings and user experience.
5. Robust Security Provisions
Maintaining strong security is critical for any website, but especially challenging for small businesses without dedicated IT staff.
Fortunately, WordPress offers comprehensive security tools and best practices developed through years of experience hardening millions of sites.
Core security advantages include:
- Automatic background updates – Updates and security patches are applied seamlessly without site disruption. No manual intervention is required.
- Granular file permissions – Files and folders can be locked down at a granular level.
- Security plugins – Leading plugins like WordFence offer firewall protection, malware scanning, threat detection, and more.
- Managed WordPress hosting – Hosts like WPEngine provide additional security layers like web application firewalls, round-the-clock monitoring, and backups.
With WordPress’ security infrastructure, you don’t need dedicated ops staff to protect your site.
6. Scales to Support Your Growth
A common concern is investing heavily in building your website only to later outgrow its capabilities as your business expands.
The great news is WordPress offers nearly limitless scalability that allows it to power everything from small brochure sites to enterprise-level web properties with extremely high traffic volumes.
While you may eventually upgrade your hosting plan or theme as you grow, the core WordPress platform has no functional limitations or ceiling. It can easily scale to become the backbone of your company site for the long-haul.
Major international corporations like Microsoft, Samsung, Ford, UPS and thousands more now use WordPress to run their main websites, intranets and blogs.
7. Built-in SEO Tools
Driving ongoing organic search traffic is hugely valuable for small businesses who can’t afford big paid advertising budgets. But optimizing websites for keywords can be complex.
Again, WordPress plugins come to the rescue! Leading SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath make search engine optimization accessible for beginners.
These tools allow you to optimize your site and content entirely from within your WordPress dashboard. Yoast and RankMath’s features include:
- On-page SEO – Optimize page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, content analysis and more
- XML Sitemaps – Generate a sitemap to aid search engine crawling
- Schema markup – Add rich snippets markup for better search results
- Performance – Speed up sites by deferring CSS/JS loading
- Integrations – Connect Google Search Console, Analytics, etc.
For the price of a premium plugin, you gain access to powerful SEO capabilities.
8. Unmatched Community Support Resources
With over 60 million WordPress sites active globally, no other CMS platform comes close to the sheer size of its community and knowledge base.
Some of the invaluable WordPress community support resources include:
- Documentation – comprehensive Codex docs cover everything about using and developing for WordPress
- Forums – WordPress forums have millions of threads on every conceivable topic
- Tutorials – Thousands of blogs and YouTube channels publish WordPress tutorials daily
- Experts – A thriving industry of specialists provide WordPress services
The richness of free resources means answers and expertise are always close at hand. Troubleshooting issues or learning how to use features is quick and easy.
9. More Budget-Friendly Than Other CMS Platforms
Pricing is a major factor for cash-strapped startups and small businesses. Being open source software, WordPress itself is 100% free to license and use. The only cost is web hosting, which starts around $5/month for basic shared plans.
Most premium themes and plugins are available for a reasonable one-time purchase, usually ranging from $39 – $99. An entire website can be purchased for less than the monthly fees of some SaaS platforms.
Compared to proprietary enterprise CMS like Adobe Experience Manager or Sitecore whose licensing alone can cost $10,000s per year, WordPress offers exceptional value with very little financial risk.
10. Built-In Ecommerce Functionality
Selling products and services online no longer requires paying monthly fees for an external platform like Shopify.
WordPress combined with WooCommerce now powers over 5 million online stores, more than any other ecommerce platform.
WooCommerce extends WordPress to handle full-featured ecommerce functionality including:
- Product listings, categories, tags
- Cart and checkout
- Payments, taxes and shipping
- Inventory and order management
- Coupons and discounts
- Reports and analytics
For small online retail businesses, WooCommerce provides an affordable and scalable ecommerce solution. You avoid paying recurring SaaS fees which eat away your margins.
Why WordPress Should Be Your Small Business Website Platform
As this article outlined, WordPress provides an unmatched combination of ease of use, flexibility, features, scalability, security, support, and affordability. Add in the built-in mobile responsiveness and SEO advantages, and it’s easy to see why WordPress dominates as the CMS of choice for small business websites.
Before investing in building your company website, take time to thoroughly evaluate whether WordPress is the right platform for your specific needs and goals. For most small firms, it provides the optimal blend of capabilities and value.
Partnering with an expert WordPress Development Company can help you fully capitalize on WordPress’ benefits. Experienced WordPress developers can provide strategic consulting and build you a custom site tailored to your brand, target audience, budget and business objectives.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation call. We’re eager to explore how we can work together to build your small business an exceptional WordPress website that drives results!
Author Bio:
Purvesh Patel, the Managing Director at Simplior Technologies Pvt Ltd, a leading WordPress Development Company. With a combined experience of over 13 years, we stand as a premier provider of WordPress Web Development services In India, USA & Canada. Our expertise spans from creating responsive Web Designs and E-commerce platforms to crafting custom Web Applications and providing Custom WordPress Development Services. Our established history showcases our ability to deliver customized solutions that address a wide range of business requirements.
