WordPress is the most widely used content management system. According to W3Techs, it powers 43% of all websites on the web, more than any other CMS. It’s only logical that the majority of educational institutions use WordPress as the backbone of their websites. Harvard Law School, Georgia State University, Bennett College, and numerous other online learning platforms, colleges, and universities prefer it over its many alternatives.
Wondering why?
Let this blog post satisfy your curiosity. In the following paragraphs, AnyforSoft reveals five benefits of using WordPress for education website development so that you can learn what makes this content management system so popular in the industry.
Enjoy!
How popular is WordPress in the education industry?
Before we describe the benefits, we would like to share some insights into the WordPress market share of higher education sites in the US. A study by eQAfy that analyzed 3,359 university websites showed that WordPress powered 40.8% of them.
However, to get a more complete picture, we should look at the CMS distribution by type of higher education institution.
Here’s the WordPress market share across public, private for-profit, and private non-profit institutions:
- Public institutions: 27%.
- Private for-profit institutions: 55%.
- Private non-profit institutions: 48.1%.
Interestingly, WordPress is preferred mostly by medium and small organizations. Extra large (20,000+ students) and large institutions (10,000 to 20,000 students) opt for Drupal, as per the mentioned study.
As a company specializing in Drupal development, this statistic doesn’t surprise us. We perfectly understand why large universities prefer Drupal. Firstly, this system provides enterprise-grade security: it has advanced security features such as user access control, database encryption, and malicious data entry prevention. The CMS supports wide functionality out of the box and thus doesn’t rely heavily on third-party plugins, unlike WordPress.
Secondly, Drupal can handle high traffic and swiftly process big amounts of data, which makes it a perfect solution for bigger educational websites.
But don’t get us wrong—we are not trying to say that one CMS is better than the other. Both WordPress and Drupal are perfectly fine and can be used to build top-notch websites. The choice of the system is often dictated by personal preferences and the end result a customer wants to achieve.
At AnyforSoft, we have expertise in developing both Drupal and WordPress solutions. Whether you need a small educational site to sell online courses or a huge platform for a higher education institution, you can count on us.
Thanks to hands-on experience in the industry, we can turn any idea into a profitable product. For example, our company helped the German-language educational online portal projektmagazin achieve 31% website speed growth, get 10% more subscribers, and gain an 18% traffic increase.
5 Reasons to Leverage WordPress for Education Site Development
As you just learned, WordPress is widely used for building websites for higher education institutions, especially small and medium ones. Now it’s about time we discussed why it is so. Here are the main benefits of using WordPress for schools, colleges, and other educational institutions.
#1 Ease of use
One of the main advantages of the WordPress platform is its ease of use. The CMS has an intuitive admin panel that can be used even by a non-tech person. More importantly, WordPress offers a vast variety of plugins and themes for setting up an educational site without coding.
Here are some of the most popular plugins for creating an educational WordPress website:
- LearnPress;
- Tutor LMS;
- LearnDash;
- WP Education;
- WP Courses LMS;
- Buddy Press.
And here are widely-used educational themes:
- Academy Pro;
- Member Press;
- Academica Pro;
- School;
- Edumag;
- Education Academy;
- Educational Zone.
By using WordPress plugins and themes like the ones above, you can build a site without having to invest in UI/UX design and the development of educational website features. And in case you face issues in the creation process, you can reach out to the huge WordPress community and find someone to help you resolve them.
#2 Customizability
To get more advanced, you can customize any education theme that WordPress offers. Thanks to its open-source code, customization options are virtually limitless.
Open-source code means that you can view the code of a theme and modify it however you want to tailor the theme to your specific needs. Thus, you can take any template and customize it to such an extent that it becomes unrecognizable and completely original.
Of course, the open-source code of WordPress is not only about visual design. It can also help you:
- Enhance website performance. By getting rid of unused code, you can make your WordPress website work faster, which will improve user experience and help your site obtain higher positions in search engines.
- Increase security. Many WordPress plugins have open-source code. If you notice a flaw in a plugin’s code that makes it vulnerable to hacker attacks, you can manually edit the code and close the security gap.
- Save money. Open-source content management systems are cost-effective by default. They allow you to make additional customizations to your site without paying extra, which is not the case with most proprietary systems.
#3 WordPress Multisite
Another reason to use WordPress is the WordPress Multisite feature.
WordPress Multisite enables you to create and run multiple sites using a single WordPress installation. In other terms, you can manage several properties within one WordPress dashboard.
To demonstrate how you can benefit from this, let’s suppose that you own a website with multiple online courses. At some point, you decide to create an individual website for each course. If you were to do this without using WordPress Multisite, you would have to manage each property separately, that is update plugins, install WordPress on each site, update WordPress Core, install/update themes, and back up each site individually. Obviously, this would be extremely inconvenient, time-consuming, and costly.
With WordPress Multisite, however, you could do this within a single dashboard, dramatically simplifying the management process.
To be more specific, the feature allows you to:
- update WordPress Core on each educational site simultaneously;
- manage user permissions, content types, and media on each site;
- create an individual theme for each WordPress site or share a single theme across all the sites;
- update plugins on the websites simultaneously;
- store websites’ data on a single server and thus back up your sites easily.
Note: some plugins don’t work with WordPress Multisite. Also, downtime on your server will render all the websites from a single network unavailable, so make sure that your system is secure and stable before enabling the feature.
