Thread: Why is Wordpress so popular when there are much better alternatives IMHO.

It was over two years ago when I first started looking into building my own website, when a friend of mine suggested Wordpress. Back then I knew very little about actually building sites, and what my friend showed me all seemed a little confusing.

Building sites with Wordpress is at the moment very popular, however what people seem to forget is that it is not that simple to use when you need your site to perform particular functions. If I want to incorporate video, I have to use a wordpress video plug in, If I want my site to be accepting passwords and logins I need to be looking at a membership site plugin etc, in fact there are over 1,500 plugins for Wordpress including: sales pages, squeeze pages, optin pages, video plugins, tracking plugins, password and login plugins on and on and on.

Now my friend has a number of sites and each one of them looks great and functions very well, however each of his sites has between 5 and 25 seperate plugins. Some of which costing more than $250 with $20 monthly membership fees. Add to the financial cost the time involved searching for and learning how to use these plugins it all starts to become a major undertaking, especially when you are just starting out and working on your site part time, sheesh, its gonna take forever. I know that's what I was thinking.

I did find a CMS that provided all the necessary tools and I do mean every tool I could ever need in relation to building a successful and profitable website. The result of having absolutely everything from hosting to keyword research from the same provider is that it has speeded up my success enormously.

Now I don't for one minute think that all of you folks reading this are suddenly going to jump ship and join me, as unfortunately when you click on my sig you probably won't "get it" To those of you who do "get it" you can look forward to joining a community of almost 50.000 webmasters who all help each other to succeed.

I don't get what your signature link has to do with a different non-Wordpress CMS.

Not much, I bet.

You hooked me with your blurb, though!

I don't get what your signature link has to do with a different non-Wordpress CMS.

It is a proprietary CMS developed by the company for which he is an affiliate. It is part of the SiteSell system and includes hosting, backend tools, and coaching for an annual membership price. I had understood that they had improved the site builder recently, but the sig site retains the classic SBI look only moved to the center of the window instead of slammed against the left side. I have never been a member but I did look at the program. I think that it would be a good path for some people.

WelL I guess the main reason why people love Wordpress is they give more than you can ask for free. You don't need to pay a cent to use and no monthly fee or anyone. So it' can't be compared with something which we need to pay to use.

THe main reason is this its open source free and the best part is this almost 80 percent developers are working on wordpress and its themes and modules just like magento.

Wordpress is popular because of plugin and ability to build any kind of site using those plugin.

I might like to build a plain site today and tomorrow I might want to add some video or forums, so with wordpress I can do by installing plugin and not doing any transition for any other type.

wordpress is popular because

- its name is popular, (brand name)
- it has many free plug-ins
- user friendly
- free CMS

Well wordpress is the most popular because it is FREE, and everyone loves free stuff (look at the activity in the free section of this forum, then you will know what i mean.)

Wordpress is accessible, has lots of free help, is easy to customise and is improving month by month.
It is very easy to use too.

Wordpress is easy for the noobs.

It's a free CMS and the SEO potential is fantastic.

Google loves WP.

Not only that, you can make great looking sites for your readers with Wordpress without knowing much coding. That SBI site look horrible and dated from the 90's.

Wordpress is popular because:

it is free
it does regular updates
the dashboard is easy to use
has a lot of features
easy to install plugins
it is customizable
offers lots of free and premium themes
its “general public license” gives tons of freedom to users
is SEO friendly.

Originally Posted by aps_uk

Basically, it's popular because it's free and powerful. You get so much out of it for very little effort. It may not be the best, but since when have the best products in the world been most popular? It's good enough, though. Especially considering in the earlier years, something like this would cost £80 or more.

It's actually heart breaking to know that I've spent 11 years training to be a web developer and yet people are considered in the same category as me, yet all they do is use free Open Source software.

I Agree, like you said people do use Free Open Source however you would look alot better if you did it by hand although alot harder and alot longer to do. They will be a day when most software for making websites will become free.

Originally Posted by Daniel Evans

It's a free CMS and the SEO potential is fantastic.

Google loves WP.

That's the priority reason why i like WP so much, lots of plugin that can make you sit and forget about SEO, you just need to touch up a little bit

I use Xsitepro, Dreamweaver and WordPress. Of the 3, WordPress stands out because I can get a site up and running (and SEO'd) in minutes. Plus there are hundreds of themes and plug-ins (free and paid) that can make the site look great. Plus, if you know programming, you can develop your own plugins. Most of my clients are satisified with the WordPress sites. I would say that about 90% of my sites are in WordPress. For those clients that are a bit particular, I would use XsitePro/Dreamweaver. Remember, in this day and age, you need to concentrate on building content and driving traffic to your site. I see so many people getting stuck in "building" their site.

If you ask me, there is so many reason it's better.. There is just no comparison at all, it's userfriendly and professional at the same time.. I think how easy it is to use it what makes it stand out so much...