By Janus Boye
WordPress has a reference list which tops any of the other candidates when enterprises select new content management systems. It is used by BT (formerly British Telecom), CIO.gov, National Geographic and Nokia just to mention a few and has everything you need in terms of security and scalability. It now actually powers around 17% of all "top 1 million sites" according to Wikipedia. Finally, WordPress is open source and can be downloaded and used free of charge.
Despite all these apparent strengths, very few organisations consider WordPress as an option when they go through a CMS selection exercise. Large and complex organisations seem to mostly ignore it. Why is that?
WordPress is not considered a CMS
According to the Boye & Co Group members, I've spoken to for this article, one frequent explanation why WordPress is ignored is that many don't even consider WordPress a CMS. Instead, it is considered and categorized as a popular blogging tool.
The few that do think of WordPress as a CMS consider it mostly suitable for smaller sites, including personal blogs. Those extremely rare digital managers, online communicators and others who have raised WordPress as an option internally, have often been shot down by IT departments who do not consider it suitable for anything business critical.
To be fair to customers, WordPress and the people behind it have gone to great lengths to avoid labelling WordPress a CMS. So far, the WordPress marketing has been as a "Blog Tool and Publishing Platform", while CMS was only recently added to the list.
5 good reasons you should consider WordPress
As mentioned, WordPress has many strengths.
Here are my 5 good reasons you should consider WordPress for your next CMS selection:
It has a strong, global and vibrant community
The user interface is comparatively easy to use and widely localized
Despite the fact that it has so far flown below the radar, it already has references in all industries
A wide-ranging list of modules, including for mobile, which is matched in numbers only by SharePoint
Tend to be cheap to implement and host
WordPress is not perfect
While WordPress deserves a place on most CMS selection shortlists, it is far from perfect either.
Keeping up with the frequent upgrades and making sure plug-ins and customisations still work tends to be an underestimated task among WordPress customers. Extensibility may be the biggest strength, but to many enterprises it is also the biggest weakness as the inexperienced developer and webmaster can easily turn WordPress into an unmanageable black hole and leave you stuck on an old and potentially insecure version.
A few features where WordPress is not best-in-class include complex workflows, fine-grained permissioning and digital marketing requirements such as campaigns.
My advice to the CMS Experts among the readers and anyone else reading these lines would be to stop discussing whether WordPress qualifies to be considered a CMS and instead move on and consider WordPress where it makes sense.
Comments on WordPress
“I agree. WordPress is a true CMS when it comes to websites. Also WordPress can do bigger sites very well. Lot of media companies using WordPress worldwide. It isin’t as extensible with custom code as systems like Drupal, but the implementation time and complexity is from completely different league. And like you said, the ecosystem is amazing.
During the last year I have had several cases where I ended up recommending WordPress for the client. In every case the client was surprised and asking things like “don’t we need a real CMS?”.
And one case we just had was a project that was priced to be over 100 000 euros if implemented with EPiServer or Drupal – but if the requirements could be a bit modified the site could be done with WordPress with almost half the cost. The client is now seriously considering this. I know I would be :)”
“WordPress is often rated as inadequate and I wonder who benefits from that unfair attitude?
Certainly all the expensive Rolls Royce-cms’ and maybe also the good old belief; “nobody every got fired for choosing IBM”?
That said, I totally agree with you Janus. A WordPress installation needs tending from a person, who undertands the functionality of themes, plugins and the framework itself. Otherwise you do get stuck “in a black hole”.”
“I consider it a CMS, as well as a pretty well developed web application framework. At my institution, we’re using it to run over 200 sites. It’s PHP framework has made it very easy for us to extend it to meet our University’s specific needs.
Most importantly, it is the most user-friendly of all the CMS tools I’ve tried when it comes to our end users, who are often not technical people (department secretaries, some faculty members.) They would have very much struggled with a more formal “enterprise” CMS. WP has been the perfect fit for us.”
“Hi Janus,
Nice to see you seem to fall on the side of WordPress IS a CMS. It seems to be the perennial debate.
In a blog post a while ago I made some of the same observations as you – that we should “stop discussing whether WordPress qualifies to be considered a CMS” and the industry should move to listening to what people want and need – and what folks like about WP.
The post got a fair amount of comments, seem relevant to what you and your readers are saying here.
Is WordPress a CMS, Hardly? Barely?
Cheers!
Ian”
“This is a really interesting topic because it does come up in a lot of the conversations we have with clients and potential clients and as you say very often WordPress is thrown out because it is seen as a blogging tool.
I don’t think that there is a right answer to this because the choice of CMS is very much dependent upon the particular client, their internal resources (both marketing and IT) and the agency and vendors that they are working with.
What I would agree with is that WordPress should be on the shortlist and if best meets the criteria for the project/client then it should be used. Just because it is “free” is not a reason to either include or remove it, as with all solutions it should be chosen on merit, which in turn is based on knowledge.”
“may be there are many opinions regarding wordpress, but there’s nothing like wordpress, so just for me is the best .. I think in 5 years everyone will be using wordpress”
“FWIW, I’m in the camp that considers WordPress to be a blogging solution, and no more than that. It’s certainly not feature-rich enough to be considered a true CMS. Can you imagine the BBC News Site publishing its content and co-ordinating input from the hundreds of journalists that work there into one coherent and ever-updating publication using WordPress? No, neither can I. That’s what makes it a blogging tool for <5 people to use concurrently, rather than a CMS to be used to co-ordinate thousands of articles produced by hundreds of contributors.”
“There is one obvious reason why you should not use WordPress, and it is simply quality. WordPress has a very poor codebase, its many plugins differ hugely in quality and, as a result, is incredibly difficult to scale beyond only simple websites. It certainly should never be used for business critical operations. It is high-risk, high maintenance, and loaded with so much technical debt that it can rarely be a viable option for any serious development team.”