Is WordPress the best CMS for me?

Written by Tom Greenwood - May 24, 2012

If you’re reading this article then you’re probably trying to decide whether you want to use WordPress as the content management system for your website, or whether you should use another system like Joomla, Drupal or a custom CMS offered by your web development agency.

As a specialist WordPress agency we of course recommend WordPress for the majority of businesses, but not without good reason.  You might think we are biased, but we chose to specialise in WordPress for the exact same reasons that you should choose WordPress for your website.  We could be a specialist Joomla agency, but we’re not.  We could offer our own custom CMS, but we don’t.  And there are very good reasons!

Why choose WordPress?

There are lots of good systems that do a few things well, such as e-commerce, forums, portfolios etc.  Some systems are easy to use, or free. But only WordPress can achieve all of these things.

We believe that your needs are #1 priority.  So we believe that you should have a content management system (CMS) that is great at the basics (making it super easy to update your website content), but also has the ability to scale and adapt to your unique requirements over time.

With WordPress you have the simplest control panel for editing your content in a FREE open source system, and it can be adapted to do almost anything you could possibly dream of.  There are over 19,000 free plugins, a range of paid premium plugins, and if you can’t find exacty what you need, there is a huge developer community to build exactly what you need.

  • Why not use Joomla?  It is rubbish for SEO, difficult to use and generally a bit patchy
  • Why not use Drupal? It’s popular because developers like the way the code is written, NOT because clients love the user experience
  • Why not use ModX? Because it doesn’t have the enormous flexibility and support community of WordPress
  • Why not use Magento? Because it only does e-commerce, and the user interface is difficult to use
  • Why not use a custom CMS? Because then you’ll be under the thumb of the dude that built it.  He can charge you what he wants, and work only if/when he wants and there will be nothing you can do about it. Nobody else in the world will be able to work on your site without investing a huge amount of time in learning their code, in which case they might as well build you a new site with WordPress.

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS for one simple reason.  It is the best CMS for most people.  It is not commercially marketed, so people only use it if they want to, and they only want to use it because it is so good.