Blogger vs WordPress Blog

Engagement, engagement, engagement.

My brother Lee and I are web developers and entrepreneurs. We try to capitalize on every opportunity available to increase user engagement. A critical part of any strategy aimed at improving user engagement involves allowing users to comment on website articles/blog posts. Commenting is possible on any WordPress site via WordPress' default commenting functionality or by installing a third party plugin. However, WordPress' default commenting lacks some important features that tend to increase user interaction. It also requires the installation of the Akismet plugin to keep your site's comments spam free. In addition, there was recent news uncovering a cross site scripting bug (the 0 Day Bug) in WordPress' commenting when Akismet is absent (but a patch has been released). For these reasons, we opt for alternatives to WordPress' default commenting functionality.

We researched four popular third party WordPress commenting plugins: Disqus, Facebook, Livefyre and Google Plus. We delved into the user and admin features offered by each plugin, their configuration processes, and some shortcomings to provide an in depth comparison of your options.

The Disqus Comment System plugin has the highest number of active installs of all of the plugins that we checked out (200,000+). At the time of writing, this plugin was last updated by Disqus on December 9, 2014, it is compatible with WordPress version 4.0.4 or below (but we used this plugin on version 4.1.5 and it worked great) and is rated 3.5 out of 5 by 80 people. The following websites currently use the Disqus Commenting functionality: wired.com, npr.org, politico.com, ew.com (Entertainment Weekly). You can find this plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory at https://wordpress.org/plugins/disqus-comment-system/. Collectively, this information gives us a good indication of what we can expect from the plugin. The Disqus plugin will likely work reliably and consistently (even at high levels of traffic), will likely be supported/updated by the creators if bugs are found and its ubiquity likely points to its ease of use and implementation. However, we're not going to let them o ff that easy; we need to see it to believe it. We installed and activated the Disqus Comment System plugin on a WordPress site. We documented the configuration process as well as the different user and admin features.

Configuration Process:

Add, Install and Activate the Disqus Commenting System. Follow the onscreen instructions

Sign in – Login via Facebook, Google plus or Twitter OR sign up for a Disqus account

Add the site name and url that you'll be adding Disqus Comments to in your Disqus account

Select your site

You are good to go! You should see a Disqus commenting box (like that shown below) on any blog post on your site.

User Features

Sign In to Comment (with Disqus, Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter), Sign Up to Comment (with Disqus, Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter), or comment as a guest (if this is enabled)

Responsive design to fit different devices – The commenting functionality is set to 100% width of whatever container it is in. So, how it looks depends on how well crafted the theme is.

Add images to the comment (< = 2MB)

Share Comment on Facebook or Twitter

Sort Comments by Best, Oldest and Newest

Ability to Recommend a Comment Stream on an article

Ability to Subscribe to a Comment Stream on an article (allowing you to keep up to date with who is commenting on your article or on an article you're interested in)

Share an individual comment on Facebook, Twitter or share the direct link

Reply to each individual comment

Edit each individual comment

The ability to up or down vote certain comments

Notification and reply by email

Support for Disqus community widgets

Ability to connect with their discussion community

Increase exposure to your comments by their community's users (not sure how much play these get though)

Users can see all Disqus comment threads that they have been a part of by clicking on the speech bubble next to the user's name

Admin Features

How to Access: Sign into your Disqus account, click on the cog in the top right hand corner and click on Admin. This should take you to the Moderation Panel.

Free to use

Get email addresses associated with all of your commenters.

Ability to approve, mark as spam or delete any comment in the approved, pending, spam or deleted category (in the moderation dashboard)

Ability to mark as spam, delete, blacklist, moderate or feature individual comments you see on the site

Ability to Close a Comment Thread or Open a Closed Thread

Add/Remove Moderators

Spam filtering by being able to add users to Blacklists (prevent users on this list from posting) and whitelists (allow users on this list to bypass some moderation settings)

Add words (such as profanity) to the restricted list (requiring approval before publishing)

Can see profiles of users (including the number of comments made in total, number of comments marked as spam or flagged, email and ip address associated with this user, Disqus user rating and how long a user has been a part of Disqus).

