Forget Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and even the good old, “word-of-mouth.” Your business website is still ground zero for brand building. Your home page sets the entire tone for how visitors interact with you and your site and the opinions they form about you and your business. Gone are the days when you could pop out a basic Blogger.com site and check, “build the website,” off your to-do list.

If you’re serious about your business, then you need to be serious about your website. WordPress, is an open source website creation tool, and is probably the most powerful and easy to use website content management system (CMS) that’s currently available. Virtually everyone from major Fortune 500 companies to big-time blogs, including Mashable, TechCrunch, and the New York Times’ blog, uses WordPress.

Why WordPress is Right for Your Business

Most small business owners fall into one of two groups. In group one are the businesses that know they need a website but can’t seem to find the time or money to get their site off the ground. In group two are the businesses that have a website but know the site isn’t properly optimized for SEO and can’t figure out how to easily update content or even change the site’s theme.

As Andrew Filev, CEO and Founder of Wrike, noted, “In working within the environment of project management solutions, our team has benefitted by having an application like WordPress because it’s user-friendly, collaborative, and versatile. It helps my team prepare all types of content and produce a highly functional website.”

Here’s some bad news: if you’re in either one of the above-mentioned groups, you absolutely need to get serious about getting the right website up and running for your business. Here’s the good news: you don’t need to know how to write code or have a huge budget to hire a developer. You just need to migrate your site to WordPress.

“WordPress is without a doubt the most popular content management system currently in existence,” says HostGator CEO Adam Farra. Farra should know: HostGator offers a managed WordPress hosting platform and free migration service that Farra says is one of HostGator’s most popular products. “It’s entirely free to use and fully customizable, with no complex coding knowledge required. Every day we see more businesses making the switch.”

Are you considering making the switch to WordPress for your business? Keep the following in mind:

  1. WordPress is free. It is especially beneficial for businesses that are worried about the bottom line. (and aren’t we all?) WordPress won’t cost you a penny. Seriously, the hosting service cost is an average of as little as $7 per month, which is similar to what you’d pay for a competitor like Square Space (business plans start at $18 per month). With WordPress, you have the freedom to choose your host and set up a plan that works for you; if you ever need to switch hosts, your site is entirely yours to take wherever you choose.
  2. WordPress is highly customizable. Since WordPress is completely open source, anyone can create a theme. This means you can have a professionally designed website without needing to drop some serious cash on a web developer. If you change your mind about the design, you can easily switch to another theme. You may start your search for the perfect theme in the WordPress theme directory or choose a third party such as themeforest.
  3. WordPress is a powerful eCommerce platform. There are quite literally thousands upon thousands of robust WordPress plugins available free for use to extend and customize your site’s functionality. These options include the popular Woo Commerce, a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress that’s fully customizable and can transform your website overnight into a powerful eCommerce store. From digital downloads to international checkout, WordPress eCommerce plugins set your site up for success.Michael Gokturk, CEO and Co-Founder of Payfirma, noted, “It makes sense to use a platform like WordPress because it integrates with so many payment applications. This provides a way for an e-commerce business to connect with its customers in and through multiple convenient ways that cater to helping the customers pay for goods and services in the way they choose to do so.”
  4. WordPress solves your SEO troubles. At WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Cutts famously said, “WordPress solves a ton of SEO issues.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. WordPress takes care of the basic SEO mechanics, and plugins like the free Yoast SEO Plugin automatically performs SEO content analysis and optimization for all the content you wish to publish. The premium version includes local SEO assistance for Google Maps ranking and a video module for optimizing videos in search results, in addition to text and the use of dynamic images.
  5. WordPress is mobile friendly. With mobile usage exploding, your website not only needs to look great on a tiny smartphone screen, it needs to be optimized to work perfectly on mobile. There’s no need to design multiple sites: many WordPress themes use responsive design so they’re mobile-friendly and automatically adjust to changing screen dimensions.”WordPress allowed me to quickly install a theme that was already mobile friendly. This allowed for us to have our website up in a fraction of the time and with the latest features.” Says Micheal Schneider, Attorney at Schneider Law Firm, P.C.

Bottom line:

Don’t put off upgrading your website because you don’t understand the complex content management system, (and the IT guy who built it is long gone), or you can’t find money in the budget. With WordPress for small businesses, you have obtained the services of a competent, trained professional and your company will be taken care of by a powerful and easy to use platform which will be up and running in just days – for a fraction of what a custom build would have cost you.