Is WordPress a Good Choice for Education Websites?

WordPress is an excellent content management system (CMS) for education websites. In fact, a large number of colleges and universities around the world already employ WordPress for their sites, including Harvard Law School, Cornell University, MIT, Duke, Vanderbilt University, the University of Berlin, Georgetown University, and the University of Texas.

These schools and countless others have chosen WordPress due to the impressive benefits the platform offers, including enterprise-level security, multilingual capabilities, multi-site content management, and more. With that said, here are WordPress’s eight biggest benefits that offer a distinct advantage for educational institutions:

1. Customization potential as a development platform. Wordpress is more than a CMS--it's a powerful web development platform. Wordpress websites can be fully customized--from the user-facing frontend to the admin level. Education organizations can make Wordpress adapt easily to their needs. Web developers can add capabilities to Wordpress or extend the existing capabilities, without hacking the core system.

2. Multi-site capabilities. WordPress can easily power a network of websites using their multi-site feature, which allows for the use of sub-domains, sub-directories, and domains within the network. This allows schools to centrally manage any number of sites that are different but related, including the institution’s main website, alumni portal, research website, admissions website, hospital website, blog, and so on.

3. Multilingual websites. As a multilingual CMS, WordPress is available in more than 70 languages. This is particularly beneficial to schools that run an active exchange program or have a strong base of applicants and students from other countries.

4. Mobile-friendly. WordPress’s responsive design makes it incredibly mobile-friendly and able to offer an optimal viewing experience on any device. This allows students, applicants, and alumni to interact with the site’s content from anywhere, ultimately supporting the school’s engagement, application, and donation objectives.

5. Powerful SEO capabilities. WordPress is a highly valuable SEO tool, featuring permalinks, auto-generated URL (from the title), Meta data control, integration with Pingomatic, and important plugins, such as Yoast’s SEO plugin, which easily optimizes your entire site. In other words, WordPress has virtually everything your school needs to boost its SEO ranking.

6. Impressive publishing tools. WordPress makes publishing easy by allowing schools to create drafts, schedule publication, and review post revisions. Authors can also make content public or private, and secure posts and pages with a password until they are ready for public consumption.

7. User role management and permissions. WordPress allows schools to easily manage user access to the site. Administrators can assign users to specific roles and tasks, including writing and editing posts, creating web pages, tagging, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and overseeing other users.

8. Security. WordPress itself is an extremely secure platform and is trusted by enterprises, companies, and universities around the world for its top-notch security. However, no CMS is completely safe, and educational institutions still need to take precautions to reduce their risk of a breach. For example, we recommend limiting access to the site to only vital users; only installing themes and plugins from trusted sources; keeping the system updated; using a secure hosting environment; and maintaining clones of the environment to safeguard against loss.