Although it started off as primarily a blogging platform, WordPress has grown into something much larger… According to W3Techs, WordPress powers over 33% of all websites on the Internet! If you limited the comparison with only CMS sites, WordPress accounts for over 60% of the market share.
If you’re thinking these number are only because of small, low traffic sites – you’re wrong. According to the Quantcast Top 10k (a list that tries to collect the 10,000 most-trafficked websites on the Internet), WordPress is even more popular among highly-trafficked sites:
- Sites in Quantcast Top 10k – WordPress holds a > 37% market share
- Sites in Quantcast Top 100k – WordPress holds a > 34% market share
Some highly visible WordPress sites include: New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, and NBC.
The huge number of installations dwarfs estimates for Drupal (+/- 2%/Internet or +/- 3.5/CMS) and Joomla! (+/- 3%/Internet or +/- 5.3% CMS) installations.
WordPress Basics
Building sites and structuring pages in WordPress is based heavily on its blogging nature. You can organize content by using categories and tags.
Categories can be arranged in hierarchies which allow you to develop the overall structural organization of your content.
Tags are single level and offer you a way to add more meaning and organization to articles and content. You can assign multiple categories and tags to an individual piece of content, making it easy to establish relationships and create highly descriptive content.
How WordPress Works
WordPress assembles pages in a modular way, with sidebars, footers, and headers existing as external files that are called and assembled into the finished page as it is requested. These files are called templates, and they are the building blocks of any WordPress site.
WordPress Loop
You can create multiple template files and then assemble pages using the templates that you need for that particular page. The content of the page is created using something called the WordPress loop and the template hierarchy.
The WordPress loop is a PHP function that loops through the site’s content and displays things like the appropriate number of posts or a specific article. The template hierarchy helps WordPress determine which loop is appropriate.
Example:
- If you’re on the index page, the index.php file has a loop that displays multiple posts.
- If a user clicks on one of those posts to read more about it, the single.php is called, which contains a loop that displays only the requested article.
WordPress allows you to create as many pages as you want manually and add and edit content directly on that page. This entire process, as well as the design and additional site functionality, can be controlled through a theme.
WordPress Themes
- Themes control the page layout and site construction.
- Themes are a collection of templates, functions, and CSS files.
- Themes provide a way for theme developers to extend the functionality of WordPress.
To successfully build a theme and customize WordPress’s behavior takes technical skills, but that hasn’t slowed the adoption of WordPress – that’s because of how easy it is to install and change themes. A well-built theme allows a user to simply install it, plug in content, and have a fully functioning site up and running in minutes.
Changing the the look and functionality of the site can be as simple as installing and activating a new theme or just tweaking the existing theme’s CSS.
There 10’s of thousands of free and premium themes available themes and the large development community make it easy to find a custom theme (or have one developed) that fits the needs of your site.
Additional Features
- There are > 29K plugins available allowing you to add new features easily
- There are > 10 of 1,000’s of free and premium themes available
- Roles and permissions can be extended through plugins
- Easy to track revisions and revert to previous versions
- Multilingual support through plugins
- Multisite support (after version 3.0)
Best Sites for WordPress
WordPress is a fantastic choice for smaller web sites that have a fairly simple structure. The relatively simple setup and installation is so straight forward, that non-technical people could set one up.
Even though WordPress can handle heavy traffic and contain as many pages as you want, using it for larger complex sites might not be the best choice due to the WordPress’ reliance on the loop which makes building a site that has content rules driven by complex business logic challenging.
If you want to learn more about the WordPress community and the CMS itself, visit the following resources:
WordPress.org
Support
Getting started guide
Download
Requirements
5 Minute Installation