60,000,000 websites can’t be wrong. Truly, there are plethora of features that made WordPress the best CMS. WordPress brings simplicity at the tip of the fingers, for users and publishers. WordPress is easy-to-use and equally flexible to handle.
You can create almost any sort of website with WordPress. Examples include not limiting to a personal blog, a celebrity website, a photography portal, a corporate website, a magazine, an online newspaper, an online community, even a network of websites.
Features
One of the nicest features of WordPress is its pretty permalink. It generates URLs that are memorable and predictable for faster site navigation in a hackable manner. Features of WordPress also include easy content publishing and management, version controlling and revision of contents, managing multiple sites from single dashboard area; and, supporting locales, internationalization and typography.
WordPress has easy export/import features for contents, data, scripts and web assets. WordPress Dashboard has drag and drop features that improves user experience. By default, WordPress Admin Dashboard features a fully functional CMS System, without installing anything extra until or unless you need external or extended features. Literally speakin, there are hundreds of thousands of plugins to extend WordPress default functionalities. The possibilities are limitless.
You can also extend, modify or do whatever you like with the WordPress code. For developers, WordPress has features under the hood including Hooks, Actions, Filters, Classes and Methods, Functions, API and many more to facilitate the Theme Development, Plugin Development, Mobile Application Development and Web Application Development with WordPress.
The following is a list of salient features of WordPress.
Application Framework
WordPress bags enough features to be used as Application Framework to develop Web Applications with WordPress. User Management, HTTP Request Handling, database manipulation, URL routing and REST API are just a few features to name among.
Built-in Blog
Blogging comes as batteries-included in WordPress. Adding a Blog to your WordPress website and publishing posts had never been easier.
Built-in Comment System
Comments keep a website vibrant and engaging by providing the audience means of interacting with the people behind the website. WordPress Comment System provides you with everything you need to operate a discussion threads on posts and forums.
WordPress Community
WordPress has the most populated and versatile supportive community. The community provides support in many alternative channels of communication. You can ask questions in support forums, attend a WordCamp or WordPress Meetup. At the reach of your arms, you can read blog posts, articles, guides and tutorials all over the web. WordPress Community is vibrant and supportive. They definitely aided much of the fuels to make WordPress the most popular open source CMS on the web.
WordPress Custom Menus
Creating navigation menus is as easy as piece of cake. You can add links to your pages and posts.
WordPress Custom Post Types
You can create your own custom post types, taxonomies and metadata, if the default content types doesn’t suit your content needs and purposes. Add a few lines of code (definitely, you can copy paste from stackoverflow or github) and you just gave WordPress new directions.
WordPress Installation & Upgrade
You won’t believe how easy it is to install WordPress with some simple know-hows. Moreover, many web hosting companies add sugar coats on it, and provide 1-click WordPress installation facility. Experienced Site administrators and webmasters often use SSH and FTP for setting up WordPress website or maintaining the same.
WordPress UI/UX (User Interface / User Experience)
Out of the box, WordPress should be scored 5-on-5 by every Tom, Harry, Dick and Potter. It avoids UI complicacy by all means possible, no matter how ugly the backend coding complexity becomes.
Can you operate facebook? Or, Twitter? I certify, you can run WordPress too!
WordPress Themes
WordPress requires at least one theme installed and activated. Themes allow you to change the look, feel and functionality all of a sudden simply by switching over installed themes. WordPress themes maintain a well separation of concerns. It means, you can change the presentation layer without even touching any other area of the website.
By default, batteries-included WordPress comes with themes ready to use. If those default themes aren’t of your taste, sense and sensibility, you can keep installing one by one from 5,000+ free themes available to install right from the “Appearance” Menu in the WordPress Admin Dashboard.
You can also install your own theme on your website by copying the theme in the themes folder inside the wp-content folder.
