We build a lot of WordPress sites here at UpTrending, so we often get asked about how it compares to other Content Management Systems. Whether it’s Joomla, Drupal, SquareSpace or even a proprietary CMS, companies want to be sure they get the right platform for their largest digital asset.
Why WordPress is the Best
Nine times out of ten a company building a new website should do it in WordPress. There are so many reasons why WordPress squashes the competition, but we’ve chosen to highlight just five.
Ease of use
One of the biggest points in WordPress’ favor is that the admin interface is extremely easy to manage. The key to this ease-of-use is organization. A well-setup theme will separate out custom post types like press releases or white papers from larger static pages. This keeps everything filed in its proper place in a big grey sidebar that’s always accessible for admins.
A good theme will also break out sections of a page into “custom fields” letting users edit the specific content they want without breaking the html structure of the whole page. The Advanced Custom Fields plugin makes these so easy, it would be foolish not to use them!
Menus are also extremely easy to manage in WordPress. With just two clicks in the admin panel, you can be editing menu links and text. You can independently edit your main menu, footer menu, mobile menu or any other menus you have globally on your site. While most other CMS’ allow for menu customization, they often require an extensive tutorial to understand the process.
Popularity
Statistics show that 24% of the web is powered by WordPress. Why does your business care? Simple – more people are familiar with it.
When hiring a new team member to manage the company website, finding someone with WordPress experience is exponentially easier. Most developers also know how to manage a WordPress site’s code. Choosing a development partner with WordPress is easier because almost everyone knows how to work on them.
Customization
With over 39,000 plugins (and counting!) in the official WordPress directory, plus countless themes at your fingertips, WordPress is by far the most flexible CMS to customize. Most custom features requested for company websites can be implemented with a simple plugin that someone else has already written and is giving away for free, or a relatively low cost.
That being said, it is sometimes better to have a developer custom-build these features, because plugins with bad or bloated code can cause issues down the line. It is always good practice to question plugins (and test them) before throwing them into a site.
Community support
The WordPress Codex offers a wealth of knowledge on how to customize and build a solid theme or plugin. There are also many forums that are regularly updated and dedicated to WordPress theme and plugin support. On the rare occasion when a solution can’t be found with a simple Google search, it is easy to drop a question in one of these forums and get answers, sometimes within minutes!
Open source
WordPress is free to use and always will be. This beats getting locked into a payment plan with SquareSpace or Wix where they control the site and never give up ownership of the code.
The Exceptions to the Rule
There are some cases where WordPress is not the best solution. Here are three cases where another option will work out much better in the long run.
Web or mobile apps
Complicated web or mobile apps are not what WordPress was built for. There are cases where these can be achieved with WordPress, but using a more robust framework like Ruby on Rails or Laravel is probably a better option.
Single-use landing pages
Sometimes a single page site is so static it never needs the content updated. In this case it may be faster to build it out as a flat HTML site.
However, implementing WordPress isn’t all that complicated so it may be better to use the CMS for single page sites that do get their content refreshed every so often.
Complex e-commerce sites
WordPress did recently partner with the popular e-commerce plugin WooCommerce. This does allow companies who sell goods online to use WordPress, and it works very well.
However, some enterprise level e-commerce sites are so complicated that it is much less headache to use the popular Magento CMS to manage the online shop. In these cases it is still nice to use WordPress for the marketing side of the company site to get the benefits of both platforms.
Not convinced that WordPress has what it takes to power your company’s website? Check out some examples of our enterprise clients whose sites are built on WordPress.