Hey guys,
I want to talk about WordPress (WP) for today. It is one of the famous CMS platforms that has been around for decades.
Nowadays, people still consider WP as their go-to CMS for their websites, blogs, showcases, etc.
Let's check out why WP is so cool and awesome.
First, the Inspiration
The inspiration for this post is based on the newsletter from Nevo David 😆
And recently, I've been deployed 2 new sites using WP (after 6 years). A lot of things have changed (in a good way).
Why WordPress?
Top-notch CMS with decades of experience
You know what they said: the older, the wiser.
The same goes for WP, with years of experience, WP is still going strong & better every day.
Easy installation with not-so-many dependencies
That's right, WordPress installation has been super straightforward since then.
There are only a few steps:
Download the source code, unzip it
Setup PHP, MySQL & Apache/Nginx
Change the DB config in
wp-config.php
Then we can visit our website and finish the installation.
Well, if you compare WP with other CMS platforms, the installation isn't that simple.
State-of-the-art Editor: Gutenberg
In order to write a good post, a good editor is required. In the past, the previous editor of WP was amazing.
But then they released Gutenberg in Dec 2018, which is more powerful. The customization, the looks, the integration, etc. Everything works so well.
Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
Simply install Yoast SEO plugin, the FREE version has everything that we need (of course if you're a hardcore SEO engineer, go for the PRO version)
Yoast will give us a lot of helpful SEO recommendations, keyword tracking, etc.
Flexibility
WP isn't just built to be a simple blog. It can be your landing pages, home websites, e-commerce, resumé, etc.
You can check out a lot of awesome plugins and make your life easier.
Nowadays, people really care about performance (otherwise PageSpeed would bite us), so most plugins are well-optimized.
A lovely Media Manager
This is also a must-have for those who need to insert & manage many media files (images, videos).
API-ready / Headless CMS opportunities
WP exposes APIs for you so that you can use WP as a headless CMS and build your own front-end website.
Pretty handy for those who don't want to do frontend stuff in PHP (and JS) together.
(Optional) Monetization-opportunities
How?
Sell your themes
Sell your plugins (one-off or subscription)
Conclusion
Honestly, everything has pros and cons, that's the nature of software engineering. But I do see more PROs from WP: easy setup, big community, SEO optimization, and a great editor.
Price: Cheap
We can run WordPress on cheap shared hosting, or if you don't like shared hosting, buy a VPS from any service. The starting price would be around 3 USD/month.
My recommendation: use Vultr. It's cheap, reliable, and simple to set up everything.
I'm using 10+ Linux VPS on Vultr and totally love it.
Performance: Fast+
PHP (8.3+) is blazing fast nowadays, thus boosting WordPress up to a brand new level.
Want a higher next level? Check these out:
They will run WP in a long-running process (same as Node.JS or Go), which reduces the bootstrap time & database connection => ridiculously faster.
Why not use WordPress for this blog?
You might ask why I'm using HashNode. Fair enough, these are the reasons behind:
I was too lazy 🥲 to:
Find or make a theme
Deploy a new site
I wanted to create a simple blog (as simple as possible) just to write notes, and share knowledge.
- Lazy to follow best SEO practices too 😆.
Will I ever migrate to WP?
Never say never, right? 😉
Final
Thanks for reading 😉. See you in the next article.