Are you a savvy small business entrepreneur who realizes the power that lies within digital marketing? Your website presence is an integral part of your business, whether it’s a brick and mortar shop or a digital marketplace.

If you’re wondering what’s the best platform for your small business website, you’ve probably started to research for the answer. We’ll show you why you should use WordPress to maintain your web presence and promote your small business.

Why is a small business website important?

Having a small business website is important to create brand awareness of your product or service. Marketing strategy has always played an important part in promoting one’s business. In today’s world, digital marketing leads the way. The best way to do it is through your own website.

Reaching consumers through your website can lead to customer conversions and sales. The ultimate goal of any small business is to build their customer base. A small business website can do this for you.

Small businesses must have websites to be relevant in today’s digital landscape. More than 90% of consumers research online before making financial commitments. When you consider that 78.6 billion US dollars were spent on e-commerce just during the 3^rd quarter of 2017, you can understand why having a web presence is crucial to your business’s success.

A website can establish your credibility in the industry you represent. Your website is often the first place a consumer will learn about your services, products, or mission. Therefore, you want the best CMS to build your website and target consumers.

Why Use WordPress?

WordPress is undoubtedly the most widely used and well known of all the content management systems. In fact, almost 30% of all websites in the world operate through WordPress, which powers a multi-billion dollar global economy.

WordPress commands 76.4% of the market share of all CMS systems, powering over 75 million websites. It’s probably safe to say that digital marketing would not be what it is today without the dominant presence of WordPress. It literally makes the digital landscape go round.

Governments, universities, hospitals, media sites like CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, and Time place a high degree of confidence in WordPress by utilizing their platform. Many businesses in every industry, large and small, trust WordPress to run their sites. It’s a powerful tool that can do great things for your small business as well.

If those facts haven’t convinced you, let’s talk specifically about what WordPress can do for your small business. Here are 10 things to consider:

1. WordPress is free. It would be unheard of for your local newspaper to come to you and offer you space on their platform at no cost to you. But, that’s exactly what WordPress does, on a much larger scale, with the potential to reach thousands or millions of consumers. You just have to choose your theme, upload it and maintain your site, all of which is easy as long as you know what you are doing, if not, check out our course.
2. WordPress can do it all. You’ll likely want to blog about things relevant to your business. In fact, you can promote your business through your blog and establish yourself as an expert in your field. For a complete digital marketing plan that can offer much more in the way of success, you should also consider a social media presence to link back to your blog and vice versa. With WordPress, the functions are already built in for you to do so. This can save you much needed time and effort so you can focus more on building your business.
3. WordPress is intuitive and user-friendly. Let’s face it, no matter how comfortable we are with a computer, the idea of building a website from scratch is somewhat daunting. The great thing about WordPress is that it’s easy and even tech newbies are able to build a website on WordPress.
4. WordPress has search engine optimization tools. What this means is that WordPress has streamlined its platform to allow Google to find you better. In fact, the search engines love WordPress. It’s There are a variety of plug ins that help you optimize and WordPress does the rest of the heavy lifting for you. As long as you use relevant keywords within your blogs and customize each post, your website should rank higher with time. This translates to more traffic to your website. More traffic means more conversions.
5. WordPress is here to stay. It’s been around for many years and will continue to be here to stay. The CMS also continually improves as the digital climate evolves. Features and updates are constantly ensuring that WordPress remains relevant and safe from hackers. Web developers prefer WordPress over many other platforms because they’re familiar with the coding and know they’re working with a nearly flawless system.  Google wants more and more of the internet powered by WordPress.
6. WordPress has free themes and plugins. There are thousands of available themes and you can choose the one that fits you and your business. They are easy to install and allow you to customize your site without professional help. This can save you lots of money and give you more control over your website.
7. WordPress is mobile-friendly. This is a serious consideration since having a mobile-ready website is more important than ever. In fact, during 2019, Forbes says that nearly 72% of marketing budgets will go towards apps and advertisements for mobile platforms. Consequently, search engines are evolving to rank mobile-friendly websites higher. This highlights the need for your small business to have a dedicated web presence that’s mobile-friendly.
8. WordPress can convert your site to a digital store. There are a number of plugins such as Woo Commerce that you can use to create an online store. Tools like these can cost much more elsewhere, but it’s all available in WordPress.
9. WordPress allows you to choose your host. Working with WordPress gives you a lot of hosting options and today, hosting providers allow you to manage and maintain your own website so you don’t have to pay someone or a company to do it for you.  This means you’re free to try different hosts until you find the one you’re most comfortable with.
10. WordPress has multi-user functions. If you want help running your site, you can assign various roles for different people. For instance, you can remain as an administrator, while you assign an editor role to someone else. The editor can publish and manage the posts of others who contribute to the site. However, contributors or writers can upload posts to the site, but cannot publish them. You can easily delegate roles to others without relinquishing total control to certain people.

Hopefully, we’ve provided enough reasons why you should use WordPress for your small business website. Remember, your website is the digital footprint for your business. It’s an important part of your storefront every bit as much as a brick and mortar shop. You need a platform that you can rely on and from where you can reach your customer base. WordPress can do it all.  If you want to learn more about how to create a successful, business website using WordPress, check out our online course for assistance.