Blue chips & sole traders – all commit to WordPress to sell online

The first version of WordPress saw the light of day in 2003 and was the preserve of just bloggers. The platform offered a free way to have a website from which to blog on the wordpress.com site. You could have mycookingblog.wordpress.com or you could use your own domain.

Recent figures now show it’s used more prevalently than any other website platform (content management system – CMS) across the entire internet.

Large corporates and Blue Chips to local sole traders, home bloggers and everyone in between all use it. It can be quick, simple to set up –and with lots of pre-designed themes and plugins you can be up and running in an afternoon. Or you can commission a designer and developer to create you an entirely custom theme and functions but all hooked into the slick CMS admin area so you can manage the content easily.

And with the well supported eCommerce solution using the partner extension, WooCommerce, along with a myriad of online shopping tool plugins, it’s proving to be a real competitor against the older eCommerce framework, Magento.

Announced today (31^st May 2018) that Adobe has bought Magento for $1.68billion, developers around the world are curious about the direction this platform will take.

With WordPress websites making up nearly 15% of the Top 100 named websites in the world, including, TED, NBC, CNN, Samsung, IBM, TechCrunch, NFL, Etsy, Skype and UPS these are just a few of the global companies with websites built on WordPress.

As the most widespread CMS, WordPress powers almost 28% of the entire internet and the latest version – v4.9 (nicknamed ‘Tipton’) has been downloaded over 90 million times as at 30^th May 2018.

60% +/- of all websites with a CMS are WordPress and is more than double that of its next two nearest competitors, Drupal and Joomla.

With the rise of both SoHo boutique businesses and large Blue Chips all wanting to be present in the online selling market, why would they not look at a WordPress eCommerce site? With a typical WooCommerce WordPress site up, running and selling online for as little £3500 ($4200) it is very appealing to both entrepreneurs and global brands to make the leap in this light, low overhead and investment way.

You have to ask, with WordPress’ widespread popularity, robustness and ease of use, is it possible that the recent purchase of Magento by Adobe is the wrong horse to back in the rapidly evolving  eCommerce CMS market?

We wait with anticipation.