CMS (content management system) is a system for managing the content of a website. It is designed to give the user the most convenient way to manage and maintain the content of a website. The slang name is «engine». Which engine is the site on the web studio «Esfirum»? Definitely on WordPress.
We are very often asked why it is still worth choosing CMS WordPress. What is so special about this system? There are plenty of free alternatives such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento, ModX and Opencart, as well as paid ones - 1C-Bitrix, Shop-Script, Shopify, UMI.CMS, NetCat and others. And these are only the most popular of them.
In total there are more than 30 different content management systems on the market.
In this article we will try to explain as simply as possible all the advantages of WordPress over other CMSs. But first, a little statistical information.
According to the latest data, WordPress controls almost 60% of the entire CMS market! But what is even more impressive is that almost 30% of all websites in the world run on this engine.
Next come Joomla and Drupal with 6.6% and 4.6% of the CMS market. Right after this pair comes Magento - with a market share of 2.4%.
The most popular websites on WordPress are the New York Post, the White House website white-house.gov, BBC America, Walt Disney, jQuery, The Sun and many others.
CMS WordPress is the fastest growing website management system in the world. Every day 500+ new websites are built on it, compared with 60-80 on Shopify.
back to contents ↑Advantages of CMS WordPress
- First of all, WordPress is a completely free content management system. All the files and the database of the site will be fully yours. You will be able to choose hosting for your website according to your own wishes and needs.
- Excellent support from the developers. The core of the system is updated often, new modules, widgets and hooks are added, security and speed are improved. Online there are answers to almost any question you may have about this CMS.
- Thousands of plugins. The WordPress repository alone contains more than 1 000 000 free plugins for solving different tasks. And if that is not enough for you, there is a huge number of excellent premium plugins on the CodeCanyon portal.
- One of the most flexible and convenient engines for search engine optimisation and website promotion (SEO). Free plugins such as "Yoast SEO" and "All in One Seo Pack" solve all the tasks of on-page optimisation (setting up the
and meta tags, the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files).
We covered the "All in One Seo Pack" plugin in the article Best WordPress Plugins. There is no longer any need to write the meta tags needed for SEO in the code, the plugins will do it all for you. All that is left is to configure them properly. - The convenience and simplicity of the admin panel. The WordPress admin panel is extremely simple to use. Even people with no experience will be able to add new sections, pages, news and images. For complex websites the admin area is easily adapted to any task with the plugin "Advanced Custom Fields". We also covered it in the article Best WordPress Plugins. If you need to build a new landing page — no problem.
You can create additional custom fields with any content: galleries, headings, texts, images, tables, dynamic elements. - WooCommerce is the best solution for building an online store. Believe us, in no other CMS will you find as many additional extensions as there are for WooCommerce.
Want filtering by product attributes and price? Solutions
Do you want to be able to choose a product colour with a nice icon instead of a boring dropdown? Solutions
Do you need to compare products on a page? Solutions
Do you need to add the option to choose different currencies on the site? Solutions
The nicest part is that, unlike other CMSs, premium plugins do not cost 200 USD. Prices range from 16 to 70 USD. - A huge number of design themes, both paid and free. WordPress itself offers more than a dozen different themes for free that can easily be downloaded and installed. The portals "Themeforest" and "Template Monster" let you buy premium themes in which you can choose any design developed specially for them.
However, we want to warn you — a website template is a «one-off». Once it is installed, reworking the site will be extremely difficult. You can read why they are not worth using in our article "Downsides of WordPress themes" - Easy installation and migration. WordPress uses the PHP programming language, which means you do not have to buy special dedicated hosting. Any PHP hosting with a good rating is enough. And because this engine is completely free, you will not have to pay for using it.
- The ability to extend the system of the site. Built a landing page and want a full website? No problem, we create additional pages with a unique design. Want an online store as well? We install WooCommerce and rework the site for full online store support. Tired of the online store and now you want to switch direction to a crowdfunding platform? Please, with Woocommerce all of this is possible. The question immediately arises: can the system handle heavy loads? 10 000 products? 1 000+ visitors per day? Yes! Everything depends on optimisation and good hosting. After all, WordPress is just a «container for content», the same as other systems, but with far greater capabilities.
- High speed of work. With a properly built theme, caching turned on and correct optimisation of images and content - and WordPress lets us do all of this with plugins - you will easily pass all the website loading speed checks on Google PageSpeed Insights і GT Metrix.
- A high level of security. The developers constantly update the core of the system, adding more and more quality protection. You can also install additional protection in the form of the "All In One WP Security" plugin. With it you will be able to protect the site from password guessing in the admin panel, protect the site's database and file system and set up additional protection from "worms".
Disadvantages of CMS WordPress
WordPress is not a perfect CMS, it has some drawbacks that need to be taken into account when choosing a content management system.
- Constant full control over the site, its security and the correctness of its work is needed. Installing plugins to automate the work does not remove the need for constant control.
- WordPress is not a site builder like Wix, Shopify, Weebly or Jimdo. So to build a site with a unique architecture and design you have to code all its pages from scratch and only then integrate them with CMS WordPress.
- A large number of low-quality plugins, after installing which conflicts between them can arise. Because of this the loading speed of the site will not be high and the quality of the site in the eyes of search engines will suffer. And that in turn will badly hurt the positions of the site in the search results.
This article presents far from a complete list of the advantages of the system. We have been working with it for more than eight years and constantly watch how it changes, how it is extended and improved. We can say with full confidence that at the moment it is the best CMS in the world for building and promoting websites of any type!
Your WordPress God