Have You Outgrown Your CMS Platform?

We tell our clients that WordPress provides them with a stable, mature platform that is friendly for marketers and has extensive developer support. The cost-to-build and cost-to-own are low. It’s flexible and extensible, and the WordPress core is secure and performant. It checks all of the boxes for most clients.

Since we like to challenge our beliefs, we researched over 200 websites. These websites were all business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies in the real estate, logistics/supply chain and healthcare industries. What we found was surprising.

Which Content Management System (CMS) Reigns Supreme?

Our results showed WordPress is still the leader in the CMS space, commanding over 50% of the market share regardless of company size. We grouped the results based on top-line revenue, and it didn’t seem to matter. As companies get larger (50M+), a percentage of them begin to move towards SaaS-based customer experience platforms or Headless CMSs, but even then, WordPress is always above 50%.

Open Source vs. Closed Source / SaaS

In the last five years, I have noticed that more and more companies are becoming comfortable using a SaaS solution to manage their web properties. While this trend continues to rise in popularity, we will likely see adoption swing back and forth between renting and owning your marketing platform. One notable observation is that marketing platforms are getting bigger and bigger, providing more and more functionality. A bigger solution can be a double-edged sword. Yes, it can do almost anything, but it might not specialize enough, and you can become increasingly “locked in” (vendor lock) over time, making a change in the future more difficult.

Headless vs. Non-Headless CMS

I’ve previously written about the difference between Headless and Non-Headless CMSs. In short, a headless CMS is data-only, while a non-headless CMS also considers the user interface.

Considerations When Selecting Your CMS

Cost to build: Initial costs can vary widely depending on the CMS. As a general rule, the more custom your needs, the higher the cost will be to build. This is true even if you are using a popular open-source solution like WordPress. Other factors that increase costs are choosing a less popular solution or a CMS that requires a lot of custom programming like a Headless CMS.
Cost to own: Long-term costs include updates, hosting, and maintenance. Some CMS platforms are easier to work with than others, and changes either increase or decrease the total cost of ownership.
Flexibility / Extensibility: It is important to choose a solution that can be customized and extended to meet changing business needs. I typically recommend that whatever CMS you decide on include some kind of page builder and plugin system. If it doesn’t, every change you make will require a developer to help you make it.
Specialist availability: The availability of skilled professionals familiar with the CMS is an important part of your decision. Popular platforms like WordPress have a large pool of developers, which can reduce costs and ensure easy access to support and customization. If you pick a robust but niche solution, it will be harder to find help, and the help will probably be more expensive.
Security: The chosen platform should offer robust security features to protect against common vulnerabilities and the ability to update and maintain security practices easily. Most enterprise-level solutions have security teams regularly releasing patches against threats. I’m not sure there is a strong argument for a clear winner of “most secure, “ mainly because the very minute a developer writes a line of custom code, they could introduce a vulnerability. We recommend using the bare minimum of plugins and code in general. Less code = less chances for vulnerabilities.
Performance: It’s my experience that, for the most part, any enterprise-level CMS already meets most performance requirements. The best-performing system can become inefficient by making bad implementation decisions. WordPress sites can score 100 on their speed scores, and I’ve seen them score 24. I’m not convinced there is an argument to be made for picking one solution over the other.