Celebrating 20 Years
WordPress, the free and open-source content management system, is turning 20 this year. It’s hard to imagine the internet without WordPress, as it has become the de facto platform for millions of websites around the world – from small personal blogs to large enterprise websites.
One of the reasons for WordPress’s longevity is its commitment to open source principles. Anyone can download, modify, and distribute the software for free, and developers are encouraged to contribute their own plugins and themes to the community. This has created a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes, making it easier for users to customise their websites.
As a WordPress agency providing handcrafted, top performing websites to clients around the world, here are 6 more reasons why we love it:
1. Scalability
WordPress can serve tens of thousands of logged-in users at a time and deliver hundreds of millions of monthly page views. It can process page requests immediately and produce near instant results to search queries. The wide variety of performance-enhancing plugins and technologies available for WordPress, coupled with its elastic architecture, contribute to its scalability.
- The record for the most unique page views in a single day on a WordPress website is 187 million.
2. Security
With almost 2 decades of continuous development, WordPress is a highly secure and stable CMS trusted by The White House, NASA, and a number of banks and financial institutes around the world.
3. Privacy
WordPress has a 5 star privacy rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This means that it:
- Follows industry-wide best practices
- Tells users about government data requests
- Promises not to sell out users
- Stands up to NSL gag orders
- Has a Pro-user public; Reform 702
4. Standards
Every piece of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web.
5. Accessibility
WordPress aims to make the WordPress core fully WCAG 2.0 AA compliant where possible, and provides continuing educational support about web accessibility and inclusive design. The WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards state that “all new or updated code released in the WordPress core must conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 at level AA”.
6. SEO
WordPress generates clean, semantic code, allows you to customise your website’s permalink structure, and generates XML sitemaps, which all contribute to making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your website.
Over the years, many competitors have come and gone, but WordPress has remained the #1 website platform. It has proven its reliability, security, and scalability, making it the go-to choice for businesses, bloggers, and individuals alike.
As we celebrate WordPress’s 20th anniversary, let’s take a moment to appreciate the countless developers, contributors, and users who have made it the powerhouse that it is today.
Happy Anniversary, WordPress!
