Will WordPress continue to dominate in 2021 and beyond?
Technology advances in leaps and bounds these days. What didn’t even seem possible or affordable just a few years ago is now so accessible and ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine life without it.
If we’ve learned anything, though, it’s not to put all your eggs in one basket. The ‘next big thing’ might be gone tomorrow, Godzilla-stomped by something better, smarter, faster, and less expensive.
Now, you might be the type of person who’s going to hang on for dear life when the change comes, but we’ve seen how that goes. No matter how hard you cling to that software/operating system/browser/platform, there are good reasons to leave it behind. When the new players outperform the OGs, no amount of love will change the writing on the wall.
But sometimes, the old boss is the same as the new boss. In our opinion, WordPress takes that title when it comes to the broader CMS landscape. Sure, there are other solutions out there, and they all have fervent enthusiasts, but there are still lots of reasons to love WordPress over the rest, and that’s not just us talking. Based on its evolution, performance, and its ability to satisfy today’s stringent data security concerns, there is every reason to believe that WordPress will continue to dominate in 2021 and beyond.
Let’s find out why.
WordPress Dominates CMS Market Share
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world by far. By current estimates, WordPress has a market share of 61 percent, which is more than all other CMS combined. There are about half a billion WordPress websites, representing nearly 40 percent of all websites everywhere.
WordPress powers fifteen percent of the world’s top 100 websites. It’s the preferred platform for businesses of all kinds, including services, artists, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and eCommerce stores that rely on WordPress. It’s available in more than 100 languages, making it easy for companies to scale and enter new global markets.
Clearly, they’re doing something right. The people have spoken.
The Most User-Friendly Solution Wins Every Time
From a developer’s standpoint, WordPress is still and always number one. While it’s known for its user-friendly tools and almost endless customizations, it goes above and beyond in providing the kind of design and feature flexibility we need to do what we do. Since it’s open-source, we are free to customize features and plugins for the client until they are completely satisfied with the result.
Once we’re done and the hand-off to the client is complete, that’s where WordPress really proves its value. The back end is intuitively designed, making it super-easy for the client to manage and update their content. We’re there to develop new features and functionality when needed, but the day-to-day stuff is so simple that almost anyone can do it – which is not always the case with other top CMSs.
And speaking of plug-ins – with almost 54,000 to choose from, there are endless possibilities to consider right out of the box.
Simplifying SEO
One of the reasons that companies choose WordPress is for its superior SEO capabilities. When you look at all the details that make up a good SEO strategy, it can boggle the mind. You also have to consider that SEO “rules” are constantly changing, so what might keep you on top one day will tank your rank the next. WordPress sites are SEO-friendly in an organic sense because the framework is designed with search engine crawlers in mind. Even for the uninitiated, WordPress offers several SEO plugins that highlight aspects of your content or page design that might be hurting your efforts.
But Is It Secure?
Recent years have seen a massive spike in cybercrime, malware, hacking, ransomware, and so on. So much so that governments all over the world have taken steps to outline very strong legal language around data protection and online security. These regulatory frameworks changed the way we publish on the web, transact with customers, and the way we use and manipulate the data our sites collect. Violations of these frameworks come with hefty fines, and for some businesses, a failure to safeguard customer data has cost hundreds of millions of dollars – not to mention the damage done to their reputation.
New data privacy laws forced many businesses to invest in newly designed websites and server frameworks that would support the expectations of HIPAA, PCS, the GDPR, and other international data protection legislation. However, there were just as many companies who either didn’t think the issue applied to them or just didn’t anticipate what could happen.
And what did happen? The world shifted, and anyone still operating on an outdated platform left themselves open to malicious players. Threats evolve at breakneck speed these days. Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing fields in computing, and they simply can’t produce enough expertise to get ahead of the criminals.
We’re constantly reminded to update, get rid of unsupported software, and leverage next-gen tools to secure our systems and devices. Still, oddly enough, some people seem to think that because they’re not a major corporation, they’re not a target. Small business websites are hacked and taken over all the time – probably more often than all the big banks in the world combined.
It’s also true that among all the hacked websites in the world, a large number of them are WordPress sites – but keep in mind that this is a numbers game. You can’t dominate the internet landscape without taking a share of the hit.
The important thing to note is why these sites were hacked. In a nutshell, they were vulnerable because of the people managing them. Outdated plugins, unsupported themes, passwords, and user names open back doors for cybercriminals, but these are ultimately preventable mistakes that have nothing to do with the platform itself and everything to do with site maintenance and due diligence.
True too, WordPress experienced a pretty big hack back in 2017. In this event, 1.5 million WordPress sites were compromised, but the problem was fixed almost immediately by the WP development team. Since then, there have been no issues, so it’s reasonably safe to say that there is no cause for alarm where WordPress security is concerned.
The development team at WordPress is continually improving their technology. They work hard to patch and protect from known vulnerabilities and push out updates quickly. They’ve put millions of dollars’ worth of resources into keeping the platform secure, which helps us deliver a consistent and reliable product to our customers.
To fortify their efforts and ensure our clients benefit from the latest security features, we use Amazon Web Services, the most secure and robust server infrastructure in the world. We work hard to ensure a reliable, safe, and secure hosting environment for our clients’ WordPress sites. We would never settle for anything less than the best, and we wouldn’t expect you to either.
So, to answer the question of whether WordPress will continue to dominate the CMS landscape in 2021, you might say we’re counting on it.
View Websites We’ve Designed and Built in WordPress
To learn more about what WordPress development can do for your business, reach out to Gate 39 Media today. Let’s discuss the benefits of building a WordPress website for you.
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