Can you use WordPress as your Content Management System? Let’s find out together!
WordPress is a great open-source content management system. It can help create websites within hours and launch them without entering a single line of code. But, is WordPress really a content management system in its true sense, or is it just a gimmick?
In this article, we find out the answer to this question and learn if WordPress is a scalable and reliable content management system for any scaling business.
Is WordPress a Content Management System?
WordPress is an open-source and free CMS that is a standalone platform. Once you have WordPress installed on your server, you can easily launch the blog or your business website without too much technical work if you are looking for a simple online presence.
However, a similar feature and functionality are offered by many other CMS or blogging framework, right? Then what is so much different about the WordPress content management system?
The answer lies in the elements it offers but to understand those elements, we will need to first know what a content management system actually does.
What is a Content Management System?
According to Wikipedia, a content management system is a software that allows its users to create, edit, and publish content on digital media without writing a single line of code. However, for a framework to become a complete content management system it should offer multiple content formats and allow a collaborative environment where multiple users can work together on a single item.
In summary, a content management system should:
- Offer different content formats for publishing content such as audio, video, image, gifs, embedded graphics, maps, and documents.
- Allow multiple user roles
- Allow liberty to the users to create any type of website they want may it be a blog, eCommerce store, gallery website, forum, social media platform, or a web app.
- It should offer third-party integrations so that users can connect to apps without digging into the CMSs functionality.
If we look closely at WordPress, it offers all these elements through its platform.
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Elements of WordPress Content Management System
Here is a list of content elements that WordPress has to offer to its users.
- Publishing Tools
- Management Tools
- Post Formats
1. Publishing Content Tools
WordPress offers a variety of publishing tools that users can use to improve the aesthetics of their website. These are:
- Posts: A simple blog post that you read on your website is called a post. You can design it in any way you want.
- Pages: Pages are just like posts but they are not listed in reverse chronological order (a blog feed) on a website. You have to make them appear separately through menu, links or banners.
- Media Files: Audio/Image/Video/PDF content that you can load to your web page through the WordPress media library.
2. Management Tools
Similar to Publishing tools, a CMS should have management tools available as well that can keep these publishing tools/elements organized. Here is a list of management tools that are offered by the WordPress content management system.
- Categories: Categories allow posts to be categorized in a single page. You can turn them into landing pages, pillar pages, or anything else.
- Tags: Tags work in the same way as categories in WordPress but their clout is small. Categories are general and tags are for smaller segments of content compilation.
- Author: Allows you to categorize author posts together on a single page. Visitors can see the list of blogs that an author has written.
3. Post Formats
Another great feature of WordPress content management system is the variety of post formats it offers. This allows it to be used by content creators of all types including video bloggers, gallery websites, music streaming websites, quotes websites, image sharing sites, and blogs.
- Image
- Video
- Post
- Status
- Quote
- Aside
- Link
- Audio
- Gallery
How WordPress Content Management System Changed Digital Businesses?
Before WordPress, website administrators had to build everything from scratch. Each website had a different functionality and it was hard to manage all those websites. Adding content to them was impossible for a non-coder because even if the content was dynamically called, it was first added to a database and then shown on the website.
Most website frameworks didn’t even support WYSIWYG editors (now Gutenberg editor) that is the unique sales proposition of WordPress.
After WordPress, anyone who had no idea of WordPress could create a WordPress-based website in minutes. Since WordPress used a simple structure, it was easy for developers to create paid and free themes and plugins for it. Because each theme and plugin can be installed on WordPress irrespective of the type of hosting package it uses. On top of it, there are hundreds of business website themes for WordPress sites.
WordPress also made it easier for users to install plugins and themes directly from its own store. Now, instead of downloading the installation file, people just had to press ‘Install’ and the theme or plugin was installed within seconds.
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How Can the WordPress Content Management System Help Your Business?
You can use WordPress to launch your website/web app/eCommerce store in a few clicks. It makes it easier to create site pages, posts, and manage them. You can even integrate external third-party applications on WordPress because of the plugins available.
So in summary, here is how you can use WordPress CMS to your benefit:
- Add unlimited posts and pages on your website
- Add an Ecommerce platform called WooCommerce to build online store with the click of a button absolutely free
- Add a forum or bulletin board to your website with a plugin
- Attach a CRM like Hubspot completely free
- Manage multiple WordPress based websites with a single dashboard using WordPress multisite functionality.
And much more…
Using WordPress as a Content Management System
Now back to our actual question, can you use WordPress as your content management system?
Definitely! By using WordPress, not only will you do away with the need of hiring a developer, but you will also find it a lot easier to add customizations to your WordPress website.
In the long-run, WordPress Content Management System will come out as a worthy investment that will not only save you time and money but will also help you scale your website like an expert with minimum hassle.
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