eulisboa2020lostportugal2020

Why media should use WordPress

Business Media WordPress

Why media should use WordPress

WordPress today ranks as the CMS with the largest market share, with more than 59% of the global market and running 29% of websites worldwide (W3Techs). From small personal blogs to large international companies websites that attract millions of views per day, tens of millions of websites are supported by WordPress technology.

The numbers shows that WordPress has a lot of popularity in several sectors, but this platform has come to assume special relevance in the media industry. With the growth of online content consumption, many newspapers and magazines worldwide have adopted WordPress to boost their digital channels and keep their readers informed.

The biggest newspaper in the United States, The Wall Street Journal, uses WordPress as a platform for its technology blog. The New York Times has adopted WordPress as the content management platform for its website. WordPress is equally popular among other major media brands such as Reuters, BBC America, The New Yorker, Variety, CNN, TechCrunch, Wired, Forbes and many others.

In Portugal, we have also witnessed a growing adoption of WordPress as a content management system platform for media groups. Examples are,  Jornal Económico, ECO, Observador, Dinheiro Vivo and others.

SEO friendly

Being present on the internet means being present in the search engines. WordPress always had huge concern with SEO which resulted in the implementation of the best SEO practices in its core. This means that the core of WordPress is optimized for search engines, apart from that there is a wide variety of plugins that help to evaluate and adjust all aspects of SEO.

Among its basic features of SEO stands out:

  • Customization of titles, description and meta-information of the pages;
  • Optimization of breadcrumbs;
  • Optimization of page addresses;
  • Creation of sitemap in XML;
  • Optimization of RSS feeds;
  • Robots.txt file configuration;
  • Definition of canonical content to mitigate the impact of content duplication.

Plugins

WordPress has more than 30,000 (thirty thousand) plugins available that allow you to extend the system almost unlimitedly. Through the plugins, you can increase the features of WordPress and create any resources that are needed on the website. Although you need to be careful in choosing the plugins to use, this feature allows you to extend the website in a simple and very effective way. Recently a project was launched – Tide – to automate tests on plugins verifying eventual errors or vulnerabilities.

Responsive

With mobile growth, having a responsive website is crucial to the user’s browsing experience. WordPress’ backoffice is fully optimized to work well on all devices, browsers and systems. However, the frontend is not responsive by default, but there are a myriad of responsive themes available.

Multimedia

WordPress facilitates and supports the insertion of any type of media files including images, videos and audio as well as the management of the metadata associated with each multimedia resource. Metadata is very relevant to search and SEO.

Scalability

On a media site, it is extremely relevant that the content manager supports a large number of page views without blocking when traffic is high. There are a number of well-known strategies and features that allow you to scale WordPress to support billions of pageviews. These strategies go through page caching, object caching, query performance improvement, indexing and search optimization, among many other strategies.

Security

The core of WordPress is as safe as possible. The dedicated work of a team of industry experts keeps WordPress up to date and secure. On average a correction is posted to a reported failure in less than 4 hours. This does not mean that we should neglect safety precautions. The adoption of best security practices is essential to ensure that we are protected.

In addition to security measures applied at the infrastructure and development level, the WordPress content management platform has the following features and functionalities:

  • Management of access control and authorization based on profiles;
  • Passwords policy based on size, complexity, user profile and expiration date;
  • Retrieval (reset) of passwords through links sent to the registration email;
  • Filtering contents that allow cross-site scripting by portal editors who do not have privileged access permissions;
  • Block access after a predefined number of incorrect or suspicious entry attempts (prevention of brute force and bot attack attacks);
  • Automatic anti-spam filter in the comments system (supported by the Akismet service);
  • Auditable record of access to the administration panel;
  • Auditable registry of changes to critical platform files;
  • Concealment of manufacturer identifiers and platform version to thwart automated sniffing attempts;
  • Possibility of integration with LDAP (ActiveDirectory) and single sign-on CAS 2.0 and OAuth 2.0 mechanisms.

Integration and Interoperability

WordPress platform is easily integrated with other systems through a REST service interface provided. This interface can be used at any time for alternative access to data and platform functionality through mobile applications, or for enrichment of data in external applications (such as portals, CRM, ERP, Single Sign-On, Business Intelligence, etc.)
Access to the REST Services API is conditioned by a unique key for each user, and through it (and the associated user profile) it can limit the range of features and access levels offered.

Customization

One of the factors of the success of WordPress is its easy graphic customization. Through themes it is possible to customize the appearance of any website. The existence of thousands of themes in WordPress, and the ability to customize colors, design and features of them, makes it extremely simple to customize the look and feel of a website.

WordPress as an application framework

In addition to a robust content management system that supports such diverse use cases as portals, e-publishing, e-commerce, reservation systems and intranet, WordPress also provides a set of REST web services that enable and facilitate integration of the platform with external services and applications such as CRM, ERP, BI or mobile applications.

The use of WordPress as an application framework allows to use and make with extreme efficiency incremental developments on all the basic functionalities of the platform, namely:

  • Extensible and customizable content management backoffice;
  • Content modeling;
  • User management;
  • Access control;
  • Internationalization of interface and data;
  • REST API;
  • Plugins system for platform extension.

Being an open source platform in continuous evolution, the application base will benefit from all the corrections and improvements that will be available in the future.

Conclusion

WordPress has revolutionized online publishing by evolving from a simple blogging platform to one of the most powerful, integrated, easy-to-use content management systems. Today, and thanks to the increasing evolution of its features and functionalities, it has become the trusted platform for most of the world’s leading media companies.

Reader Interactions