Setting Community rules

Comments require moderator approval before publishing, all comments are automatically published, or comments that aren't from verified emails require approval

Allow guests to comment

Require approval of comments with links before they are published

Automatically display and include images and videos that are included in comments

Email moderator(s) when a comment is flagged

Don't display a comment once it is flagged X amount of times

Don't allow comments after a certain number of days

Set a Twitter username for tweeted comments to @ reply

Import existing comments (via a WXR file into Disqus' moderation panel)

Able to be crawled and indexed by search engines

Export Disqus Comments as a Backup (not for use in importing them later – you would want to export comments on WordPress if you would need it to possibly be uploaded later)

Migrate Threads to a new domain, upload a URL map (if your URLs change) or crawl your site for 301 redirects (Disqus crawls your old pages and updates the thread to be associated with the new url)

Analytics – seeing the top comments, the number of comments and votes in the last 30 days and in the last 3 months

Adjust the Appearance of your Comments (Color Scheme, Typeface, moderator badge)

Adjust the text of the comment count link

Adjust the default sorting (it defaults to Best but you could change it to Newest, Oldest or Best)

Comments made with Disqus are also synced with your WordPress database (this also allows you to revert to WordPress default commenting without losing any comments that you had while using disqus)

Another commenting plugin that we checked out uses Facebook's commenting plugin. You may not have heard of this little social network called Facebook ;). They have over 1.4 billion users and a $220+ billion market cap. According to the WordPress Plugin Directory, the most popular WordPress Facebook Comments plugin has 90,000+ active installs, a 4.5 out of 5 rating from 81 people, is compatible with WordPress version up to 4.1.4 (but we used this plugin on version 4.1.5 and it worked great) and was last updated on April 4, 2015. Facebook commenting is visible on techcrunch.com, espn.com and foxsports.com (and of course the functionality stems from Facebook's internal commenting engine). This background provides a solid foundation for use; it shows that the plugin is likely easy and very reliable to use on the user and admin side (which we can attest to). You can get this plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook-comments-plugin/ or use Facebook's documentation to add i t to your WordPress site. We installed the Facebook Comments plugin on a WordPress site and documented the configuration process as well as the different user and admin functionality.

Configuration Process:

Create a Facebook App (choose WWW) at developers.facebook.com/apps

Enter the App Id that you get after you create the app into the Facebook Comments Plugin settings page

You are good to go! You should see the Facebook comments box (visible below) on all of your blog posts. You can disable the Facebook comments on each individual post by checking a box on each post edit page.

*It's important to keep in mind that if you use this Facebook commenting plugin you will want to disable WordPress comments on your site (otherwise both the WordPress default commenting and Facebook commenting will show up on the page). In order to remove the default WordPress comments, we recommend installing the WordPress Disable Comments plugin. Download the plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/, add it as a new plugin to your WordPress site and then activate it.

User Features

Allow users to comment on your blog post once they're signed into their Facebook account or by signing up for Facebook. Users cannot comment using other login providers (used to be able to do this but can't as of Graph API v2.3)

Responsive design to fit different devices – The commenting functionality is set to 100% width of whatever container it is in. So, how it looks depends on how well crafted the theme is.

Reply, edit, delete or like each individual comment

Threaded comments and replies

Users have ability to like, flag and reply to each individual comment

Comment sorting – by time, top (most active discussions are highlighted and spam is hidden and higher quality comments are bright to the top)

Increased exposure of your comments to the Facebook community (Not sure how much exposure you get out of this though)

Users can simultaneously post their comment and share their comment on Facebook by checking the box next to "Also post on Facebook." This gives users the ability to easily share their activity with friends

If a friend comments on the same article that you commented on, you will get a notification alerting you to their comment.

If a user responds directly to your comment, you'll receive a Facebook notification – alerting you to the reply.

Ability to Follow a Post (follow a comment) associated with an article (allowing you to keep up to date with a comment you're interested in).

Ability to Unfollow a Comment (removing any additional notifications that you would receive).

