WordPress versus other CMS alternatives

Jun 10, 2015 articles

Today I am going to be a critic of a critic.

I stumbled on to a blog post or should I say website today that was discrediting how awesome WordPress is. Now this might be a bit of a bias post on my part since I think WordPress is quite amazing but mostly from a development stand point. And the admin side of WordPress is quite robust and mostly intuitive. Not to mention that 33% of websites on the web are powered by WordPress! Oh and it is no doubt the most SEO friendly system out there.

Now the post in had is http://www.cmscritic.com/wordpress-joomla-and-drupal-are-not-the-best-cms/

I haven’t dug that far into the website but from what I can see along with their sister site is that they are promoting mostly CMS platforms that they can actually make a commission off referring people to, they favor the paid platforms as they can make profit off promoting those. So this in itself is creating some negative or false information on legitimate systems and in fact praising not so good systems. The internet is the wild wild west when it comes to information and you usually have to look a little deeper to find the truth.

I have pointed out why Wix is a bad platform to run a website on. As well as, did an onsite SEO analysis on Wix code structure and determined that Wix is NOT searching engine friendly despite the things you find on the internet.

But I would like to point out a few things that this critic was saying are a bad thing or even misinforming their audience about WordPress.

1. WordPress isn’t just for bloggers
WordPress did start out as a blogging platform but has expanded into a full fledged CMS. And actually since it was a blogging platform to begin with some of those features are what really make the system extremely SEO friendly. With Google being big on fresh and new content WordPress revolutionized the blog to transition from people ranting or your traditional blogger, to companies now having the capabilities of reaching out or keeping their customers informed through their company blog. And lets face it every other CMS out there who didn’t originally have a blogging system has started adding it to their core setup. So WordPress had it right from the beginning!

 

2. Plugins are what makes WordPress a platform to gravitate to
Plugins aren’t a bad thing like the critic says. I quote “too much dependence on plugins”, no WordPress doesn’t depend on plugins at all actually. Out of the box it is a great CMS system. Plugins are there to enhance the platform. And the fact that there are so many FREE plugins makes it even better. Not to mention if you want to write your own plugin WordPress makes it quite simple and flexible to expand or add enhanced features particular to your needs. But the best thing about all the plugins is that if you need something specific you typically don’t have to code it yourself because odds are someone has already wrote a plugin to fit that need. The plugins come from the community and it just shows that WordPress has a huge community. And it’s no wonder why 1/3 of the websites on the web are powered by WordPress!

 

3. If anything else, go with WordPress for it’s shear SEO factor!
Google loves crawling WordPress websites! There are quite a few factors involved in why Google loves it. The clean structure, the semantic code structure. The fact that it pings other sites when you update or publish a page or blog post. Outside of it’s core SEO friendliness the best thing about it is it’s open source. Meaning you have control over the code structure. If you use a CMS that “locks down” it’s code who knows if they are using the H1, H2, H3 tag properly. Whether they are displaying meta data correctly or even giving you access to write unique meta data. So many times I see people using H3 tags as a style meaning there are multiple H3 tags in the footer as a font style instead of using a CSS class style. So the fact that you and I or your developer can create a very semantic code structure and have full control over the best practices of how code should be structure to get the very best out of my onsite optimization makes it better from all paid platforms that you have no control over the code. And in general if you look over paid platform’s code you will find it is not SEO structured at all and fails on so many levels. Reference my article WIX and SEO.