Not all themes are equal in monetary terms. They are classified as free and premium. Whereas, free themes are available at the WordPress Themes Repository, the premium themes are available for sale at theme marketplaces and individual developer websites.
You can try DIY (Do it Yourself) to create your own WordPress themes for personal interest or for commercial purposes. WordPress Themes should be developed following the theme development guidelines from WordPress. You need to know HTML, PHP, WordPress API, CSS and JavaScript to develop Themes for WordPress. These HTML, PHP, CSS and JS can directly be programmed and altered to get a functional new theme having its own look and feel.
To get fast paced with theme development, you can utilize WordPress theme boilerplates and build your own on top of that. The Underscores is one of the popular WordPress boilerplate themes. Themes can be “Child” of “Parent” themes. Such child themes are developed by overriding minimal subsets of a parent theme. Child themes are popular among WordPress design geeks, because chilld theme development ensures faster serving with less cook times.
You can let people use your theme for free by listing it in the WordPress.org Themes Repository, or you can sell your theme to make some side hustle. I know many millionaires on the Internet who build and sell premium themes for WordPress.
WordPress is W3C Compliant
WordPress code is compliant with the W3C standards. Once you build a website today, it will keep running in future in all browsers without any maintenance or migration. This feature is called Forward Compatibility.
Gutenberg Block Editor
Latest versions of WordPress comes bundled with a new default block-based editor named “Gutenberg”. Blocks are reusable abstract units or web-components like parts that allows you to create and modify contents in a modular way.
WordPress Importer
WordPress has an Importer tool to import your website or blog from other platforms like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Tumblr, Movable Type and many.
WordPress RSS Feed
WordPress has built-in features to support and expose RSS feeds.
WordPress Non-Technical Maintenance
As I told you repeatedly, WordPress is designed keeping non-technical persons in mind. On their behalf, the WordPress community tests new releases, fixes bugs and improves WordPress.
WordPress Media File Library
For media files like images and videos, WordPress includes a default media library. You can upload media files here and embed such media files in your contents like posts and pages. WordPress Media File Library also allows you to edit images in basic mode. Basic image editing includes cloning, resizing, compression and optimization. WordPress supports most of the image file formats and compression algorithms.
WordPress Media Management
WordPress allows you to drag-and-drop media files into the WordPress Media Library to quickly upload those media files right inside your website. Once uploaded, you can set ALT text and captions for media, insert those captioned media files like images and galleries into your content, and let your content live their life in glory.
WordPress Mobile Application
WordPress mobile application version exists for WebOS, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. These applications allow you to add new posts and pages, commenting, moderating comments, replying to comments on the go all from the mobile and other handheld devices like Tablets.
WordPress is Mobile-friendly and Device Responsive
WordPress websites are responsive on devices having variants of display dimensions. Basically, this is ensured by the themes. If a theme isn’t responsive, simply modify it using HTML, CSS and JavaScript or switch to a better one.
WordPress Site Moderation
WordPress makes it quick and easy to moderate a website. Moderating means administrating user contents, keeping track of permissions, user roles and comments. Master the moderation, and you keep spammers away or jail the attackers in bay.
WordPress Multisite
From version 3.0, WordPress supports multisite. You can have as many sites as you like to setup. The WordPress admin dashboard seamlessly manages all the sites from one single control board.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress is name-called with respect for its plugin architecture. This architecture is built upon thousands of Action and Filter Hooks, four thousand or more functions and hundreds of classes having thousands of methods. Unlike themes, all WordPress APIs are usable in plugins.
Plugins are used to extend the existing core functionalities of WordPress or create new ones. Plugins also facilitate interaction among modules.
Free plugins are available at WordPress Plugin Repository which hosts more than fifty thousand plugins excluding some fifteen hundred premium plugins. Plugins bring new, unprecedented and novel functionalities to WordPress websites. Ecommerce, SEO, security, editor are the common a few categories of popular plugins.
Plugins can be installed from admin dashboard or copying directly into the plugins folder.