Admin Features

How to Access: Sign into the Facebook Account that you used to create the Facebook App associated with the comments plugin. Then, you can either go to the following link http://developers.facebook.com/tools/comments OR click on the Moderator Tool link at a page of your site with the Facebook comments plugin. For more information check out the following link https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments#moderation-setup.

Free to use

Create blacklisted words (could be Standard Facebook restrictions or a custom list)

Add/Remove Moderators

Ability to make all comments public by default and add to moderator view, make all comments public by default and add only comments with blacklisted words to moderator view, or make all comments hidden by default and add all comments to moderator view

Approve or Hide comments. You can approve or hide multiple comments at once using the checkboxes or the select all checkbox in the left column.

Set the default comment sorting (social ranking, oldest, newest).

Automatically correct common grammar mistakes

Always show the comments composer or collapse when there are greater than 5 comments

Create a list of banned users (they will still be able to comment but only them and their friends can see the comment).

The language of the comments plugin can be changed to fit the language of your site (these languages are supported http://www.facebook.com/translations/FacebookLocales.xml)

Set width of the plugin

Set color scheme of the plugin

Set number of comments to show

Technical Notes* You have the ability to add a class and a data-href attribute to an HTML element and it will output the number of comments associated that href. You can also Export Facebook Comments as a Backup. You could get all comments associated with a particular URL by using a Facebook Graph API call but it would be tricky for a non-technical person to figure out. Also, there's not much else you could do with those comments (because you can't import them into Facebook).

The list below outlines some functionality that is absent from Facebook Comments.

Shortcomings:

Don't get email addresses associated with your commenters

Cannot add images to the comment

Cannot allow guests to comment

Cannot import existing comments

Comments are unable to be crawled and indexed by search engines (it doesn't appear to be the case, but if we're wrong feel free to correct us in the comments below)

Doesn't have analytics.

Comments made with Facebook are NOT synced with your WordPress database (making it very very difficult to switch from Facebook comments to a different commenting solution and retain those existing comments)

Unable to delete comments from Facebook

Must have a Facebook Account or sign up for one to comment

Livefyre Comments 3 is another popular alternative to WordPress' default commenting functionality. Livefyre Comments 3 has 8,000+ active installs, 4 out of 5 stars from 4 users, was last updated on December 5, 2014 and is compatible with sites up to WordPress version 3.5.2. (We used this plugin on a WordPress version 4.1.5 site and it worked exactly as it should BUT the avatar image was too large for the design and overlapped a bit of the comment box. So, you should definitely stick to the listed compatibility on this one.). You can download this plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory at https://wordpress.org/plugins/Livefyre-comments/. The following sites are using Livefyre's commenting functionality: tennis.com, hootesuite.com, spinsucks.com and thecommunitymanager.com. Below, you can check out the configuration process for the Livefyre Comments 3 WordPress plugin along with a comprehensive list of user and admin features.

Configuration Process:

Click on the confirm your blog configuration with Livefyre.com link at the top of your WordPress dashboard

Login to your Livefyre account (or create one)

Once Livefyre is done importing your existing comments, you're good to go! Create a Facebook App at developers.facebook.com/apps

User Features

Allows users to comment on your blog post once they're signed into their account or comment as a guest (if this is enabled). They give you multiple options to make the sign in process easier; you can use your Livefyre, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or OpenID credentials.

Ability to Follow commenting that occurs on a certain page by clicking on the +Follow button.

Responsive design to fit different devices – The commenting functionality is set to 100% width of whatever container it is in. So, how it looks depends on how well crafted the theme is.

Social media login with above networks

Add an Image to your Comment

Twitter @ mention other people in your comment

Change the text formatting by clicking on the little pencil in the left corner ( make text bold, italics, underlined, numbered or bulleted)

Sort by Newest, Oldest or Top Comments

Share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or with a link

Edit or Delete your own comment

Flag, Like or Reply to an individual comment

Admin Features

How to Access: Login to your Livefyre account. Go to a page of your site with the commenting plugin, hover over your picture and click on the Admin Console link.

