WordPress is by far the most popular website platform in the world. An estimated 43% of all websites are built in WordPress.
It started 22 years ago as blogging software, it remains an excellent platform for that purpose. But it has long since evolved into a versatile tool for doing almost anything you want.
It is not, however, really a do-it-yourself platform, even though it is often described that way. It is way too complex for most people, with no background or experience. There ARE many DIY website builders, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. None are capable of turning out a professional website, in amateur hands. By making it easy, they limit what you can do with it. You aren’t going to win Formula One races in a car straight off the dealer’s lot.
So WordPress is a highly capable platform, with almost unlimited capabilities in the hands of a professional developer.
The success of WordPress starts with it being an open source platform – the code is available for free to anyone, and anyone can work on improving it. Over the years it gained the support and participation of programmers, developers, designers, and others in large numbers, all over the world.
The result is an entire ecosystem that supports the existence and ongoing development of WordPress. The WordPress development team provides regularly updated core software. Tens of thousands of independent developers conceive, create, and improve themes, plug-ins, and extensions. These can be found through WordPress.org where they are tested in the marketplace and the best of them become widely used. Since anyone can develop a plug-in for anything there is often a wide-choice of plugins for a given niche. These plug-ins are tested and supported. They are usually free or inexpensive, and easy to use. This means that complex or rarely needed functionality can be added easily and inexpensively to a site. If each plug-in on had to be coded for each website, many websites would cost ten times as much, be more subject to faults, and subject to becoming obsolete.
This is why there are millions and millions of WordPress websites. Even if someone came up with something better, it would have to develop a huge following before WordPress would be in danger of being put out to pasture. Meanwhile, WordPress continues to get better and better.
Here’s an example of why this works so well, One key addition is a page builder, that makes building pages easier. Over the years, these have evolved. Again, there are many page builders. In 2013 someone developed “Divi” and it quickly became most popular because of its ease of use and capabilities. Yet just three years later, another developer created “Elementor”, which was a quantum leap forward. Now most WordPress sites are built using Elementor – and Elementor continues to be improved.
You see now, why WordPress is so popular? And why those of us in the industry don’t see anything coming along to replace it. Of course nothing is forever. But, it could be a long time.