Why The Top Universities Are Choosing WordPress

Universities need a versatile and easy-to-use platform when it comes to building or maintaining a?custom website.

There are huge volumes of data for enrollment, financial aid, class schedules, departmental blogs, resources and more. This requires the help of multiple skilled people in order to keep an educational institution’s website updated and running smoothly.

There are many content management systems available that are up to the task. However, WordPress seems to be the CMS of choice when it comes to many of the top universities.

WordPress?powers over 43.2% of the web. This showcases the platform’s versatility in terms of blogging, eCommerce, building the perfect landing page and so much more. It’s then no wonder that universities like Harvard, Georgia State, and USC have all chosen WordPress to power their websites.

So, here are just some of the reasons why top universities choose WordPress.

Hassle-Free Training

Unlike many other content management systems, WordPress is well-known for its top-notch online support. Anyone can read up and easily learn more about the platform. The open and inviting online WordPress community is ready to help on multiple online threads as well. There are also countless free tutorials and videos available online to teach you all you need to know.

In addition to this, WordPress hosts global annual conferences at very reasonable prices. These offer an additional opportunity to mingle and learn extra tips and tricks.

Compared to other content management systems, like?Cascade CMS?where training usually comes at a much greater expense, WordPress is hard to beat. This has led many educational institutions to migrate to WordPress.

Ease Of Use

One of the stand-out qualities of WordPress is that it is very easy to use. This is especially helpful to?larger educational institutions?– since multiple people will need to use and update the website. With a lot of varying levels of expertise present in any given team, choosing a simple yet effective platform is often the best choice.

The intuitive user interface along with WordPress’s drag-and-drop block editor makes creating blogs, pages, and posts quite effortless. The platform’s capabilities can be extended with additional plugins and a fitting theme can be chosen from the WordPress library or you can customize one of your own.

When it comes to upkeep, WordPress is very easy to maintain. This ensures that universities can focus their resources in other areas while their websites stay functional and up-to-date.

The Use Of Multisite

WordPress is one of the few content management systems that has a unique feature that allows you to run more than one site on one install, aptly named Multisite. Multisite allows you to set up multiple websites and departments. This is perfect for an educational institution with different faculties.

It also allows you to have a single library of users and enables full customization of each website. Additionally, Multisite gives you control of all your websites through the allocation of administrative users.

By using Multisite, universities also save on maintenance since all the websites will only need one hosting provider.

Prioritizing Security

When it comes to a university website’s security, any risks that might make that website vulnerable needs to be eliminated. Some content management systems, like Ektron, have notified the public that future versions of their platform will not be updated. This has led many users to?migrate from Ektron to WordPress.

Without regular system maintenance and updates, a content management system can become vulnerable to security threats. At the end of the day, this can impact the education quality that students receive.

Luckily, with WordPress, users don’t need to worry about regular system updates or the security of the platform. Since WordPress is open-source, various technical experts are always working on improving the platform’s security. This minimizes the probability of universities using WordPress being compromised.

Maintaining Your eLearning System

In the past, WordPress users had to maintain their eLearning system separate from their CMS. This meant that site content and learning material were in separate locations. This made sharing these resources between the two environments extremely difficult.

However, these days, all of the learning material and content can be housed under the same roof when using WordPress.

There are many tools available that can help to create learning content online that works in tandem with your web content. This is probably one of the primary reasons why universities are opting to use WordPress. It allows them to create a hassle-free online environment that can truly do it all.

In Conclusion

Many of the top universities across the world choose WordPress as their content management system and it’s clear to see why.

WordPress offers an affordable, competitive product that can help any university to create a holistic online platform. Universities can easily manage their different faculties with Multisite and don’t have to invest much time and energy into training. This means that they don’t need to waste unnecessary resources while maintaining an efficient online system.

WordHerd??has migrated?Stevenson University,?Northern Arizona University,?DDLS?and?Galen College of Nursing?just to name a few.

If you’re interested in migrating your website to WordPress reach out to our content wranglers to?get a free quote.