Free to use

Feature an individual comment

Tag comments

Mark as Approved, Pending, or Bozo (Spam) or Move to Trash for each individual comment

You can quick filter the comments (by approved, approved and flagged, all sidenotes, all content, pending)

You can also filter the comments in more depth by state (approved, pending, bozo, trash), source (Livefyre, Facebook, Twitter), flags (spam, off-topic, offensive, disagree, profanity, spam), created date/time (from and to dates), modified date/time (from and to dates), author (ip, display name, user id), contains (keyword, media), collection (collection id, collection tag, parent id).

Edit a comment

View replies to a comment

Look up more info related to a comment (author ip address, username, whether it passed a spam check, content id, collection id)

View Flags and Reports associated with a comment

Add a note to a comment

View Collections (comments associated with an individual page) and the ability to add new collections

View all of the users who have commented via the plugin (see all of their activity (comments, likes, conversations involved in))

Viewing analytics on conversations and moderation reports

Insert all comments to the WordPress database. This also allows you to revert to WordPress default commenting without losing any comments that you had while using Livefyre

Allow guest commenting

Remove replies to a comment that was marked as bozo or deleted

Define rules for when you should trash, bozo or pre-moderate comments depending on the number of times it has been flagged

Define a list of banned IP addresses (preventing commenting from those IPs)

Enable profanity checking or use a site specific profanity list.

Add/Remove moderators, owners, whitelisted users, banned users, banned browsers

Allow users to edit their comments

Display linkbacks

Require moderator approval before content is published

Allow photo uploads

Highlight recently featured comments above the editor

Display Facebook and Twitter content related to your article

Below is a key feature that is absent from Livefyre Comments.

Shortcomings:

Aren't given access to email addresses associated with your commenters.

The final WordPress Commenting plugin that we investigated is Comments Evolved for WordPress. The Comments Evolved plugin allows you to include several commenting options on your WordPress site via a tabbed interface. We just wanted to use Google Plus Commenting so we made sure that there was only one tab corresponding to Google Plus. While Google doesn't officially support Google Plus Comments outside of use on Blogger.com, the creator of this WordPress plugin figured out a way to make it work on WordPress sites. This plugin has 10,000+ active installs , is rated 4.5 out of 5 stars from 65 people, was last updated on March 31, 2015, and is compatible with WordPress versions less than or equal to 3.6.1 (but we used it on a site with WordPress version 4.1.5 and everything worked as it should). This plugin can be found at https://wordpress.org/plugins/gplus-comments/.

Configuration Process:

Once you've activated the plugin, make sure that the only value in the Tab Order input is gplus. If you have multiple values in this field, then your users will have multiple commenting options.

Save Changes and you're good to go!

*It's important to keep in mind that if you use this Google Plus commenting plugin mentioned below you will want to disable WordPress comments on your site. In order to remove the default WordPress comments, we recommend installing the WordPress Disable Comments plugin. Download the plugin at https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/, add it as a new plugin to your WordPress site and then activate it.

User Features

Comment after logging into your Google Plus account.

Mention people in your comment

Comment Sorting – sort by newest and top comments as well as public comments versus only those in your Google Plus circle

Reply, +1 and Flag each individual comment

Link, Report Spam or Abuse, or Mute any comment

Edit, Link, Delete, Disable Replies to a comment thread that is authored by you

Responsive design to fit different devices – The commenting functionality is set to 100% width of whatever container it is in. So, how it looks depends on how well crafted the theme is.

Comments are able to be crawled and indexed by search engines

Admin Features

None. Since the Google Plus Comments are meant for Blogger.com, they offer moderation tools for Blogger blog authors (https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/3007766?hl=en). However, using Google Plus Comments on other sites is not officially supported and we couldn't figure out a way to use the moderation tools on WordPress.

Free to use

Below is a list of the shortcomings of Google Plus Comments.

Shortcomings:

Doesn't have any moderation functionality when used on a site other than Blogger.com.

Unable to create default comment approval settings.

Unable to delete, mark as spam, approve or hide comments from Google Plus.

Must have a Google Plus Account or sign up for one to comment

Don't get email addresses associated with your commenters

Cannot add images to the comment

Cannot allow guests to comment

Cannot import existing comments

Doesn't have analytics.

