WordPress SEO & web design

What is a content management system?

In simple terms, a content management system (CMS) is software installed on a web server which allows a user or web designer to create, store and deliver digital content over the internet. They allow for collaborative working, and there’s an enormous range of free and paid plugins, extensions and themes available to make a website do virtually anything you could wish for.

Most of the popular ones are open source, so the CMS itself is free to download, install and use. In their simplest form they contain pages and a blog, which itself contains posts, categories and tags — letting a specific page or article be reached by date, title, tags, category or author, even if the site visitor isn’t really aware of that structure underneath.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system, paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Its plugin architecture and template system (called “Themes”) are what make it so flexible. In plain terms, it’s a platform for building websites that store information in a database and present it to visitors in a proper format when they visit the site. WordPress remains by far the most widely used CMS on the web today, running well over 40% of all websites according to W3Techs — its closest competitor a fraction of that.

Why build a website using WordPress?

The site owner can access the admin panel to add pages and posts, and change images and content, all without seeing — let alone understanding — a single line of code. Because it’s database driven, changes can usually be made in one place and reflected everywhere; renaming a menu item, for example, updates it instantly across the whole site. It also means that from a design point of view, we can build a site knowing every page will render properly, and that future changes stay straightforward.

The modern way to build websites

Very few web designers or agencies hand-code websites these days — almost everyone uses a content management system to provide the framework a site is built on. WordPress is by far the most popular, though there are others you may have heard of, such as Magento, Joomla and Drupal.

We’ve worked with these platforms over the years providing SEO services to clients whose sites were built on them, and we still provide web design and ecommerce support for WordPress and Magento sites where needed — each has its own advantages depending on a client’s specific requirements.

Having worked with these and other, lesser known systems over the years, we’ve already done the research involved in WordPress SEO and web design. If your site is slow, we know which plugins are best suited to its size and style, and how to configure them for the best results — see our guide to making a WordPress site faster.

Want to add a new feature to your website? It could be something as simple as a lightbox for image display or a fancier navigation menu, or as involved as adding full ecommerce functionality or a directory system. We’ve installed, configured and optimised all of these before — why not let us do the same for your site?

Keeping a WordPress site secure and up to date

A WordPress site running outdated plugins usually still looks completely fine — right up until the moment it doesn’t.

WordPress’s popularity is also why it’s a common target for automated attacks — not because it’s inherently insecure, but because there’s more of it to attack. In practice that means keeping the core software, theme and plugins updated, using a reputable security plugin, and not installing more plugins than you actually need, since every plugin is another piece of code that has to be kept current. Part of the reason we keep builds lean is exactly this — fewer moving parts means less to go wrong and less to maintain.