WordPress

What is WordPress

WordPress is what's known as a Content Management System, or CMS for short.

It allows you to make changes to a website (to it's "content") but doesn't require any technical skills, such as HTML or CSS, which is what websites are built with.

Perhaps more importantly, it enables website owners to accidentally ruin any search engine optimisation that's been done on the page, and so damage their own rankings in Google.

You do not need to be editing your website content every week. Adding a new blog page every few weeks is a great idea, but you don't need something the size of WordPress to do that.

WordPress is often found to be slow and bloated, and comes with literally thousands of plugins that usually slow it down even more.

What started as a simple blogging platform, has now become a jack-of-all-trades.

Who uses WordPress

With a little bit of time anyone could build their own WordPress website, and a lot of people do. It is designed to be very accessible for anyone.

You choose a theme, which dictates how your pages are laid out, and what colours they use, and you just fill in the gaps.

Why not test your own website with some of our simple health-checks - it can be quite an eye-opener.

What is WordPress suitable for?

WordPress is best-known for being a blogging platform. The term blog is short for "web log".

• Going on holiday? Write a blog!
• Having a baby? Write a blog!
• Just going about your daily life? Write a blog!

The entire WordPress platform has been pushed and squeezed in directions which weren't really intended.

As such, it is a bit of a monster these days, the majority of websites running on WordPress are slow and simply don't attract new customers for their business owners.

Many owners of WordPress sites will seek the help of an "SEO expert" to try and help get more visitors to the site, which is really throwing more good money after bad. It's the foundations that are the problem, WordPress is the problem.

Simply by replacing WordPress from underneath a website (retaining the design and content if you wish), can see the number of visitors increase 3-fold.

Expert insight and experience of WordPress

What do I do with WordPress

The first thing I always do is run the site through the simple health-checks to see just how badly it performs.

From then, most of my days are spent putting WordPress in the bin.

Clients come to me with a website that isn't performing well, it's slow and cumbersome, and on first glance I'm not surprised.

Usually it's been built by some bloke on UpWork for £5 an hour, or they've found a cheap so-called "web-designer" locally.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

When a website is re-built by an expert, you get results like this: