Welcome to The Complete Guide To WordPress – this is the first instalment of weekly posts.

This course is designed to guide you through how to set up, host, customise and use WordPress for your blog.

You might be wondering what makes WordPress so good. Well, here are 9 reasons why you should consider moving to WordPress.

WordPress is easy to set up, manage and update.

You don’t need to be a website designer to start a WordPress blog – with one-click install and one-click updates, you can easily set up and manage your site on your own.

Thousands of themes.

WordPress has thousands of themes to choose from for absolutely free. You can also buy many stunning themes all around the web, or have custom ones made.

Plugins.

Plugins are one of the best features of WordPress. With thousands upon thousands to play with, all for free, you can get ones to help manage your content, change fonts, improve SEO, related posts, check broken links and more which can be an alternative to spending money on marketing agencies such as MangoMatter Media.

Search engine friendly.

By design, WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic mark up  (I don’t know what that means, but it sounds impressive, huh?) which is attractive to search engines. On top of that, there are plugins that help your blog to become even more search engine friendly.

Mobile web friendly.

WordPress themes are mobile responsive, meaning your site will look great on mobile as well as desktop – very important in 2017 when more people are reading blogs on their phones or tablets rather than their computer.

It supports different media.

You can cut and paste the URL of a YouTube video, Instagram pic, Tweets and Soundcloud audio and it will automatically embed into the post – so it’s very easy to share media on your blog.

It’s not just for blogs.

WordPress doesn’t have to just be for bloggers – but you can use it for a other things, too, such as:

• An eCommerce website.
• A Blog.
• A Video.
• A Service/Appointment Booking Website.
• A Photography Website.
• A Directory Website.
• A Classified Ads Listing Website.
• A Membership Website.
• A Question Answer Forum.
• A Knowledgebase.

Large WordPress community for troubleshooting.

WordPress has a support forum that has millions of questions and answers so you can search through previous questions or add your own if you come across a problem.

WordPress is secure.

23% of websites are run off WordPress – this means hackers are often trying to find ways to hack it. But fear not, regular updates keep WordPress safe and secure – remember to keep your plugins and version of WordPress up to date to avoid hackers.

Tune in next week to see what hosting packages you can get for your blog.