You can build your own WordPress plugin for personal use and you can sell them too.
Like themes, plugins are also of two types: free and premium. There are marketplaces and development individuals and companies who sell premium plugins for WordPress.
WordPress Publishing Tools
With WordPress Publishing Tools, you create, you edit, schedule and manage revisions of your posts, pages and other contents. WordPress lets you make your posts public or private. You can also secure pages and posts with a password.
WordPress SEO
WordPress SEO features are rich at its core, mostly behind the curtain. WordPress provides code base for SEO. These Search Engine Optimization features promote your contents to higher ranks and makes them appear atop the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Stay assured, WordPress itself is SEO optimized out of the box. For more control over SEO, you have plethora of SEO plugins at your disposal.
WordPress Speed Issue
WordPress continually strives for speeding up the website as a whole. WordPress ensures speed improvements by removing bloat codes that slows down the load time of a WordPress website.
WordPress Internationalization and Localization
WordPress is translated in more than 70 languages. If you prefer to build a website with languages other than English, things are cakes.
WordPress User Role Management
WordPress makes Users Role Management easy. By default users are categorized under five segments, namely, Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator. In a WordPress website, every user needs his/her own roles of access. While subscribers are able to follow posts, contributors and authors can create posts. While, an editor can moderate contents, an administrator manages the site overall having the highest privileges and access rights.
You can change user roles simply by setting the role for a user in administrator dashboard. You can also create new roles or modify existing ones.
Accessibility
WordPress was designed for all users, irrespective of users' ability or their devices' capability. WordPress is committed to as accessible as possible, and wants users to publish contents and maintain website, regardless of his/her physical and mental constraints. In pursuit, WordPress Foundation aims to make the WordPress software fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 AA.
The Accessibility Team
WordPress has an Accessibility Team who educates on web accessibility. The WordPress Accessibility Team works for improving the accessibility of core WordPress. They also support identifying accessible themes.
WordPress Accessibility Handbook
The WordPress Accessibility Handbook shares a list of accessibility tools, the testing procedure to improve themes and plugins. The Accessibility Handbook also shares best practices.
The WCAG Statement
WordPress adopted the WordPress Accessibility Coding Standards guideline. The guideline states that, "All new or updated code released in WordPress must conform the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guideline) 2.0 at level AA."
WordPress API
The core WordPress API (Application Programming Interface) includes many individual API subsets, each covering a specific area of functionalities. These APIs provide the necessary foundations and frameworks for developers. Developers use the APIs in plugins and themes to interact with WordPress core features.
Database API
Database API is one of the oldest API that co-existed with WordPress from the inception. Database API was first introduced in WordPress version 0.71. The API provides a set of functions to access data which are stored in database layer.
Officially, WordPress suports MySQL, MariaDB database servers. Unofficially, the Percona database server is also compatible with WordPress.
Filesystem API
The Filesystem API was initially created for the sake of automating the update features of WordPress. From versin 2.6, the API is publicly available. Using the WP_Filesystem_Base class and several subclasses, the Filesystem API abstracts the internals of reading and writing files in the OS (Operating System) FS (File System). This is necessary as because, WordPress is hosted on many OS and environments.
Each OS has its own API of accessing Filesystem, which makes things complicated for developers. The Filesystem API abstracts the internals and offers an standard set of functions on top of that for accessing file system.
HTTP API
From version 2.7 onwards, the HTTP API is added in WordPress and extended further. The HTTP API standardizes the HTTP Requests for WordPress by handling cookies, supporting gzip encoding and decoding and chunking. It also implements many other features of HTTP Protocol. Prior to sending, the API tests each method and uses the appropriate method to make the request, based on server configuration.
Permissions and current user API
The Permission and Current User API facilitates verifying the current user’s authority and permissions to perform operations. The API can protect against unauthorized access they users might try in excess to their permitted vicinity.