Comments made with Google Plus are NOT synced with your WordPress database (making it very very difficult to switch from Google Plus comments). So, if you decide to switch commenting plugins down the road, you will not be able to carry the comments made here with you to another plugin

Using Google Plus Comments on sites other than Google or Blogger.com is not officially supported by Google. So, if there are issues with use on other sites, Google may not fix them.

While you can use any of these commenting plugins, certain plugins prove to be much more useful than others in certain situations. For example, you may have existing WordPress comments and want to make sure they are carried on to your new commenting functionality. You will lose existing WordPress comments if you switch to Google Plus or Facebook Comments. However, Disqus and Livefyre have import capabilities for existing comments; making them the obvious choice in this circumstance. You may also have no existing comments but you want the flexibility to switch to a different commenting platform later. Again, you do not want to use Facebook or Google Plus Comments in this instance. We would suggest using Livefyre or Disqus. In choosing between Livefyre and Disqus, we would recommend using Disqus. Disqus offers more features, gives you access to the email addresses associated with all your commenters, has the most number of active installs and has a better design than Livefyre.

In all other situations, we would discourage you from using Google Plus. Google Plus has no moderation functionality and is not officially supported by Google for use on any site other than Blogger.com. The last updated date and the compatibility information are also strong indicators that you should not use Google Plus Commenting via the Comments Evolved for WordPress plugin.

So, Facebook, Disqus and Livefyre are your best alternatives to WordPress' default commenting functionality. We tend to lean towards Facebook and Disqus because both are more ubiquitous than Livefyre, have functionality that we prefer and boast more of a modern and beautiful design. Facebook Comments has some simple and reliable admin functionality, but we prefer having the additional admin features that Disqus offers. But, Facebook is a staple and nearly everyone knows how their functionality works. We also love the prospect of easy and increased user engagement by users sharing their Facebook comments to Facebook and receiving Facebook notifications to continue their conversations on different comment threads. However, being able to share a conversation or comment on Twitter and/or Facebook, subscribe to a comment thread, add images to a comment, up or down vote a comment and recommend a conversation via Disqus provides more opportunities for users to engage with your website than Facebook comments. Lastly, Disqus is more open than Facebook Comments and provides more sign in and sign up pathways, the possibility of guest commenting and gives you access to all of your commenters' email addresses. These features are incredibly valuable in building an engaged community.

So, at the end of the day, it's hard for us lovers of user engagement not to land in the Disqus camp.

Continue the Conversation: We always love more insight, so please comment on which commenting plugin you love and why.

Ben cofounded a web development company with his brother Lee 5+ years ago. He luxuriates in building WordPress plugins. Ben and his brother built WPMerchant to make it cheap and easy for anyone to sell products/subscriptions on WordPress. Ben also enjoys learning about lead generation and the brothers relish helping others get more customers through their TemplateLauncher landing pages.

Source: A Comprehensive Comparison of WordPress Commenting Plugins

Yes of course, Dr Hunt, your remarks about women in labs were not sexist at all!

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields have always been ruled by men. However, there have been women like Marie Curie, Ada Byron, Rosalind Franklin, Sally Ride and Maryam Mirzakhani, who have proved that women are just as talented as the opposite gender. Yet, the mind-set that women are not professional enough for these fields prevails even today. A Nobel laureate, Dr Tim Hunt, recently commented at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul that, "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls; three things happen when they are in the lab; you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they ...

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Source: Kanwal Tariq

Roosevelt Island hosts the Marxist Memorial, dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at its southern tip.

(The memorial officially is known as the FDR Four Freedoms Park.  FDR's wife Eleanor, Hillary's admitted inspiration, is the ghost with whom Hillary famously said she conversed late at night in the White House

residence.)

The memorial deifies FDR's compilation of two God-given individual rights that he lifted from the U.S. First Amendment, and two responsibilities he wanted imposed upon the individual, from the tenets of Marxism.

The "Four Freedoms":

1. Freedom of speech and expression

2. Freedom of religion

3. Freedom from want

4. Freedom from fear

Freedoms 1 and 2 are God-given individual rights that every human is born with and that every nation should sanctify.  Of course, few do – which can be confirmed by looking at the roster of the countries that belong to the United Nations, housed in the Marxist Monument, the U.N. Secretariat Building, immediately across the East River.  That roster reads like a "Who's Who" of global Marxists, tyrants, and terrorists, plus the free countries necessary to foot the bill.

