Last updated - July 8, 2021
If you find yourself wondering, “should I learn WordPress,” then you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, because I will help answer that question for you. It means you’ve heard about it, maybe from a colleague or friend, and you’ve done your research.
But, what you’ve probably missed is weighing all the in-depth pros and cons of why you need to start learning how to use it. That’s exactly why I’ve decided to show you what perfecting WordPress skills can do for your future career.
I graduated in English a couple of years ago, and I never believed I would find a job that suited my skills, so I decided to take up anything as long as it pays the bills. Eventually, I learned about WordPress. I figured, why not try it? I can put my writing skills to good use, and on top of all that, it’s free, so it wouldn’t hurt to try. So, that’s what I did.
At school, I learned to think critically and write, but WordPress taught me something more, something that should have been implemented at school so that students will learn it as well, and those are skills that an employer will value.
Here I will focus on the following topics:
- Should I learn WordPress and What Makes it Special?
- List of Factors that Make WordPress Popular
- What to Use WordPress For?
- The Top Most Important Skillsets WordPress Can Teach You
Should I learn WordPress and What Makes it Special?
To answer the question, should I learn WordPress today, I will be focusing on some research to point out the importance of this platform and its influence.
Based on statistics, as of 2019, 35% of all the websites in the world have been created on WordPress, which is 60% of the CMS (Content Management Systems) market. And this is how it compares to its competitors on the global market. This is a table of some of the most popular ones. Let’s take a look.
| % of Websites Created | % of CMS Market Share Value | |
| WordPress | 35 | 60 |
| Wix | 1.1 | 1.9 |
| Joomla | 2.9 | 5.2 |
| Squarespace | 1.5 | 2.7 |
| Drupal | 1.9 | 3.4 |
As you can see, most of the websites and blogs in the world are hosted on WordPress. I don’t believe this platform will lose the crown anytime soon. It is even more popular than self-hosted CMS.
In 2011, WordPress powered 13.1% of all the websites. While in 2014, their success almost doubled, reaching a staggering 21%. In 2017, that number reached exactly 27.3%. By the beginning of 2019, it was 33.6%, and now it has reached 35%. If you do the math, that’s 23% growth. In other words, their success may not be immediate, but it’s growing much faster, shadowing their competition.
List of Factors that Make WordPress Popular
There are multiple reasons why this platform is so popular. Here are the most common ones:
- Easy to work with
- Good for a website or a blog
- Plenty of themes to choose from
- Has the option to add plugins
- Search engine – friendly
- Huge community
- Adapted to mobile phones and tablets
- Updated and perfected through the years
- Open-source platform
- Mature community
It is easy to set up and gets started on WordPress. You will only need a web browser and a proper internet connection to create your own website, that’s it. And, you will learn everything else you can use step by step if you follow the tips on the platform itself. Also, you can customize and manage your website as you see fit.
You will also have access to thousands of themes professionally designed to meet everyone’s taste – some of which are completely free to use. If you want to add a little complexity to your website, you can do that too. The platform allows for plugins to be added if necessary, adding additional functionality to the entire site. These plugins are not as complex as you think. You don’t need to hire a professional coder to do that for you, and all the options will be easy to access.
The SEO options make it a search-engine-friendly platform. Therefore, if you plan on getting more people to see your website, WordPress will automatically solve that problem for you if you know how to make use of it. You get a Yoast SEO plugin completely free.
Something that not many other platforms have is the option to be mobile-friendly. WordPress is evolving and adapting to current trends. Therefore, if you make a website on WordPress, that website can be easily viewed from a mobile device as well. Anyone with a tablet or phone can access your site from anywhere.
According to statistics from 2019, more than 2.70 billion people use a smartphone, while 5 billion use different mobile devices. That means having a website suitable on different devices is a crucial factor to success.
Moreover, WordPress has been around for more than ten years. So, it has been updated, tested, and refined multiple times. The community is also more mature. Even though anyone can make a website, only the most serious ones decide to stick to the very end investing time and effort into building their own content. And, we all know that time is an extremely valuable commodity.
Last but not least is the fact that WordPress is open-source. In other words, there are no limitations or commercial restrictions. All the software you see, it’s available for use. You can choose to host the website without fearing that a more expensive business model will have a more serious impact than you. Of course, the WordPress business model does have its perks, but it doesn’t separate the free users from the paying ones with unreasonable restrictions. On the contrary, you can still make the most of it without having to pay a huge sum of money.
What to Use WordPress For?
One of the most popular reasons people decide to try out WordPress is to create their own blog. The service is easy to use, fun, free and doesn’t require too much work to get started. Others use it to make their own business websites.
This is a convenient and flexible platform with a lot to offer, and you can use it for a lot more than that. Anyone can create webpages for both big and small companies. No need to have HTML knowledge; all the options and features are within reach.
Another reason people use WordPress is to make their own sales page where they can market products for any kind of item. You can even create your own portfolio to show-off your WordPress skills. Basically, you can monetize your website to make money from it.
In other words, there are many things you can use WordPress for, but some of the most popular ones are to:
- Create a blog
- Start an online business
- Make a website
- Offer online courses
- Create a membership website
- Make an online magazine
- News site
- Portfolio
- Polls
The Top Most Important Skillsets WordPress Can Teach You
Of course, you don’t have to be a writer to use WordPress. There is more to WordPress then writing posts. You can even have a business and create a website to bring more traffic in, get popular, and get more clients. You can even start with a blog, and then turn it into an online shop – the options are limitless.
