WordPress has indeed become one of the most popular platforms to build websites today. In fact, more than 24.7% of the websites are powered by WordPress. This number is impressive and so is the growth of WordPress. It has evolved from a blogging system into a full-fledged Content Management System (CMS), capable of powering communities, networks, and sites.
WordPress allows you to create a variety of websites, from e-commerce stores to informative blogs to business sites. Aside, it provides simplicity for the webmaster as well as the end user, thanks to its scalable, versatile and flexible nature. WordPress has become so popular that it is also being used by many major brands such as Facebook, Time Magazine, eBay, The New York Times, LinkedIn, Sony, Disney and so much more.
Best of all, WordPress offers a plethora of themes and plugins to help you design your website and extend its functionalities. The concept of WordPress plugins is introduced to help webmasters to add new features to their websites regardless of their lack of technical knowledge. However, they have become so common that a majority of WordPress users install plugins without even giving it a second thought.
Whether you want to give your users an option to translate your website or merely want to add a slider on the homepage, many webmasters turn to plugins to fulfill their requirements. Plugins are certainly a great way to improve the functionality of your WordPress powered website, however, using too many plugins can become the leading cause of your website failure. Of course, you wouldn’t want that.
WordPress, itself, comes with a plethora of features that make you want to stop using plugins forever.
Today, we are here to share some of these most useful and resourceful WordPress features to give WP the credit it deserves.
1. Multilingual
As a matter of fact, there are over 6000 different languages used across the world. While English has emerged to be the international language, there are still various countries that prefer their own language in regards to access the internet. Therefore, WordPress has been translated into more than 70 languages to enable webmasters to build websites in their mother language to cater to a specific type of customers and offer best user experience possible. Moreover, it provides extended character support from its 4.2 version.
2. Publishing Tools
WordPress also comes with a powerful publishing tool to allows you to manage your content and enable you to create, save and preview your content. It also allows you to schedule publication of your content for particular time and date. This feature helps you publish the post in the peak hours of the day while helping your reach your target audience. Scheduled publication feature not only improves user engagement but also reduces the bounce rate. Aside, it gives you the freedom to make your post public or private depending on your requisites as well as secure some posts and pages with a password.
3. Media Management
Media is one of the most important factors that contribute hugely to the success of a website. Since visual content has the power to capture the attention of users, it makes absolute sense to use it to its full potential. WordPress allows you to conveniently and quickly upload and manage media by dragging and dropping images into your uploader and add it to your site. You can also create galleries, insert images, add titles, captions and alt text to your image to optimize it for the search engines. In addition, WordPress also offers certain image editing tools.
4. Quick Permalinks
URLs are an important component of a website, especially when it comes to optimizing a site for the search engines. If your URLs are a phrase or keyword oriented, you can rest assured that your website will be ranked higher in the search engines. Thus, configuring permalinks of a website is the foremost thing that a website owner does. Unlike other platforms, WordPress is equipped with an option to configure permalinks of your site from right within your WordPress dashboard to help you in optimizing your site.
5. User Management
A site usually has many users working on it but not every user needs to have full website access. As an instance, you may not want to give your editor a permission to publish an article. Similarly, a contributor may only have permission to save a new post as a draft.
Wordpress offers a powerful and intuitive user management system to help webmasters manage the roles and permissions of various users. WordPress allows 5 different user roles to be assigned including Administrator, editor, author, contributor and subscriber where every user has its own role and permissions.
6. Built-in Comments
A website is created for users and customers and thus, you would indeed want to communicate with them to know their feedback. WordPress also comes with an inbuilt commenting system that enables users to publish a content on a WordPress powered website and leave their feedback about the website. From allowing users to share their views to build a forum for discussion, WordPress built-in commenting system makes it possible for the webmaster to easily manage user comments.
There is no doubt that WordPress is an extremely useful and powerful tool that allows you to build aesthetically appealing and fully functional websites. So, next time you plan on adding a plugin, considering checking WordPress’s inbuilt features first.
