This might sound arrogant coming from someone that’s on the WordPress business for more than 10 years, and counting.

But it’s the truth. There is no other CMS that is even close to WP statistics.

Anyone that knows what we are talking about will agree. WP is still the dominant CMS of all.

Some other CMS’s has been there for a long while and they evolved to a high quality product, but there is still no other that can get close to WP popularity.

The fact is that WP runs almost the half of total existing websites and 63% of the websites built using some CMS. *searchlogistics

¿Why is WordPress the most popular CMS?

Check the following list to find out:

Flexibility

WP features a great flexibility. With enough knowledge, it is possible to do almost anything on a WP installation.

You can achieve your custom design or logic both from the backend dashboard or programatically.

In both cases WP provides a wide set of tools, and a complete documentation for both advanced developers and average users.

Huge community

The WP official support forum is one of the largest online community on the web outside social media. And there are tons of content related to WP of all topics in forums and blogs.

The WP developer community is also very active. That means if you need some help or you’re struggling with some issue, you will find a solution online for sure.

Thousands of plugins & themes to choose from

Only on the official WP repository, there are more than 60.000 plugins and over 7.000 themes. There are plugins to achive specific tasks, or some others that tries to cover a wide range of features.

It might be hard to find a plugin that brings you a specific solution you’re looking for, but you’ll surely find a freeware or premium plugin that helps.

Features

Since 2003, when WP was released, many features were added as long with improving existing ones.

WP provides multiple APIs to be used. It has its own console terminal (WP-CLI), it supports multilanguage translations, it can be extended to provide API endpoints and much more.

The features list of WP is very large, and each one of them can be used by developers freely for sorting out any requirement.

Open source

Thanks to the fact that WP is an open source project, there is no mistrery related to how it works. Every single file of WP core is public and anyone can try editing it.

Just head to the wordpress.org website and download the zip file to see the same code used by over 400 M websites.

While this might have no sense for normal users, its music to the ears of developers. A big advantage over other CMS that aren’t open source.

Disadvantages of WordPress

Being the most popular CMS does not mean necessary being the best CMS.

There are some other CMS and frameworks similar to WP that holds a high level of quality. And some are even better than WP in some areas.

Performance

A WP website with many plugins, a complex theme and a lot of customizations will drastically slow down page loading rates.

In order to achieve acceptable page load rates, it is necessary to optimize the WP installation.

This can be a reall oddisey for unexperienced webmasters who manage websites with many plugins and customizations.

Maintenance

And this takes us to another disadvantage of WP. Constant maintenance work is required. As well as some complex optimization tasks.

Updating plugins and themes is not the only daily work a WP website owner needs to live with. Uncompatibility issues, errors after an update or other kind of isues will surely come some day.

Learning curve

For a basic blog that only publish posts and have a few pages, you will not need any technical knowledge.

However, after some time, you’ll find necessary to learn some technical concepts in order to improve the blog or add some features.

And if you want to be a reall WP developer, you’ll need to learn some coding on PHP, JS, CSS and MySQL. That’s several years of learning.

Final thoughts

Althought WP is the most popular CMS, it’s not the best choice in all cases.

The best choice depends on the requirements, so you must carefully evaluate this and take a decision before start working on a project.

If you decided to use WP, you wont be dissapointed.

However, in the future, you might regret if it was a wrong decicion.

The clue is to consider all options and to be able to choose the right one. This will be the one that satisfies the requirements in the best way.