#4 Integration with education-related apps
Since WordPress is the most widespread CMS on the market, the majority of learning management systems, CRMs, school district management solutions, and other education-related apps support WordPress integration. We’re talking about solutions like Classter, Jotform, Thinkific, Destiny One, and similar applications. You can integrate any of them into your WordPress site.
Such solutions are designed to help educational organizations streamline administrative operations and digitalize academic processes. They enable website owners to add extra features to their educational sites without having to develop them in-house. By using them, educators can:
- create unlimited courses;
- track student attendance;
- monitor student performance in online classes;
- setup paywalls;
- manage curriculum;
- communicate with students and parents;
- manage enrollments;
- conduct surveys, and much more.
The thing is, many educational apps don’t support integration with content management systems other than WordPress, which gives the latter a significant advantage. Thus, if you’re planning to use solutions like the ones mentioned above, you know what you should opt for.
#5 Infinite scalability
Lastly, by leveraging WordPress for creating educational sites, you can rest assured that you will be able to scale your site whenever the need arises. When equipped with the right software and hardware, WordPress can handle virtually any amount of traffic.
For example, with a quality managed hosting plan, your educational site could manage as many as 400,000 monthly visitors. A proper cloud hosting platform also enables WordPress sites to successfully operate with millions of page views per month. For instance, Rocket.net’s Enterprise plan can handle over 5,000,000 visits thanks to the use of more than twenty server locations and a smart Cloudflare cache.
However, if you were to create your e-learning platform or school website with a simple website builder, you wouldn’t be able to scale. Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and similar solutions are simply not designed for creating big websites and handling high traffic loads. Thus, opting for WordPress is a wise strategy in the long run.
Create an Educational WordPress Website with AnyforSoft
As you learned in the article, WordPress is a great solution for education websites. The system is easy to use, very flexible, has many amazing features such as Multisite, is integrated with plenty of educational apps, and can be infinitely scaled. Thanks to the abundance of plugins and themes, it allows you to build a simple website without coding.
However, if you aim to succeed in the long run, building a professional development team is imperative.
AnyforSoft can help you with that.
We build development teams with industry expertise to help you translate your ideas into tangible solutions. When working on projects, we care about our customers’ product visions and do everything it takes to meet their expectations and business goals.
Don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us more about your idea. Let’s collaborate and create something successful together!
FAQs
If you want to launch an educational website on WordPress just to test the waters, there is no point in investing large sums of money. Luckily, WordPress allows you to create your very first site completely for free. All you have to do is use free WordPress themes and plugins and also find a free hosting provider.
If you want to launch an educational website on WordPress just to test the waters, there is no point in investing large sums of money. Luckily, WordPress allows you to create your very first site completely for free. All you have to do is use free WordPress themes and plugins and also find a free hosting provider.
The cost of educational website development depends on a project's complexity, its requirements, the number of specialists involved in the project, the chosen collaboration model, and numerous other factors. It can range from $500 to $50,000 or even more. You can always contact us and request a cost estimate for your project.
The cost of educational website development depends on a project's complexity, its requirements, the number of specialists involved in the project, the chosen collaboration model, and numerous other factors. It can range from $500 to $50,000 or even more. You can always contact us and request a cost estimate for your project.
Using WordPress for website development in general looks like this:
- First, you find an appropriate domain name for your educational website.
- Then you register the domain name and invest in a hosting plan (or find a free hosting solution).
- After that, you install WordPress.
- Once it’s done, you install an attractive and, more importantly, responsive educational WordPress theme for your website.
- If you have coding skills, you customize the theme to make it unique and tailor it to your specific needs.
- After that, you install educational WordPress plugins (like the ones mentioned in the article).
- Lastly, you fill your website with content.
Using WordPress for website development in general looks like this: First, you find an appropriate domain name for your educational website. Then you register the domain name and invest in a hosting plan (or find a free hosting solution). After that, you install WordPress. Once it’s done, you install an attractive and, more importantly, responsive educational WordPress theme for your website. If you have coding skills, you customize the theme to make it unique and tailor it to your specific needs. After that, you install educational WordPress plugins (like the ones mentioned in the article). Lastly, you fill your website with content.
Of course, WordPress is relevant in 2022 and will remain so in 2023 and years to come. The last WordPress update was released just a month ago—on November 15, 2022. We see no reason for the WordPress team to stop their efforts in the near future.
Of course, WordPress is relevant in 2022 and will remain so in 2023 and years to come. The last WordPress update was released just a month ago—on November 15, 2022. We see no reason for the WordPress team to stop their efforts in the near future.
Being the most popular CMS, WordPress is a constant target of hacker attacks. To give you an example, in 2020, Wordfence reported over 2,800 hacker attacks per second targeting this content management system.
In addition to that, WordPress relies heavily on third-party plugins, many of which are vulnerable. Thus, when developing an educational website, you should take care of its security: timely update your plugins, don’t install questionable plugins and themes, regularly update WordPress core, and make sure that your code doesn’t have security vulnerabilities.
Being the most popular CMS, WordPress is a constant target of hacker attacks. To give you an example, in 2020, Wordfence reported over 2,800 hacker attacks per second targeting this content management system. In addition to that, WordPress relies heavily on third-party plugins, many of which are vulnerable. Thus, when developing an educational website, you should take care of its security: timely update your plugins, don’t install questionable plugins and themes, regularly update WordPress core, and make sure that your code doesn’t have security vulnerabilities.
