WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are the most widely used website platforms out there, but which is best to construct your business website on? The answer should depend on your budget, design specifications as well as long term aspiration for your business.
Now, let’s take a look at the overview of the three most popular CMS platforms, including both the similarities and differences.
WordPress
WordPress has been downloaded for about 18 million times, making it the most-used open source CMS worldwide. While nearly half of the sites are using free hosting from WordPress.com, WordPress takes up 18.9% of market share in the self-hosted website field.
Pros of WordPress
WordPress is easy to use. Don’t worry that you lack basic knowledge of HTML coding, WordPress lets you easily add blog posts, pages, products, media and edit the current content the way you like. You can also rely on the support and guide from WordPress community when you find yourself stuck.
WordPress is affordable. Instead of manually building the WordPress website for your businesses, you can access to a wide variety of free, professionally designed themes.
WordPress plugins add complex business features to your website without having to hire a coder. If you want to extend the functionality of your website, WordPress offers you thousands of plugins to meet your business needs, regardless of whether you look for a full-featured ecommerce system or a simple contact form.
WordPress is SEO friendly. With extendibility at the heart of WordPress philosophy, there are many awesome plugins that make any marketer lift much easier. Meta tags, 301 redirects, social shares, A/B testing and rich snippets, everything you want to do for creating a search engine optimized website can be realized by simply installing several WordPress plugins.
WordPress is ready for mobile web. Facing the upcoming mobile-driven internet world, you should ensure your site look great and work well on a tablet or smartphone. Most WordPress themes are designed to be responsive so that your visitors won’t be challenged to use your website on their mobile devices. Also, the WordPress dashboard can works perfectly on both full-sized PCs and mobile devices, enabling you to easily manage your website from anywhere.
Cons of WordPress
WordPress developers frequently update the software so as to work with the current browsers and enhance security and maintenance. However, some plugins may be found unable to make change according to latest version of WordPress as soon as possible. It happens sometimes that some of your plugins cannot work in the way they suppose to be after updates. That’s why we suggest you take a backup copy of your WordPress website before each update to the latest version.
Joomla!
Joomla! has the second-largest user base in the CMS market, with 2.5 million installations worldwide. Though the software aims at beginners to advanced developers, compared to WordPress, it is more challenging to use in technique perspective. Due to the comprehensive CMS functionalities pre-installed, Joomla! becomes the favored solution for lots of small businesses.
Joomla! is proud of flexibility. Joomla! comes fully-loaded with a slew of features and extensions, giving you maximum flexibility and power to create a functional and interactive business website as expected.
Joomla! is incredibly secure and stable. There are thousands of people working day and night to debug and tweak the Joomla! core. All you need is updating to the latest version as with every security alert. Meanwhile, thanks to the well-organized front and back-end user interface Joomla! features, you just take care of the minor maintenance and changes while leaving the heavy lifting to its support team, saving your time and reducing the possibility to make mistakes to your website.
Joomla! is e-commerce friendly. With providing plenty of components created specifically for e-commerce, Joomla! lets you easily manage your products as well as all the content along with each product, done without having to switch over tabs.
Cons of Joomla!
Even though Joomla! has been regarded as a good combination of WordPress and Drupal, it has a significant downside—limited free themes and plugins. As a result of that, customization could be even more difficult to achieve and maintain with Joomla! than the other two CMSs.
Drupal
Originally developed as a student community solution, Drupal now has evolved into a full-fledge, complex PHP-base open source CMS. While an extremely lean basic installation comes with the software, most Drupal users are advanced developers after all there is a very sophisticated coding interface.
Pros of Drupal
Drupal is flexible and extensible. Drupal is famous for a highly configurable admin that allows for user& role based permissions as well as workflows. Versioning and tiered approval are all possible. What’s more important is the industry-leading configurative area. You can tailor and rework any part of the admin to fit your business needs. As well, due to the world’s largest developer following, Drupal keeps developing and manages to release new modules frequently. The vast array of modules are available to all users so that you can make use of to improve your business website and add extensible features.
Drupal easily adapts to different business and requirements. No matter what size of your business, you can successfully implement Drupal and will be granted the ability to create any kind of content, to build customer database, to generate product reviews, etc., with no need to make code modifications.
Drupal has vast community support. You’ll never feel alone whenever you come across a technical issue or anything like that since you can get support by a simple web search for the Drupal community. Even better, many common issues and problems are already described and solved, so you can easily find solutions in documentation. Don’t worry even if the solutions to your problems haven’t been available because you can get help and assistance from lots of Drupal pro.
Cons of Drupal
To add features to Drupal, it requires some advanced knowledge, and the user interface is not as nice as WordPress or Joomla!. The software also lags behind in terms of scalability and efficiency, when compared with WordPress.
As with the development of internet technologies, websites are no longer a must-have for small business owners. You customers are also expecting to find potential companies and products on the web. It is true that an in-depth site would require a large investment from the budget. But for most small business owners like you and me, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are all affordable solutions to get started with and which also enable for growing with the company.
