As the number of websites powered by WordPress surpasses the 50 million mark, its time to take a look at some of the reasons fueling the platforms popularity.

Firstly, lets clear up the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com offers users a free blog, hosted by WordPress. Over 285 million people view more than 2.5 billion pages each month. WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day.

WordPress.org is the place to go to download the WordPress publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. This provides development teams with the files required to install the WordPress platform on the required server.

Initially created as a blogging platform, WordPress has developed into arguably the most complete and comprehensive web publishing tool available. Match this with its Content Management System, impressive security tools and its lovely user friendly interface, its easy to see why its so popular. WordPress has a huge open source developer community behind it, constantly updating & improving the various plugins available. Perhaps the largest factor, though, is the fact that WordPress is free.

User friendly Content Management System

The WordPress backend interface is very well designed, and simple to use. You require no technical ability or coding knowledge. The layout of the user interface instantly feels intuitive.

Search Engine Optimisation

The visibility of your website depends on many factors, but clean, well structured code is a must. Combined with semantic code, WordPress offer various plugins and tools to allow you to optimise your website for search engines, quickly & efficiently.

Themes & Widgets

As previously mentioned, WordPress has a huge developer community. One of the best features of the WordPress platform is the widget based approach to design & layout. Through the backend, users can modify their theme a the click of a button. Themes are available free of charge, whilst others are paid. There are currently 120 themes to choose from on WordPress.com, coming from various sources, designers & developers.

Security

We are all aware of the headaches of ‘Spamming’, irrelevant hyperlinks posted to blogs and forums, usually taking users to suspicious websites containing malicious code. Usually scripts or automated bots target high traffic websites. WordPress comes with anti-spam protection in the form of Askimet. This tool is regulary updated to keep one step ahead of the spammers.

Currently WordPress is used by over 14% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites. These including TED, CNN & TechCrunch to name a few. There’s no denying the Platforms popularity, and it’s market dominance will no doubt continue to grow, which is no bad thing.