While FDR's "freedoms" 1 and 2 are individual rights, 3 and 4 are services FDR wanted guaranteed to one individual by another, which no free nation may rightly demand.  Because if you guarantee someone "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear," you are simultaneously enjoining someone else in that country to provide those services.  To garnish the income necessary.  And no free nation can impose such duties on its citizens and still call itself free.

Instead, this is the Marxist maxim, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," as well as an abrogation of the biblical commandment "Thou shalt not steal."

(Or, from the perspective of the U.N. parasites across the river, their "tax enslavement" of nations is imposed on those in the U.S., which foots 22% of the U.N. budget, and other free nations.)

But calling these last two "freedoms," sanctifying them with a marble memorial in the shadow of the U.N. building, on the island formerly called welfare Welfare Island and renamed Roosevelt for the president who started the welfare state, then using this Marxist Memorial as the backdrop to your presidential campaign's re-launch, confirms the Marxist ideology of the woman who wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky and spent the bulk of this campaign speech promising a continuation not of her husband's attempt to triangulate to the center, but rather Barack Obama's far-left "spread the wealth around" "fundamental transformation" of the country.

It is also a warning that electing her would be the equivalent of Obama's third term.

David Baker lives in New York City and welcomes readers to his blog at eagleinnyc.wordpress.com.

Roosevelt Island hosts the Marxist Memorial, dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at its southern tip.

(The memorial officially is known as the FDR Four Freedoms Park.  FDR's wife Eleanor, Hillary's admitted inspiration, is the ghost with whom Hillary famously said she conversed late at night in the White House

residence.)

The memorial deifies FDR's compilation of two God-given individual rights that he lifted from the U.S. First Amendment, and two responsibilities he wanted imposed upon the individual, from the tenets of Marxism.

The "Four Freedoms":

1. Freedom of speech and expression

2. Freedom of religion

3. Freedom from want

4. Freedom from fear

Freedoms 1 and 2 are God-given individual rights that every human is born with and that every nation should sanctify.  Of course, few do – which can be confirmed by looking at the roster of the countries that belong to the United Nations, housed in the Marxist Monument, the U.N. Secretariat Building, immediately across the East River.  That roster reads like a "Who's Who" of global Marxists, tyrants, and terrorists, plus the free countries necessary to foot the bill.

While FDR's "freedoms" 1 and 2 are individual rights, 3 and 4 are services FDR wanted guaranteed to one individual by another, which no free nation may rightly demand.  Because if you guarantee someone "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear," you are simultaneously enjoining someone else in that country to provide those services.  To garnish the income necessary.  And no free nation can impose such duties on its citizens and still call itself free.

Instead, this is the Marxist maxim, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," as well as an abrogation of the biblical commandment "Thou shalt not steal."

(Or, from the perspective of the U.N. parasites across the river, their "tax enslavement" of nations is imposed on those in the U.S., which foots 22% of the U.N. budget, and other free nations.)

But calling these last two "freedoms," sanctifying them with a marble memorial in the shadow of the U.N. building, on the island formerly called welfare Welfare Island and renamed Roosevelt for the president who started the welfare state, then using this Marxist Memorial as the backdrop to your presidential campaign's re-launch, confirms the Marxist ideology of the woman who wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky and spent the bulk of this campaign speech promising a continuation not of her husband's attempt to triangulate to the center, but rather Barack Obama's far-left "spread the wealth around" "fundamental transformation" of the country.

It is also a warning that electing her would be the equivalent of Obama's third term.

David Baker lives in New York City and welcomes readers to his blog at eagleinnyc.wordpress.com.

Source: Hillary chose FDR's Marxist Memorial to re-launch her demand for the presidency

WordPress sure has a come a long way since it's initial release in 2003, hasn't it? What started out as a simple blogging tool has become arguably the leading content management system in the world.

In fact, WordPress is now used by 23.8% of all websites in the world.

