Have you ever hated something that everybody else loves? Most people have. It might be a band or musician that everyone else has fallen head over heels in love with, but you can’t stand. It could be a movie that everyone else thinks is the greatest thing they’ve ever seen, but you were bored with by halfway through. Even more likely, it might be a television show that the whole world raves about. Until the series ended earlier in 2019, many people online reported being the only person in their entire friendship group who didn’t enjoy ‘Game of Thrones.’
If you know how that feels, you’ll also know that your hatred for whatever’s being discussed only increases the more other people insist that you should like it. The more your friends tried to push on you that ‘Game of Thrones’ was the show that television was invented for, for example, the more you took the view that it was a nerd-fest about winter and dragons. That’s a natural response – the more people try to drag us away from our perspective, the more we dig in our heels. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel that way about WordPress.
We realize that we might be onto a hiding to nothing here, but we really love WordPress. We’ve heard all the common objections to it, and we believe we have answers to them. If you haven’t moved your website across to WordPress yet, but there’s still a tiny part of you open to the idea of doing so, please read through our reasoning. We hope we’ll be able to change your mind.
Objection: “It’s Too Common”
We know what you mean. WordPress’ share of the market when it comes to building webpages is almost unbelievably high. As of 2018, it was believed that WordPress was the power behind 30% of all the websites on the entire internet. When you consider how many billions of websites there are out there, that’s a frightening number. It makes them the Microsoft of webpage building, and who really wants to put their hand up and say that they’re a big fan of Microsoft? It isn’t the done thing, because it isn’t cool. Nobody wants to go to a party in the same clothes as their friends. Nobody wants to have a WordPress website if everybody else already has one.
Try to think of it from the other point of view, though. There are thousands of ways to build and host websites out there. Why is WordPress the most popular? We’ll go back to Microsoft. Windows didn’t become the most popular operating system by accident. It happened because it was the best piece of software for the job at the time. WordPress is the same. It commands such a huge market share because it’s so perfectly suited to its task.
Objection: “It Looks Too Basic”
We hear this one a lot. There’s a feeling that all WordPress sites look the same or have the same basic appearance. While we’ll always have time for a clean, well-presented website, there is such a thing as having too uniform an appearance. The internet isn’t a British public school, and websites shouldn’t be dressed in identical clothes.
The thing is, they don’t have to be. These identikit websites you’re seeing have been put together by people who either don’t understand they can use different themes or haven’t put enough time into customization. There’s another thing we want you to consider though – sometimes, simple can be good. Take a look at the way that mobile slots websites set themselves up. Their customers go to them because they want to play online slots, and so they respond by listing their most popular mobile slots on their homepage, one click away as soon as visitors arrive on their site. Sometimes, we make simple tasks online too difficult by putting too many obstacles in the way of the customer or the reader. Mobile slots websites make a lot of money. Sometimes, basic is good.
Objection: “It’s A New Skill I’d Have To Learn”
OK, we won’t disagree with you. It is a new skill you’d have to learn, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Every skill you now take for granted is a skill you had to learn at one point, though, and you presumably now rely on several of those skills in order to earn your income. We never stop learning all the way through our lives. What’s so bad about learning a skill which will make you better at designing websites? At what point in the future do you believe that the ability to design a functional website will cease to be useful?
If you can write a blog, you can use WordPress. You’ve seen some of the badly-made WordPress sites out there. Do you rate your skills so poorly that you don’t believe you can do better than that? WordPress is designed to be simple to use and intuitive to pick up. You’ll be amazed at how much you can do after a few days of learning. Even spending a weekend learning the basics would be sufficient for you to pick up the skills required to make a basic page.
Objection: “It’s Just A Place For Blogs”
WordPress is not just a place for blogs. It’s a platform that has millions of blogs on it, but that’s not the same thing. Despite the perception that WordPress is just a place where people blog, or small businesses build their websites, nothing could be further removed from reality.
Here are just a few of the massive international brands and companies that use WordPress for their websites: Mercedes Benz, CNN, Vogue, The New York Times, and the Harvard Business Review. Even military websites in both the USA and the United Kingdom are built on WordPress. You just didn’t realize that, because they haven’t been put together using basic themes. Now you see what we mean about not all WordPress sites looking basic!
If you’re totally opposed to using WordPress, we understand. Not everybody has to like the same thing. We love it, and we think more people should be using it, but we can’t make you see our point of view if you’re determined not to. If you’re on the fence and prepared to invest a little bit of your time into seeing how it all works, though, we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. What do you have to lose by finding out?