Pros and Cons of Choosing WordPress as a CMS Tool

First of all, let me say, we LOVE WordPress! We’ve created many WordPress websites, and the program is truly a joy to use. However, when trying to decide between Joomla, Drupal and WordPress as to WHICH Content Management System is right for your website, there are a few factors that might be critical in helping you to make that initial decision. Depending on your design and functionality needs, not all CMS packages are the same.  Here are some factors to help you in making your decision.

So, here are our top picks as the reasons we LOVE WordPress to build websites:

1. User Friendly Administration: Many clients want the ability to edit their own website once the initial build is completed. WordPress has by far the simplest and friendliest back-end administration interface available, and for most clients, it is completely intuitive.  Adding and editing posts and pages, managing comments is all done through a simple WYSWYG (What You See is What You Get) text editor that feel like Word. You can easily upload images and add captions.  You can choose when to publish and create categories and new pages on the fly.
2. Simple Upgrades: This is one of the best reasons to choose WordPress over Joomla or Drupal is the ease of keeping your blog updated to the latest release.  All the CMS applications have frequent upgrades, and WordPress offers automatic upgrades with the click of a button.  Plugins are also easily upgraded, so you don’t need to download and upload software, as you do with Drupal and Joomla.  You should install a backup plugin and run a backup of your database prior to upgrading, but that’s easy too.  We like WordPress Database Backup and WP-DBManager.
3. Plenty of Plugins: Finding and adding new plugins is very easy to do.  In fact, it’s a little addictive!  You can find,  install and activate new plugins in less than a minute.  This is both a pro and a con, as you will see below.
4. Lots of Themes: While we like to customize themes and make them very unique to a client’s business, you can find hundreds of themes out there to use to get started with… we do caution that many themes, especially the free themes might not be well designed and can create more problems than it solves.  But choosing the right theme can give you a big  jumpstart, and then you can customize from there.  We LOVE Thesis from DIYThemes and use it as our base theme on almost all our projects.
5. Speedy Path to a Live Website. Choosing WordPress can the fastest way to get your website up and running.  We’ve built and launched WordPress sites within just a few hours, where using Joomla and Drupal will definitely take more time to configure and customize, because they have more features and options to offer.  But for a quick and clean website, WordPress rocks!

Now a few limitations to consider before deciding on WordPress.  For many clients this may not  be an issue, but it is important to consider:

1. Limited per page customization. With Drupal and Joomla, you can customize the look and feel of your website to your heart’s desire.  This can be very important for complex sites or sites that have more than one marketing goal, or customer focus.  With WordPress, most of your theme will remain the same on all pages.  For instance, when you add a widget to your sidebar, that widget will show up on all pages.  You might be able to customize your homepage widgets or even find a plugin to customize what pages show what widgets, but in general, if you think you’ll need different messages, or theme elements within the site, I usually recommend using Drupal or Joomla.
2. Plenty of Plugins: The problem with so many plugins out there is it can be a little too easy to add and try out new plugins.  It’s so tempting to install lots of plugins.  However, not all plugins are coded well, and some of them can cause more problems to your site than they are worth… for example, I’ve visited many WordPress sites that are extremely slow, and the reason for that is there are dozens of plugins running that are not truly compatible or are hogging the database resources so much that the site is running like mud.
3. Limited Additional Functionality: With over 12,000 WordPress plugins out there, you can add a ton of functionality to your website, including social platforms, advertising management small shopping carts, forums, etc… however, if this functionality is going to be critical to your business, I definitely would recommend using one of the more robust CMS tools, such as Joomla or Drupal, that offer commercial level modules designed for high traffic, application specific performance.

So, a few questions you can ask yourself when trying to decide if WordPress is right for your website:

1. How critical to my business is the FUNCTIONALITY of the website?
2. Am I expecting high traffic within the next year, or am I just starting out and want to put a toe in the water first?
3. How much page level control do I want over my website?
4. How fast do I need this website up and running?
5. Who is going to be maintaining this website and how technical / web savvy is this person?

We’ll be adding posts soon on Joomla and Drupal options too, so stay tuned… Good luck in making your decision, and please feel free to contact us with questions or comments.

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