Sites powered by WordPress include brands ranging from NASA, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, TechCrunch, IZOD, Best Buy, GM, eBay, and even Jay Z's LifeandTimes.com, to name just a few. Even Google's Matt Cutts is a fan of WordPress, calling it "a fantastic piece of software."

If you're a WordPress user, it's easy to realize why WordPress is such a powerful platform. It's easy to use, it's free, and has more than enough plugins/add-ons to help customize your site or blog to fit your needs.

That's not to say that other content management systems – such as Joomla or Drupal – aren't worthy options, it's just that WordPress is pretty exceptional, especially when it comes to SEO.

Whether you've used WordPress in the past, or want to start using it for your business or personal blog, here's a breakdown of why WordPress is the absolute best platform to use as the foundation of your SEO success story.

Optimized Websites in 5 Minutes or One Click

Creating a website can be a daunting task if you're new to the development world. A decade ago finding a complex content management system that could handle all of the many tasks that WordPress can offer would have cost you an arm and a leg to get started with, and that's before even trying to figure out how to use it.

First and foremost, WordPress is free to download. With a little help from the famous "5-Minute Install" method, you only need to be a little tech-savvy to get WordPress up and running on a typical hosting provider. Unzip, fill out the WP-Config file (you'll need to set up a database first which is also as easy as point-and-click), upload the files, and you should be good to go.

Even over the last few years, most major web hosting providers have dumbed this process down even further by offering a one-click installation. That's right – you just sign up for hosting, login, click one button, and you can start the process right in your browser. No touching any of the core PHP files!

Open Source Customization

Another important factor is that WordPress is open-source. This is the real reason that WordPress is such a powerful CMS – any developer in the world can create a theme or plugin (more on this soon!) and contribute it to the WordPress community.

Looking for a well-designed theme that's also designed with current SEO standards? There are literally thousands of them to choose from (both free and paid).

Need your WordPress site to perform a specific SEO function? There are thousands of those, too. The capabilities of your WordPress site are nearly endless, and it's all because of the open source nature of the community. This allows you to easily update your site to stay on top of Google's suggested best practices, instead of an alternative proprietary CMS which may take months or years playing catch up.

Basic SEO Out-of-the-Box

One of the many reasons why WordPress is often chosen over its competition is because of its ability to manage on-page SEO fairly well out of the box. We could argue that SEO is a complex practice consisting of hundreds of factors, but at the end of the day a simple WordPress installation will allow you to easily manage the basics without any coding knowledge whatsoever.

Permalinks

After installation, the first thing you'll want to do is head over to the settings tab and click the drop-down menu, where you'll find a section called "Permalinks". There you'll find the default permalink setting which displays URLs based on a few odd characters and numbers (grabbing the id number of the database entry where your page or post is being stored).

Below you'll find several other options, the most preferred being the "post name" option (for most installations this is the best option). That's all you have to do to make sure your URL structure is going to be optimized, with the ability to customize the actual words once you starting editing a blog post or page.

Title Tags & Headings

This takes us to the next set of basic SEO needs, found in the content editor. Once you're ready to add content, simply head over to "add page/post", and begin adding your content. First you'll want to add the title, which typically is coded as an H1 or H2 tag depending on the theme you're using, which will also act as your web page's title tag. Under that, you'll see your URL structure, which again, is easily editable without having to touch a line of code.

Optimized Content

Next, you have the actual content area, where the Visual Rich Text editor allows you to bold and underline words, hyperlink to other internal or external web pages, add additional heading tags, upload images (where you can add image alt tags), but more importantly as a whole, ADD CONTENT, which will easily be crawlable by search engine spiders. All those basic SEO elements are built right in to any default WordPress installation.

Site Speed

Earlier we mentioned using alternative paid or proprietary platforms could be a detriment to your SEO needs, and addressing site speed is a great example of how you could run into such a problem. Over the last few years Google has been making it very well-known that it's taking your website's load times as an important factor in your on-page optimization.

What happens when your old, out-dated CMS doesn't hold up to the big G's standards?

