What is WordPress? And How does it Work?
WordPress
Still don’t know what WordPress is? Do you want to make a website and are trying hard to learn code? The secret of almost 40% of the websites that have stood created in history is WordPress.
If you do not know WordPress and want to create a much more comfortable website than chopping code, we will tell you how to get it in this article.
Table of Contents
What is WordPress?
WordPress stands a web content management system (CMS or content management system ), which, in a few words, is a system to publish content on the web in a simple way. It is so common that it is the absolute leader worldwide to create websites for many years.
It is open-source software (you can access all the code) that we can also try to improve within your community. Therefore WordPress is free, and we can download it from their servers https://wordpress.org/ for different purposes.
WordPress came to democratize the web, like other CMS. Since 2003, it is a content management system that makes web content creation dependent on programmers and people with high technical knowledge. Now, anyone can create a website.
WordPress remains divided into three parts :
- Core: WordPress itself, which is free and downloadable.
- Their appearances a substantial free repository, but there are also paid resources outside of the warehouse.
- Plugins: utilities that can turn your website into almost anything. Like themes, there is a free repository and thousands of companies that sell its features.
Advantages of WordPress
WordPress has stood around for over 17 years. He must have apparent advantages over the competition to have been at the top for so long and increasingly take advantage of his pursuers. Right now, 60% of websites that remain made with CMS do so with WordPress.
We are going to tell you six advantages of WordPress over other CMS.
WordPress Themes
Changing the visual appearance of a website in WordPress can be done with just a few clicks. There are thousands of free themes in the official repository that will allow us a website with a professional appearance in seconds.
The themes remain made up of templates that are each of the master pages that layout our content. The more customization in the article, the more templates it will have. These templates are independent of the content. They only give design so that they be able to stay rummage-sale for any content.
On the other hand, other payment options also create more advanced designs and are especially useful for larger projects, with innumerable complex templates.
WordPress Plugins
Plugins extend WordPress’s capabilities with utilities, ranging from something straightforward to change the web works completely. There are plugins to share on social networks, have an online store, improve the site’s performance, and create widgets.
The official repository has tens of thousands of free plugins packed with utilities. If you want something, indeed it is already created, and you can find it there. If not, there will always be the option to buy plugins in a marketplace.
Some plugins are visual editors that modify the themes and create highly advanced custom templates without just touching the code. Some of the most famous are Elementor, Divi, and Visual Composer.
Most of the pages in WordPress today are created with page builders or visual editors. So here we have a link between themes and plugins.
The Simplicity of WordPress
One of the great strengths of WordPress is its administrator or main dashboard. The WordPress backend, once learned, makes us much more productive.
If WordPress’s installation is in less than 5 minutes, and we are familiar with the administrator, we have already won a lot. If we also manage the theme and its customizer, in just 30 minutes, we can have laid the foundations for the entire design of the future website.
The WordPress Community
WordPress advances because there is a massive community behind that supports and improves the project every day. This support complements the code’s improvement, translation, events, forums, and uploading of themes and plugins.
WordPress Stability
WordPress takes been with us for more than 17 years, and it has never stopped evolving without leaving its first followers behind. This stability makes you know that a WordPress website can last for many years, and you will only have to update it simultaneously as the software.
WordPress Free
One of the main reasons is that WordPress is free. To work with WordPress, you will need a domain and hosting (or nothing if you install it on your computer) and everything else you can get for free: themes and plugins.
What can I do with WordPress?
While it is true that in principle, WordPress comes prepared to work with posts and pages, we can create any website with plugins.
Blog
By default, It allows you to make a blog with your posts. It was for the first thing that stood thought and for what the core adapts best.
A blog is a website that collects in reverse chronological order a series of articles (posts), which are published periodically, grouped by taxonomies (categories and tags), by dates, by the author, Which may also contain comments the readers.
As new content remains always placed in a preferential position concerning the previous ones, it remains though that the blog has a dynamic range.
Corporate Web
Corporate websites have content that is not preferential concerning the previous ones in time. They are websites with static content, no matter how much it can remain updated within the same web page.
They are pages like the main one, the contact page, who we are, services, forums. That can create a simple or much more elaborate web presence.
Online Store
One of the most famous plugins of the repository (WooCommerce) turns it into e-commerce. Many small online stores (and some not so little) use WooCommerce and its add-ons (added plugins) to sell daily on the network.
With WooCommerce, we can create simple products, variable products, categories, a shopping cart. And many more options related to shipments, taxes, means of payment, etc.
How to Install WordPress?
This is a free software CMS that you can modify and install wherever you want. The wordpress.com service is an adjusted facility where they charge you for several benefits, and it is minimal.
The most common thing for developers is downloading the software from wordpress.org and installing it wherever they want, even on a personal computer. Private hosting is nothing more than a foreign computer where we install something.
The most normal thing for users is installing the original wordpress.org software with a single click within the private hosting that we have contracted. That server should be minimally current and handle recommended versions of PHP and MySQL.
In any case, The installation is straightforward and can take from a few minutes to a few seconds, depending on the automation of the process. As long as you have OK hosting, this process is never going to be a problem.
How does WordPress Work?
But how does WordPress work in a nutshell?
- First of all, you must have hosting that is associated with a domain. Any hosting company will help you in this step, usually automatic on the cheapest (shared) servers.
- Later, we can automatically install it. We will have it hosted on our hosting and under our domain.
- Once installed, we must go to Settings and show that we have planned our website in URLs, images, site title, description.
- If we need more utilities, we must go to Plugins and begin with their installation. If we want a theme repository design, we must go to Appearance.
- To create dynamic content, we have the option of Tickets. To create static content, we have the option of Pages.
With this, we will have already created our website, fundamental, and we will have added its first content.