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Since its introduction in 2003 and up until now, WordPress has become powerhouse blogging platform and more importantly CMS (Content Management System) of choice for many web developers. Just to illustrate how popular WordPress actually is, let's just mention stats from April 2016, according to which WordPress is powering impressive 26,4% of all pages on the Internet. Even highly traffic sites such as The New Yorker, Forbes, Variety, Fortune, Reuters Blogs, to name a few, are using WordPress for content management. But what's so special about it? WordPress Is Open Source Project With Great Community WordPress is a free open source project. That means that it is free to use and modify all of its components. Source code is available to anyone curious enough in finding out what is happening beyond the curtains. In fact, since WordPress is open source project, it is updated and improved on daily basis by thousands of dedicated and talented individuals. Not only that, but over the time WordPress has build the community of users ready to help out anyone who might stumble upon any type of issue with the platform. At this point knowledge base is quite in detail and cover almost any problem you might come across. But if you still get stuck, feel free to ask away, you'll get the answers in no time. Wordpress Is User Friendly One of the main reasons for the popularity of WordPress is its ease of use. Let's talk about installation first. For start, all you need to do is have hosting place supporting PHP programming language and MYSQL databases. If you are passing these two requirements you are free to start building your first page. But don't be afraid if you are not too skilled in coding, as WordPress will allow you to set up everything without writing a single line of code. Although, let's be clear that if you are well versed in coding, you will reap many additional benefits. Its dashboard is clean in design and it won't take you too much time to get used to it. Adding content and writing posts on your page has never been this easy. WordPres Is Highly Customizable Wordpress offers plethora of plugins for bringing your page to the next level. In reality, these plugins are small programs that once installed can greatly improve functionality of your page, both front-end as well as back-end. For example with plugin you can add simple things like Twitter feed, image gallery, social buttons to your page. But plugins can greatly help with more complicated functionality like adding web site security, setting up web shop, generating special XML sitemap, creating contact forms, scheduling back-up and so on. Sky is the limit here. Additionally, if you want to change visual style of your page, you can do so with plethora visual themes for WordPress available all around web. Just like with plugins, these themes can be both free or sold as premium products. All you need to do is to find suitable theme that matches style of your web site well, and just apply it through the dashboard. WordPress Is Search Engine Friendly Out of the box WordPress is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly thanks to using standard compliance high quality code. That basically means that you won't have to put much effort into optimizing your page to finally appear among search results on Google and similar search engines. Although, according to SEO experts, this can be further improved with additional use of popular plugins such as All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO, which will teach you how to write good articles attractive to search engines. As you can see, WordPress is a powerful platform. You can use it for almost any type of page, whether that might be personal blog, web shop, online portfolio, magazine or something else. With visual themes and plugins taking care of look and functionality of your site, you can focus on bringing your ideas to life.