That's not a problem with WordPress out-of-the box. A basic installation and standard themes load quickly and efficiently. Now, it is true that the user can slow a site own depending on what types of content they add or what themes they pick (for example, loading web pages with tons of videos or using themes that are image heavy, having too many scripts running on one page, etc), but luckily there are plenty of plugins like Autoptimze and WP Super Cache (as well as other actions you can take) to keep your sites zooming along.

Mobile Optimization

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock for the last few months, you know in April Google set a deadline for websites to have some sort of mobile optimization in place. That's right, Google flat-out told the world that if your website wasn't optimized for smartphones or tablets (in other words, using a responsive design that made the experience of your website better for mobile users), there was a strong possibility that your website would lose high placements for mobile searches.

As with any announcement of this nature, everyone started to freak out, with the exception of most WordPress users. So why weren't they feeling the heat?

That's because for most simple WordPress websites, all they had to do was install the popular Jetpack plugin and in just a few minutes were able to comply with Google's mobile website standards. On the other side of the fence are those WordPress sites using premium, paid themes from marketplaces like Envato, and those users surely weren't scared because the premium theme marketplace has been cranking out themes that already have built-in responsive capabilities for years! This is perhaps one of the greatest arguments for why WordPress simply is an SEO's dream come true.

The Versatility of Themes and Plugins

Many times when others argue about their favorite CMS (usually die-hard fanboys of a specific platform arguing their point to a WordPress user), they argue that their CMS is just as customizable as the next. That's great if you're a seasoned developer, but for us who want to focus on our SEO skills, we need something easy to develop at the drop of a hat.

Luckily, with thousands of WordPress developers out there, there is a ridiculous number of options to customize your WordPress site, and usually there is a theme or plugin already out there for any feature you can dream up.

Optimized Themes for Any Kind of Website

First, let's talk about WordPress themes. We've already mentioned the basic "twenty" themes that come pre-installed with WordPress, and those are great if you're just looking to get some optimized blog content out on the web. But what if you're looking to build something more?

Many people today think WordPress is only good for blogging, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

You can build any kind of website with WordPress, and you can find a theme that completely transforms your installation and allows you to build it – and do so well for optimized for search! Want to build an optimized E-commerce site? No problem. Directory site? That's easy. Forums, social networks, the list goes on and on.

Did We Mention Plugins?

So we've mentioned it a bagillion times so far, but we need to discuss the concept of plugins once and for all to really drive home what makes WordPress so great. Advanced users who started reading this article were probably laughing when we discussed title tags and hyperlinks as reasons why WordPress is such a great CMS for SEO, knowing very well that in your experience, it takes much more to get WordPress SEO just right.

And that's exactly the point – WordPress isn't only this super-sophisticated platform that only SEO rockstars can use to rank for highly competitive keywords. The basics could be all a blog needs if what they're discussing is long tail enough, which is a very powerful thing.

Giving anyone the ability to create a blog with the basics may be all the SEO they need if it were to say, go viral and get tons of highly authoritative links and social signals!

Yet not all of us will get so lucky, and in order to fight the good fight, we need every optimization technique in place. Luckily for us ,the SEO gods have granted us a wealth of plugins to use to our advantage – many of which are free.

There's the obvious Yoast SEO plugin that allows us to optimize really technical stuff like our Robots.txt file, canonicalization issues, XML sitemaps – stuff a non-developer couldn't even begin to understand. Then there's tools like the Broken Link Checker, Redirection plugins, SEO tool widget plugins – really, the list of awesome SEO plugins that you can use to supercharge your SEO is endless.

The point is, whatever your specific SEO plugin needs are, either now or in the future, the WordPress community has your back.

Conclusion

Over the last decade WordPress has taken over the web development world as the platform of choice for many designers, developers, and SEO professionals. With its core installation, its community of open-source plugin and theme developers, and the ease of use for non-programmers, there is no doubt that WordPress will continue to be the dominant CMS in the SEO community for many decades to come.

If you're a WordPress user, are there any additional reasons we forgot to mention that make WordPress the best platform for SEO?

Featured Image: "The Art of WordPress" via mkhmarketing/Flickr

Source: What Makes WordPress the Best Platform for SEO?

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