In the past few decades, online shopping is growing exponentially from non-existent to becoming a multibillion-dollar industry. According to the post in Oberlo, an estimated 1.8 billion people worldwide purchased online (Statista, 2018). In the same year, global e-retail sales amounted to $2.8 trillion and the projections show that global e-retail sales are going to grow up to $4.8 trillion by 2021. Recently due to COVID pandemic, the number of people buying goods and services, groceries has boosted up more than ever before. This brings up shops to make themselves available online to increase in their sales. The Content Management Systems will make it for you.
Content Management System
The Content Management System, also referred as CMS, is a software platform that enables you to create websites and manage its components. It is the platform where most of the CMS will allow you to create websites without understanding the knowledge of coding. Choosing the right CMS is always a difficult and confusing task. There are a variety of CMS available in the market which are associated with various pros and cons. There are many open-source and proprietary CMSs available in the market today. However we will talk about the most common CMS here, and those are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Wix where each has its own pros and cons compared to each other.
WordPress
WordPress is a web publishing software you can use to create your own website. In a simple way, WordPress is an operating system for your website. It is open source and free to use. WordPress does not require any prior knowledge of coding. It is user friendly and even beginners can work on it very easily.
Pros
- Highly customizable and easy to use.
- Without having much technical knowledge, website owners can edit and maintain their websites themselves.
- Availability of thousands of themes and over 50,000 plugins to choose the suitable one and make your website more better. Many themes and plugins are free.
- WordPress is better for SEO than any other CMS. It’s easy to create SEO-friendly URLs, categories and tags for your posts.
- Offers a high extensibility which makes it an ideal CMS platform for developers and beginner as well
Cons
- Many website owners fail to regularly update their WordPress websites and plugins, which can lead to security holes in the site
- To an advanced level if someone is interested to make more complex work with their website to make it more user friendly, then some coding part might be required.
- Adding more plugins may result in a decrease in the speed of your website page loading.
Joomla
Since its release in 2005, Joomla is almost as old as WordPress. It is the second most popular CMS after WordPress today which boosts around 3% of all the websites on the internet today. Joomla is also an open source CMS based on PHP with MySQL database. Some big names Linux.com and eBay have been using Joomla as their preferred CMS for years.
Pros
- Joomla comes with flexible, powerful and polished UI, which makes easy for new publishers to publish their content very easily
- For the improvement of the site, Joomla provides five categories of extensions viz. Plugins, modules, components, languages and templates
- Joomla has built in multilingual support into its base
- Joomla continuously launching free of cost open source free plugins and extensions due to having the large number of developer community
Cons
- With Joomla, user can face some difficulties while building and customizing the functions
- Joomla has the lack of SEO capabilities unless you hire an SEO expert as the solution
- Since Joomla has some advanced customizations, the beginner may face difficulties while using and he may need to approach a programmer to learn
Drupal
Drupal is the most powerful CMS. It is open source like WordPres and Joomla. Drupal can be used for any kind of projects including community forums, online stores and management, other complex sites etc. This is one of the great options for web designing and development. To use Drupal, you will need a basic knowledge of HTML, PHP and some other programming languages. Like other platforms, Drupal also has its own pros and cons.
Pros
- Like WordPress, Drupal offers themes and plugins to enhance site’s design and functionality.
- As mentioned Drupal is way more powerful than WordPress and Joomla. With Dupal, you can bring limitless customization to your websites.
- Drupal has extensive API support including Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and more.
Cons
- Drupal posts and pages tend to load faster and the response time is very quick.
- Managing the Drupal site could be more expensive than WordPress and Joomla if you could not handle the technical things on your own.
- Drupal’s script is not much user-friendly and requires advanced technical knowledge to install and modify.
Wix
Wix is another excellent content management system to build your websites. Wix was founded in 2006 and helped more than 110 million people around the globe. Wix is especially famous for its free website building plan. Wix is the cloud based platform, so your websites will be live on Wix servers, so there is no need to have a third party hosting or install additional apps or plugins separately.
Pros
- Wix has plenty of easy drag and drop templates and has free site hosting.
- It is user-friendly with having beautiful designs created by Wix ADI or easy to the site builders.
- Wix is all in one product so there are no extra costs.
- Wix is good while developing the smaller websites.
Cons
- Wix is not a much better option to use when your website is going to be bigger.
- Since Wix is a lock-in platform, you can’t move your website to different hosts for better performance.
- There are a limited number of selections for the apps and themes.
Additionally, here is the recent screenshot from Google Trends that compares the interest over time (worldwide) for all the platforms we discussed above:
The percentage (in the graph above) is not to say that Drupal and Joomla are less than that of other most used platforms. All the CMS are excellent in their own way but lacking when compared to the most used CMS, that is WordPress. Ever tried to understand why WordPress is getting used most worldwide today ? Let us understand this in depth.
WordPress began in 2003, and since then, WordPress quickly grew to become an extensive content management system (CMS) to handle various amounts of websites. According to the usage statistics of content management system, wordpress powers 38.6% of all the websites on the internet today.
Source: Usage Statistics of Content Management Systems, W3Techs, 2020
WordPress allows you to build and manage your own fully functional website without a prior knowledge of coding. So if you are looking to build a website quickly and do not know much of coding WordPress is your best choice. Go for it, you will be glad you did!