WordPress is flexible but doesn’t require some immense programming skills to get the work done. Their service is free and very easy to use. You will be using simplified tools that WordPress will explain to you. So, even if you’ve never made a website before, you can still do it with WordPress.
It’s perfect for college students who want to use their free time to create their blogs or website. You can use it to polish your writing skills and more. But why should this tool be implemented in our education system?
Let’s take a look at the useful skills to know and reasons you should be learning WordPress at school.
Organization Skills
Creating posts, pages, or simply laying out a website, using SEO (search engine optimization), requires proper organization skills. You will be organizing content, filtering it out, deciding what to discard and what to use next.
With a constant flow of information, you have to keep up, and you need to know what you can and can’t use next. What will bring more traffic in and what kind of information will drive people out. For that, you will need to use a solid vocabulary and make sure that you publish high-quality content. If you plan on writing an essay for your blog, or you are looking for a proofreading service, you can check StudyDriver.com. Professionals will help you to improve your essay.
The first thing you think about when making your website or blog on WordPress is how to break down that project and collect all the parts to make it more interactive and easy to understand. While the platform makes it easier to navigate through the menus, it still takes skill to make it more appealing to the general audience.
It’s all about a proper flow. You will be adding your personal touch, but you will also be focusing on the entire layout of the website. If you design it to be too complicated, people will have no idea how to use it. But, if you make it too simple, it will look as if you don’t plan on putting any effort into it. So, they will quickly lose interest.
That’s where your organization skills will come in handy. It will take a bit of time to figure it out, but are useful skills to know. With a couple of trials and errors, you will eventually perfect your WordPress skills and make the best website that will reflect your personality and be simple to use.
Data Analysis
It’s all about keeping up with trends, and data analysis is a valuable skillset in any industry nowadays. With the current advances in technology, data is easy to reach, but analyzing that data and translating it into actions is crucial. This skill interprets, organizes, structures, and presents the data into information that can be put to good use.
WordPress is a solid stepping stone if you want to work with A/B testing and Google analytics. You can boost the interaction with your blog or website, try out different experiments, and see how the results will vary from one change to the next.
A future employer will want to see if you can set goals and review your own results. It’s also crucial to understand the problems an organization faces and explore that data in many ways. This is the kind of work that:
- Makes a business more productive
- Predicts the customer’s behaviors and trends
- Help with making effective decisions
Influence
Professionals who make a lot of money have a huge influence. To achieve your goals, you have to influence others; it’s crucial. Of course, influencing others is not as easy as it looks. In fact, it’s an entire process that focuses on achieving a positive outcome for both parties.
The skill to influence others or to sell something you’ve made is extremely valuable to employers. No, you don’t have to be in sales to obtain this skill. If you run a successful website, you already have the influence you need. You are inspiring people to see what you’ve built, prompting them to take a better look at your articles, recipes, songs, merchandise, or more.
Before you can work in an organization, you have to know how to build that influence. And the first step is to show people “what’s in it” for them, why they should check out your website. This is only something that can be learned from practice.
Once you’ve built up a solid fan base, more people will be coming to you without you having to lift a finger. Learning how to maintain a website on WordPress teaches you how to ensure and maintain a solid fan base. You will learn how to manage your tasks better.
Communication
Creating your own website or blog on WordPress is a great way of practicing your visual communication skills. What that means is you will learn to be more direct, concise, clear, and confident in your work.
To get to know your customers, you have to communicate with them actively, that’s the only way you can appreciate and understand how working with clients actually looks like. Once you start emailing, interviewing, and talking with people, you will start polishing your communication skills, which is a fundamental skill when looking for a job.
According to recent research, 78% of people think that communication skills should be taught in school, while 80% strongly agree that critical thinking should be implemented as well. 58% of the people interviewed believe that things like motivation, creativity, and collaboration are meaningful targets that teachers should focus on. While these skills may not be the main target at school, WordPress can make a change.
Creating a wonderful website is all about expressing your creativity. Colors, themes, and posts add more visual impact to the website making it more appealing to the general masses. The prettier it is, the more likely it will draw traffic. It’s all about collaborating with people and adding the changes they want to see. The more you work with them, the better you will get at your job. From communicating, you will constantly improve and learn a lot more than you would normally do at school.
Problem Solving
Even the most basic of functions on WordPress will make you experiment, research, and constantly change your decisions to find the perfect solutions to your problem. Whether it is about writing essays, selling merchandise, publishing news, or more, a lot of things will go through your mind.
Like, I want to add a plugin, maybe I should to a little more research for a snippet, or, what about adding push notification?
Many features you use on WordPress can make your website more interactive and responsive. But, to figure our those features, you will have to do plenty of research on your own. It’s about building a form of logic that is easy to work with. That’s why it takes a lot of experimenting with bringing your idea to life.
Problem-solving can be learned at school, but you can only perfect it in a different environment where you will be in direct contact with customers. If WordPress is implemented in schools, then you will learn all of these skills much faster.
Conclusion
Because of how popular it is, WordPress has a huge community that only keeps on growing. Now the community has expanded to social channels, forums, discussion boards, and every social media network.
Whether you want to be a famous blogger, or you just want to create a website, WordPress can make that process a lot easier to achieve. Many people doubt the usefulness of this platform and why they should be using it. But, there is more to it than it meets the eye.
It’s not just about writing fun posts, and it’s about polishing your skills to have a better chance of finding a job. Some skills are best learned from experience, and this experience can be obtained by working on WordPress.
