4 reasons you should include WordPress as new 2020 growth skill
You may already know how popular WordPress is, but according to creativeminds, WordPress market share is 35% of all websites in the world for 2020. So if you’re wondering why learning WordPress in 2020 and how this skill can help you move forward your career, these are my 4 arguments for why learning WordPress in 2020.
Reason 1: WordPress is a content management system (CMS) developed in 2003 and released as Open Source Software (GPLv2) with a steady growth over the last 17 years.
This means it is a mature web development tool currently in version 5.5.3. If we go to Google Trends and look for WordPress search term for the past 5 years, we can observe that it has a stable monthly traffic volume which means WordPress is not a new or fashion technology and won’t go away soon too. Therefore, it is a skill that you will for sure apply in the following years to come.
Reason 2: COVID-19 disrupted shopping behavior around the world in 2020.
According to digitalcommerce360, “a global study released in August 2020, by Salesforce Inc., 63% of consumers said the way they get goods and services “transformed” during 2020 and 57% said the same about the ways they engage with companies. 62% said this year changed how they conduct their lives offline and an equal percentage said it changed their online lives.
Also, 58% of consumers said they expect to do more online shopping after the pandemic than they did before it and 80% of business buyers surveyed expect to do more business purchasing online in the post-pandemic era, compared with the pre-pandemic period.
Salesforce collected its data from a survey conducted from July 16 through Aug. 18, 2020. Respondents represented 27 countries on six continents. The study included responses from 12,000 consumers and 3,600 business buyers.”
With this in place, we can only expect an exponential growth in e-Commerce websites and WordPress with WooCommerce will definitely get a good market share of this.
Reason 3: Huge Open Source Developers Community and ecosystem.
WordPress Developers’ community is worldwide vast, so any issue you may face either is already fixed or you will quickly find someone willing to help you. Also, there’re tons of developers building new themes or plugins every day to accomplish state-of-the-art web functionalities, so if you see a fancy website you can find a theme or plugin to get the same behavior in your website.
By the other side, if you need to contract a freelancer or small agency to develop or configure something specific for your website, you will easily find someone that meets your requirements and budget.
Also, while Wix and Shopify are good and popular e-Commerce builders’ options, they’re not free and with a monthly recurring fee vs. mostly free WordPress-WooCommerce solution, WordPress will continue in high demand.
Reason 4: WordPress can help you with a range of business models or short-term and long-term goals.
With an enormous range of themes and plugins, free and paid, basic to premium, you can start with any business model and dream big. For example, you can start as a freelancer and without investing more than a domain and hosting space, build your portfolio website and post your services into freelancer websites like fiverr, upwork or freelancer.
Then if you want it, you can start your agency and target more expensive projects by including premium themes, websites builders like Elementor Pro, Divi, Brizy Pro or Oxygen and premium plugins too for SEO, Forms, Lead generation, Sales Funnels, Conversion, Learning Management Systems (LMS) or e-Commerce.
Also, with WordPress you can target a great range of services:
- Website Design
- Website Development
- Website support and maintenance, plugins’ updates, conflict troubleshooting and resolution, daily backups, etc.
- Website performance work, image optimization, cache plugins, css/js minification, image lazy loading to name a few.
- Website SEO, plugins, optimization, Google suite configuration, etc.
- Website migration, move from one hosting to another
- Website Security
- Website content management, adding blog articles, adding e-Commerce products, adding news, etc.
Finally, you may target one time fee projects and recurring monthly fees, there’s a lot of proven models with success stories you can find on the web.
Final Words
WordPress is a high value technical skill that can help you whether you want to switch to a Web Development services career or just need a website for your business and be knowledgeable of how to contract the right agency/freelancer to meet your requirements. You can start at any level and with or without a technical background, artists, content creators, authors, photographers and many more are embracing the web technologies by learning WordPress.
