20. What’s So Special About WordPress?

Stephanie 0:00

When it comes to creating a blog for your business, the platform you choose is a pretty big decision. Let's talk about why everyone seems to be using WordPress and why you might want to do the same.

Stephanie 0:11

Hey, there, teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:23

Welcome back to the podcast. Last month, we chatted about Pinterest, and now we're going to switch gears and talk more about blogging, and specifically, we're going to talk about things you can do behind the scenes to set up your blog for success. On the surface, it might sound like these posts are intended for brand new bloggers, but really, if you're a veteran blogger, I think you'll still find some helpful nuggets in these episodes, because if you're anything like me, back when you set up your website, you probably just followed some tutorials that you found online, and you clicked where you were told without really understanding why. So my hope is that we can dive into the why of some of these blog setup decisions. That way, when you are wanting to make changes to your website down the road, you'll know what you should probably keep the same and why. On the other hand, if you're a new blogger, I hope that these episodes will give you an important head start. You'll be able to avoid some of the common mistakes that new bloggers make as they're setting up their websites.

Stephanie 1:29

So without further ado, the first thing we're going to talk about today is the platform you choose to build your website on. Even if you're an experienced blogger and you've already made this decision, chances are that you've looked at your website expenses before and wondered if you made the right call. So let's chat about WordPress specifically, because it seems like most people build their websites on this platform. What's so special about it?

Stephanie 1:57

To get a better idea of what WordPress even is let's compare building a website to building a home. One of the very first things you need when you're building a home is a set of blueprints. You need to have a plan for how everything will fit together. A website platform allows you to build the framework for your site. Now, just like you can choose from different house designs, you can choose from various website platforms, depending on your needs. A very popular platform that most bloggers choose is WordPress, and it's considered a content management software. It was launched back in 2003 as a blogging only platform, but it has evolved over the years, and now it is one of the most popular website platforms out there. But one quick thing I want to point out is that there is a wordpress.com and that is more of an all in one blogging platform. We're not talking about that today. Instead, we're talking about wordpress.org and that is open source and free to use, but it takes some other investments to get your website up and running. So let's chat just a little bit about what those extra investments are. We'll go back to our home building analogy. So just like you need your blueprints, you also need the actual land to build your house on, and the better the land, the more stable and secure your house is going to be. And so in this analogy, the land for your house is your website host. You need to pay for space on a server where all of your website files will live, the better the hosting service, the more stable and secure your website is going to be. When you choose WordPress as your free website platform, you still need to pay for separate hosting. So some popular examples of website hosts are Bluehost, Big Scoots or GoDaddy. Now, there are website platforms out there that are more of an all in one solution. You've likely heard of these. There's Wix and Squarespace. Those are two of the more popular website platforms that include hosting as part of the website builder.

Stephanie 4:22

Now, since we're all about saving money here, you might be thinking, Well, why don't I just pay for an all in one solution. What's so special about WordPress? Well, first, like I mentioned earlier in this episode, WordPress is the standard when it comes to website builders. 43% of website owners use WordPress. Now, I'm not an architect or anything, but I assume that there are certain standards in formatting when it comes to creating those blueprints that I mentioned earlier. Since WordPress is what the vast majority of people use, it's much easier to get help when things go wrong, because people usually speak in terms of that WordPress language and those features when they're doing tutorials. In fact, I would say most YouTube blogging tutorials are based in WordPress. If you joined some sort of blogging mastermind group on Facebook and you were to ask a question of the group most people, if you don't say I use Wix or I use Squarespace, most people are going to assume you're working in WordPress, unless you specify otherwise. The second reason why you might want to consider building your website on WordPress is that even though it's a little bit more work to get everything set up, you do have more freedom and control over your website. Going back to our blueprint analogy, I know that there are certain subdivisions out there where the builders use one or two sets of plans, and home buyers choose from those particular plans. The builders have mastered these plans and have created efficient systems around them, and that helps them keep costs down, and it also helps to minimize, you know, the decision fatigue that homebuyers have, because a lot of the most important decisions have already been made. Unfortunately, this leaves not a lot of room for customizing the plans for the family's needs. They might discover once they get into the house that they wish they had been able to choose something different. Even though WordPress is a little bit more work right off the top, you'll appreciate the flexibility of being more in control of how you customize your website. Since WordPress is so popular, there is a vast library of plugins and themes that you can use to customize your website. You can make a decision on these customizations based on what will provide the best user experience, and not just what your website builder has available. And that leads me to the third reason why WordPress is so popular, because it's designed with SEO performance in mind as a whole. WordPress allows you to build really streamlined web pages, and they aren't bloated with a lot of extra code. So this means your page speed will be faster, user experience will be better, and these are two very important factors in getting Google to like your website. Now this is not to say that pages built on Wix or Squarespace can't rank. Of course, they can. You just have a little more control over your SEO when you use WordPress.

Stephanie 7:41

If you're already in the planning stages of your blog, or you've been blogging on a different platform for years, you might be wondering if you should switch to WordPress. My answer is that it depends. Migrating your website from one platform to another is very involved. While there are plugins that can make it easier. There are still many things you'll need to transfer manually or hire someone to do it for you, and only you can balance whether or not this investment of time or money is worth it for your business. So one question you could ask yourself is, am I leaving money on the table by not switching? Just as an example, I recently read a really interesting thread on Reddit. A website owner was getting enough traffic to apply to have display ads on their website using a premium ad network. And if you're not familiar with that, this would have meant a really significant increase in monthly revenue for their business. Now, once they applied, they were told that they wouldn't be accepted into the ad network because their Wix website wasn't compatible with the third party advertising platform. So in this particular case, this website owner might think that it's worth it for them to migrate to WordPress. Now, as a TPT seller, you might not be all that interested in having display ads. So in your case, you might decide that you want to host your products in your own website shop. You do your research, and you decide that WooCommerce is the shop that you'd like to use, because a lot of the tutorials you're finding online use WooCommerce. This is a WordPress plugin, so you would need to migrate your website in order to move forward with using that particular shopping platform. Now I just used these two examples to give you some food for thought and to show you that really you do need to balance whether the very involved process of migrating to a different blogging platform is going to be worth the time and effort that you put into that. In some cases it is. In other cases it might not be. So it's totally up to you.

Stephanie 9:55

While there are many perks to using an all in one website builder, and you can get great results from your business by using one. most people do use WordPress because it's the gold standard for bloggers. It's more customizable and it's more easily optimized for search engines only. You can decide on the best website builder for you and your business. I just wanted to give you the chance to hear why everyone seems to be choosing WordPress.

Stephanie: 10:24

If you have a friend who's getting ready to start a blog for their teacher business, be sure to share this podcast with them and encourage them to subscribe. They'll definitely want to catch the rest of the episodes this month.

Stephanie: 10:35

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.