Is WordPress still relevant in 2021?

For the majority of the development community, WordPress CMS is still a great choice that is simple, powerful, and free. Though it has some shortcomings, you can always fill it using the vast library plugins to overcome them.

Starting in 2003, WordPress was launched for blogging purposes. Since it is an open-source CMS, many developers around the globe started working on WordPress and adding extra features to it. WordPress uses MySQL and PHP.

On research, it was found out that by December 2018, websites using WordPress had monthly views of over 22 billion. While that wasn’t enough in 2019, the WordPress CMS managed to win over 60% of the websites on the web, powering more than 75 million websites.

WordPress used to be a blogging platform, but it’s adapted well over the years and become highly versatile, allowing users to create fully functional sites of any category. It’s also open-source software, meaning it’s completely free, redistributable, and offers unlimited validity.

In this article, we will answer a simple question: Is WordPress still relevant coming in 2021? And is it still worth learning WordPress?

Why WordPress

WordPress CMS is used in countless different ways, ranging from the simplest of websites to complex eCommerce marketplaces furthermore anything in between.

Following are few things as to why you should learn WordPress in 2021.

• In 2021, multiple websites are adopting it as their CMS. These increased WordPress websites will require more WordPress developers.
• Now, desktop applications are also becoming online-based. This signifies that more people will try to solve their problems using online tools growing in popularity nowadays. And WordPress is the perfect tool to transform a desktop application into an online application.
• WordPress being open source, you do not have to buy it to analyze its code structure.
• WordPress community is immense. One never feels stranded if any help or assistance is required while writing codes to develop a theme or plugin.

WordPress Statistics 2021

These statistics concentrate on WordPress’ overall market share and other usage statistics.

• WordPress now powers 40.0% of websites in the CMS market.
• It is the fastest growing and the most widely-used CMS. Of the top 10 million websites online, 500 websites built each day are powered by WordPress (versus 60-80/day built on managed platforms such as Shopify or Squarespace or Wix).
• Adding to that, WordPress powers 14.7% of the world’s top websites.
• 39.6% of the internet is WordPress powered. With a growth of nearly 5% from the previous 35% in the year 2020 furthermore a 4% rise from 2019.
• If you consider only the CMS-built sites, 64.1% are built using WordPress – 5% growth from 2020.
• WordPress sites receive over 400 million visits each month.
• But WordPress is not only for blogging – WooCommerce supports nearly 28% of all e-commerce on the web.
• WordPress.org offers over 50,000 plugins and over 4,100 GPL-licensed themes.
• In 2018, the non-English WordPress downloads were more than the English ones.

These facts and numbers are essential and show why WordPress plays a crucial role in the online business environment.

Identifying these capabilities has encouraged companies of all sizes to opt for them, leveling the playing field. However, regardless of the features and extent of ability, the prime clincher of how effective your WordPress site is your creativity, not the project’s cost. This opens even for small businesses to compete with large, global brands and organizations that enjoy massive marketing budgets.

WordPress CMS Community

WordPress has a tight community with enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, so it’s no surprise that many people within that community recommended newbies start chatting with others. Having a desire to continuously learn and get help will take you far.

There are plenty of places to get connected. You could check out the WordPress core developer chats on the #wordpress-dev channel on the Freenode IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network if you’re a developer. Just listening to what’s going on in the discussion will help you understand the direction of the codebase and the decisions made. You’ll also discover who is doing the talking, i.e., who the project leaders are.

As a developer, open-sourcing your software and distributing it has always paid off for the community. Considering WordPress, this may include a plugin or theme that you may be working on and would like to involve the contributors. These source codes can be easily shared using the WordPress and GitHub repositories.

This will enable you to get feedback and ideas from the community experts, which will help in improving whatever you’ve built or contributed. All of this will result in learning something new along the way.

The other great advantage about getting involved with the community is you’ll make friends and build a support network, which indicates if things do go wrong in the future, there’ll be people around who can help you out.

What do you say, are you convinced? If you’re already using it, why do you love it? Let me know in the comments below; let’s build a better community.

WordPress CMS Enormous Theme Library

Both WordPress and third-party marketplaces offer a myriad of free and premium themes for you to download. The only work you’ll need to do is install and customize it. The WordPress theme library is by far the best place to look for themes that are entirely free to use. It contains several themes for every genre and category, which offers complete customization and flexibility. The themes are easy to understand and can be installed with a single click.

To know more about WordPress themes, please follow this detailed guide on installing a WordPress theme.

WordPress CMS Mobile Optimization

Every year, more users are actively visiting websites through their hand-held devices. However, many sites still aren’t optimized for different screen aspect ratios, resolutions and fast-paced loading. Favourably with WordPress, your site will be packed with mobile features right off the bat, between some built-in WordPress functionality and most WordPress themes.

From site design to image scaling, most of these essential features will naturally happen with a WordPress responsive theme – no extra coding is required. This will enable both users and search engines to access your site on all devices, resulting in a great user experience no matter the screen size.

Google also prioritizes mobile experience for its ranking criteria, so it is imperative to consider if you want your website to show up in mobile search results. With the introduction to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google’s algorithm crawls every page as mobile-first before indexing it.

Between WordPress themes and plugins, it’s outrageously easy to create a mobile-friendly website. It’s no wonder more than 40% of websites use it!

To know more about it, please follow the guide to How Image Optimization can be achieved in WordPress

Integration with Other Tools

If you’re building a website, you probably have an objective – it can simply be to showcase your work, generate leads for your business, or streamline information for your users. Regardless of the goal, you’re using a few other apps to achieve them, like social media, email campaign and marketing tools, or analytics applications like Google or Adobe.

WordPress is a top-rated platform and easily compatible with a lot of other online tools. Whether it connects via an API or a plugin, the process to combine these tools in your workflow is super simple.

Conclusion

WordPress, which was founded 15 years ago, has evolved a lot since its original inception. But the principal idea and the core functionality of empowering users to start personalized blogs is always a vital feature of this tool. It has also evolved and is now used by all companies, from Enterprise to Fortune 500 companies.

This article talked about a fantastic CMS and tried to explain if learning WordPress is worth it. WordPress is the most powerful website builder globally, with over 75 million websites built with it, and 500 more are created daily.

A lot of big brands and organizations have chosen this platform to design them. The features it offers and its flexibility has convinced big corporates to stop paying big money for static websites and use WordPress instead. WordPress can’t be rivalled anytime soon, and it’s only continuing to grow. With new SEO features, improved dashboard functionality, and UI updates coming in the future, the platform is only getting better and better.

Let me know what are your thoughts on this in the comment section below.