Wordpress is one of the most widely used platform to create websites, blogs, complex portals, enterprise websites and even applications. 17% of the web today is powered by wordpress and this figure is growing day by day. Wordpress provides all coding facilities to the developer yet its simplicity makes it easy for the average users and publishers. It has speed and gives a great user experience. Wordpress is a powerful semantic publishing platform and comes with a great set of features that intend to make its usage as easy as possible. There is a list of features that come handy with wordpress. With more than thousand plugins available in the market, the functionality of wordpress is limitless.

1. Starting a new Website?? First know what WORDPRESS is.
Wordpress is one of the most widely used platform to create websites, blogs, complex portals,
enterprise websites and even applications. 17% of the web today is powered by wordpress and this
figure is growing day by day.
Wordpress provides all coding facilities to the developer yet its simplicity makes it easy for the
average users and publishers. It has speed and gives a great user experience.
Wordpress is a powerful semantic publishing platform and comes with a great set of features that
intend to make its usage as easy as possible. There is a list of features that come handy with
wordpress. With more than thousand plugins available in the market, the functionality of wordpress
is limitless.
In this article you would find some interesting plugins that are must for a website and various
features and tools that make wordpress so easy for publishers as well as developers.
Due to extending with plugins, the features that wordpress can provide to a website are limitless.
Yet here is a list of few features that are important and come by default with wordpress.
Freedom: Yes, you are right. You can use wordpress whichever way you want. The licensing of
wordpress is under GPL which protects your freedom. You are free to download it, install it, change
it, or even distribute it and make as many website and applications as you please.
Multilingual Facility: It does not matter which language you speak, you can use wordpress in more
than 60 different languages. Your website can be created in any of those languages and can even be
translated as well.

2. Management of users: Every user may have different contribution to a website. Keeping this in
mind, wordpress provides a facility of user management where the users could be divided into
administrators, editors, authors and contributors and get the access to the website accordingly.
Use of Themes: There are two default themes that come with wordpress but if you don’t like it ,
there is a directory of free as well as paid themes that can totally transform your website as per your
requirement. Wordpress provides this feature in a very easy way with just few clicks.
Easy to publish: Creating content using wordpress is as easy as using notepad. You can create
Posts and Pages, format them easily, insert media, and within few minutes your content is published
on the web.
Search Engine Optimised: One of the most important feature for any website to have today is to
be search engine optimised. Wordpress covers this feature 80%-90% on its own which can be further
increased by using various available plugins.
No access to others: If you are using wordpress, all the content on the site will be yours. No
adverts or any intrusion from a second party can be seen , hence making it your own space.
Community: Being the biggest open source CMS has helped wordpress to make a strong
community from all over the world who share their knowledge and experience. You even get
answers about any issue that you are facing with wordpress.
Plugins Directory: Plugins are short set of codes that can be easily integrated with wordpress to
perform a specific function. The online directory contains more than a thousand plugin to choose
from which almost covers all the functionalities that you could think of.
Apart from the few features mentioned about wordpress, it also has lot of scope for developers.
Some of the features that make it developer friendly are:
Create your own Theme: Wordpress provides facility to the developers to create their own
themes. It could be a simple one or can be as complex as the developer wishes . Developer can even
give away his website theme for free or can sell it to make money.
Create your own app: Not known to many but wordpress has features such as HTTP requests, URL
routing, databases and many more features that can be used in creating an application of your own
choice. Developer can use his creativity and make as many apps he wishes.
Create your own Plugin: With wordpress API’s , it is possible for the developer to create any
plugin as per his requirement . There is a wordpress repository where you can hote your plugin and
help users extend wordpress.
Make use of the Latest Libraries: Wordpress gives you all the latest libraries such as jQuery,
Plupload, Underscore.js and Backbone.js which can be used by the developers to enhance the user
experience of the website.
Any article about wordpress would be incomplete without writing about some of the free plugins
that are must in a new website. Each plugin mentioned below has a unique feature/functionality of
its own which extends wordpress and provides support to your website.

3. Content Aware Sidebars (Free)
This is a free wordpress plugin that allows you to create n number of sidebars and also gives you an
option to assign it to any post, page , category and so on in your website. In a simpler language, this
wordpress plugin allows you to make as many columns as you want.
Enhanced Text Widget (Free)
This wordpress plugin helps you to experiment with the text of your website, giving you more
options. You can even add link to you wishful text. This wordpress plugin is basically a widget.
WordPress SEO by Yoast (Free)
Search engine optimization has become one of the most needed tool in today’s web world.
Wordpress SEO by yoast for websites provides various features to enhance its SEO.
Akismet (Free)
This wordpress plugin for website is used to combat spam. It helps the website to have only relevant
and is very easy to install.
Digg Digg (Free)
This wordpress plugin for website enables you to get the maximum usage of the social media by
enabling using to quicky share on them. It supports all social media platform such as facebook,
twitter, linkdin etc.
These are just a few number of plugin that can be used for your website and would make it better.
The use of wordpress for creating website gives you infinite possibilities and helps you get your
requirement fulfilled.
Hope you liked the read, kindly comment below and provide me your honest feedback.