WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. It is freely licensed and developed by a huge user community. By default, WordPress provides only minimal options for organizing a blog, but thanks to extensions, users turn a simple engine into a universal tool for creating various sites, from landing pages to multi-page portals with a million audience.

User-friendly

WordPress is deployed in one click on almost all hosting services, so there will be no problems installing the system. You can also install it manually by downloading the distribution kit from the developer’s site – there are enough instructions and guides on this issue. The tutorials will also be needed to perform the initial engine setup, which includes changing the general operating parameters and installing several required plugins.

The fifth version of WordPress introduced the visual editor Gutenberg. He made the system even more user-friendly. Once created and pre-configured, Gutenberg becomes the main tool for customizing the look and feel and managing content. He suggests building pages from functional blocks that perform different tasks:

• adding text content: headings, paragraphs, quotes, lists;

• inserting media files: individual pictures, galleries, audio recordings, and videos;

• integration of markup elements;

• hosting widgets and applications created by third-party developers.

Each block has its settings, which can be changed manually. For example, to insert a post from a social network, you no longer need HTML code. It is enough to select the appropriate block and provide a link to the record. The display parameters will be selected manually, you just have to accept or change them.

Combinations of blocks can be saved as templates and then applied to other pages. This approach increases the speed of website development and subsequent content addition. This is the same job as in the editor of any website builder. For a CMS, this is not a typical situation, but I am glad that WP developers continue to move towards visualizing settings and simplifying the system.

The classic editor has been disabled due to the implementation of Gutenberg. It is returned using the Classic Editor plugin. This is a solution for those who do not like the visual editing mode, so here WP tries to be as convenient as possible for webmasters with different preferences.

SEO

WordPress sites easily rank high in search engine results thanks to the excellent technical optimization of the engine. However, the system in the minimum configuration offers users an extremely meager set of tools for promotion: you can only choose the way of displaying the address – with WWW or without WWW – to exclude the creation of mirrors and set the appropriate link format.

Installing an SEO Friendly theme is also beneficial. Friendliness in this case means compliance with the layout requirements for CSS and HTML5 standards, as well as quick display of pages after clicking on the links. In the description of such templates, it is written as follows: SEO Friendly.

WordPress isn’t perfect

Sites created on it are often hacked, but this is not a problem of the engine, but a consequence of its prevalence: it is used by millions of webmasters, many of whom are not puzzled by a deep study of security issues.

Another potential drawback is performance degradation due to the use of a large number of plugins. All novice webmasters face this. WordPress offers a million possibilities, I want to try everything, but at some point, the add-ons start to load the server too much. The problem is solved by moving the site to a more powerful and expensive infrastructure or by abandoning plugins – after all, the open-source code of WordPress allows you to implement individual functions on it without installing add-ons. True, this will require programming skills or a budget to attract specialists.