For me, WordPress is compelling as technical solution to publishing a web site. Below I discuss four key reasons I that think WordPress should be on your short list when choosing a web platform.

Support is available

If you can’t find an answer to your WordPress question then you are probably trying to do something that shouldn’t be done. There are so many good resources out there that you’d have to be doing something very obscure not to find someone who has experienced the problem before and written about it.

Support comes in the form of community forums, YouTube, blogs, and dedicate sites. Most hosting providers will have some WordPress documentation to help get you up and running with their hosting service.

Training is available

There are complete, structured courses that take you from newbie to competent, to expert. One of the very best resources is WPBeginner which has a very comforting “Start Here” section. Ease yourself into WPBeginner blogs, sign up for the free video course, read their newsletters, or search for specific (or maybe random) topics. Syed Balkhi, the owner of WPBeginner, and the WPBeginner team curate the best WordPress information and keep it up to date.

Aside from WPBeginner, you’ll find hundreds of YouTube videos but you’ll need to evaluate where you spend your time because some YouTube videos are no longer current for the latest WordPress versions.

WordPress is extendable

WordPress is a software system that manages your web site content. The designers rightly decided to focus on the core functionality and leave “the fancy bits” to extra pieces of software called “plug-ins”. This results in software that performs well and is manageable from a developer maintenance perspective. The core WordPress doesn’t carry all the baggage of every bell and whistle that someone may want.

There is a rich and thriving variety of plug-ins that should meet just about any need you have for your web site. If you find that there isn’t a plug-in that does exactly what you need then you can commission a developer to create it for you. That’s the beauty of having an extensible system.

WordPress can be deployed on many different hardware configurations

WordPress is based on some fairly ubiquitous software foundations – mySQL and PHP. PHP is a programming language that is still actively developed and is supported by a passionate community. mySQL is a database management system that is currently owned by Oracle Corp, and is actively developed.

WordPress can run on shared hosting or a dedicated server, wherever PHP and mySQL are available. The hardware requirements are fairly modest. I have sites running that use 1 CPU and 512MB of memory. For a small site with little activity this is sufficient. Larger sites will need more hardware resources. It can be quite economical to install WordPress on shared hosting, a small virtual private server, or even that almost-obsolete machine sitting in the corner of your office.