Popular CMS Options (And Why They’re Great)
We’ve talked before about how great Content Management Systems are, because they really are great. This time we’d like to go over some specifics, looking at some of the popular choices and how they stack up.
So without further ado, let’s find a CMS you’ll love.
WordPress
WordPress is an excellent choice, and one we’re happy to recommend to everyone. It’s also the most popular CMS in the world, being used to power roughly 43% of all websites across the world. You don’t become responsible for nearly half the internet without a very good reason, so here’s a few of them.
The biggest thing it has going for it is its incredible flexibility, there’s truly nothing you cannot build with WordPress. Whether you need a simple gallery of services, a fully featured business website, or an online store, there’s a way to build and maintain it with WordPress.
It’s also extremely user friendly, adding and adjusting content doesn’t require any knowledge of coding, and making minor to moderate changes is similarly effortless. Making overhauls to your website can still be done without coding, but it will require a bit of technical knowledge and it may be easier to simply have a professional take care of any major design work.
WordPress also has thousands of plugins available that can expand its capabilities in any direction you could want. If the base software can’t manage something, rest assured there’s a plugin out there somewhere that can add the features you need.
It’s also search engine friendly to make getting found online even easier.
There’s a lot to take in when you get started, but it’s well worth taking advantage of.
WooCommerce
For the sticklers out there, yes, we know this isn’t technically a CMS. WooCommerce is actually a plugin for WordPress, that expands the functions of the base software to allow it to serve as an ecommerce platform.
And it does a great job too, proven by the fact that it’s the most popular ecommerce platform in the world. It works for both physical products and purely digital businesses, and like its parent software has a whole range of plugins that can further expand its capabilities.
It offers built in inventory management and support for affiliate links, and comes ready to accept PayPal and Stripe payments as standard.
The one thing you really need to watch out for is that WooCommerce doesn’t always play nice with some WordPress auditions, so be sure to check the compatibility of your various plugins.
As an extension of WordPress, there is a lot to wrap your head around, but you could do a lot worse than settling in to learn how to make the most of WooCommerce.
Shopify
Shopify is another hugely popular CMS platform, designed from the ground up to support building an online business. With its drag and drop interface, updating your store is as easy as can be, and similarly to WooCommerce it can be expanded with plugins.
One really cool thing about Shopify is that it can also support in store sales, allowing you to seamlessly mesh a physical location with your online retail presence. Shopify supports PayPal and credit card payments by default.
The big drawback of Shopify is that it doesn’t have the sheer enormous breadth of plugins and extensions that WordPress and WooCommerce can offer. Make sure to do your research and be certain that it can do everything you want before committing to building an entire store around it.
Content Management Systems are a fantastic way to manage an online presence, they’re an invaluable tool you absolutely should be looking into to save yourself time and hassle. If something here has caught your eye, do yourself a favour and take a deeper dive into exploring what it can do for your business online.
