What is WordPress?: When it comes to choosing a content management system to help you build your website, then the majority people will lean towards using WordPress thanks to its popularity, ease of use, additional themes and plugins and the fact that it is free of charge and it is by far the most widely used CMS to build websites and blogs.

There are millions of websites and blogs out there who have used WordPress, even some of the very biggest companies out there including Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, BBC, and many others.

WordPress was started as a simple blogging tool but now it has become a very powerful CMS. You can build the different type of websites and blogs with WordPress.

Further Reading: 35+ Type Of Websites You Can Create With WordPress

People will have lots of different reasons why they choose WordPress, but one of the main reasons is the fact that WordPress is made extendable through the use of the many powerful premium and free themes and plugins that are available.

The majority of people that use WordPress every day are not web designers or developers but are just normal people that try to learn the ropes themselves.

Research suggests that most people that use the CMS don’t actually have any prior knowledge of building websites at all. That is where the plugins and themes come in, making it extremely easy for people to build a website from scratch.

Currently, there are over 51,174 free plugins for the customer to make use of, which helps with the functional side of the site, and over 4,000 free themes, which help to change the overall look of a site, available at WordPress.org

Using these plugins and themes means that you can give your website almost any look that you can image, especially as the majority of the themes are also fully customizable.

What is a WordPress Theme or WordPress Template?

A theme will usually come with an options panel that will allow the user to change elements such as the color, create a custom background, create sliders and imagery and much more. You are also able to include elements that are unique to your company, such as the company logo, or branding colors.

There is a theme available for almost anything that you can think of, whether you need a photography theme, a visual portfolio, a magazine theme or an e-commerce store, no matter what type of website you are planning on building, chances are there will be a theme available to help.

What is a WordPress Plugin?

Different to a theme is a plugin. A plugin is a free piece of software that contains a group of functions that can be added to a site using WordPress. If you need a new feature added to your website, then chances are there is a plugin that is available to do the work for you.

The plugins are written using PHP programming that integrates with WordPress seamlessly. No longer do people have to learn code to fill their site with a huge range of features.

There are plugins that do virtually anything, and some are a much higher quality than others, so you have to be careful which you pick, and it is worth doing a little research beforehand.

You should look at how recently the plugin has been updated and make sure that it is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. You should also check the rating of the plugin which can help you see what other people thought of it.

Best Selling and Most Popular WordPress Plugins?

Some of the best selling plugins include

• Visual Composer: is the best selling plugin with 298,571+ sales at the time of writing this article. It is a drag and drop page builder plugin that lets you create great looking websites and blogs without learning to code.

• Slider Revolution: lets you create fully responsive and mobile friendly slides with different animations and styles. It has been sold more than 200,126+ times.

• Layer Slider: is a multi-purpose plugin to create Slideshows & image galleries with mind-blowing effects, gorgeously animated landing pages & page blocks, or even a full website.

• Ultimate Addons: is an add-on plugin for Visual Composer plugin. With this plugin installed, You can add Parallax, video background, animations, Icon fonts to your site.

• UberMenu: have you seen websites with big yet beautiful and responsive navigation menus, UberMenu lets you create big menus for your own blog.

while the most popular free plugins include

• JetPack is a swiss-army knife for WordPress users. It offers a lot of features including security, website stats, writing tools, website backups, blog Monetization and more. JetPack Personal plan is very affordable and starting from 3.50 per month only.
• Akismet is an anti spam plugin to block comment spam.
• Woo Commerce lets you start your online store to sell products.
• Yoast SEO plugin lets you optimize your posts and pages for better search engine rankings.
• Contact Form 7 is the most popular and free contact form WordPress plugin with any add-ons.

Most Popular and Best Selling WordPress Themes

Thousands of free and premium templates are available for WordPress, There are so many individual developers and market places selling high-quality, professional themes. Premium themes come with better support and updates.

Best-selling WordPress Themes and Templates

In terms of themes, the best selling themes include Avada, X The Theme, Enfold, Bridge, and Betheme. With all of the following themes, you can very easily build the different type of websites for yourself and for your clients.

These premium themes come with additional premium plugins, advanced features, page-builder plugins and demo content importer. It means You don’t need to pay extra money for premium plugins. If you will buy those plugins separately, they will cost you hundreds of dollars extra.

For example, X and Avada themes come with 20+ premium plugins, including Visual Page builder, Envira Gallery, Layer sliders, Slider Revolution, Uber menu and many others.

• 1. Avada Theme is the most popular and best-selling premium WordPress theme of all time. More than 300,000+ websites have been built with this powerful theme.
• 2. X Theme is the second best-selling premium theme of all time with more than 130,000+ sales. It is a multi-purpose theme.
• 3. Enfold is a multipurpose responsive theme and at the time of writing this article more than 129,098+ copies of this theme has been sold at ThemeForest. The demo comes with 100 pages, posts, and products.
• 4. Bridge is the best-selling creative theme and at the time of writing this article more than 75,293+ copies of this theme has been sold at ThemeForest. The theme has 201+ beautiful demos.
• 4. BeTheme is the 5th best-selling WordPress theme and at the time of writing this article more than 71,851+ copies of this theme has been sold at ThemeForest. The theme has 260+ prebuilt demo websites.

Free WordPress Themes: The most popular free themes include Responsive, Customizr, Zerif Lite, Vantage, and Hueman. You can find a complete list of free websites at https://wordpress.org/themes/, more than 4500+ free themes are available at WordPress themes directory.

Due to the open source nature of WordPress, additional themes and plugins are being created all the time. If there is currently no plugin that suits your needs, that doesn’t mean that there will never be one suitable. The plugins and themes that are already available will also constantly be updated and improve, making an overall better user experience.

Reasons to use WordPress

An additional benefit to using WordPress is that it is search engine friendly. It is written using standard compliance high-quality code, and this makes your website very attractive to search engines such as Google.

In addition to this, there is also the opportunity to make the site that you have built even more SEO friendly by using a WordPress SEO plugin.

When using WordPress, the CMS comes with a built in updater that will allow you to quickly and easily update all your plugins and themes from within the WordPress dashboard of your site. This feature will also notify you when there is a new version of WordPress available for you to use which can be updated simply by the click of a button.

If all that has not convinced you that WordPress is the right content management system to use, it is also one of the most secure tools that you can use. WordPress was developed with security in mind and is considered one of the most secure places to run any website.

Further Reading: How to make WordPress Search Engine Friendly

The CMS can be used in many different ways and can be used to create a blog, website, gallery, portfolio, shopping store, membership site and much more. Learn more about What type of websites, you can create with WordPress in this post.

People are constantly coming up with new ways to build a website using WordPress, which is another reason why it is so popular. People using WordPress to create their website shows no sign of slowing down.

There is plenty more information that can be found in a fact-packed infographic that can be found at skilled.co If you are looking for more reasons to pick this as your CMS, this is the place to go.

Presented by Skilled.co