It doesn’t matter if you’re a business, nonprofit, or mommy blogger extraordinaire, keeping your website up to date is mission critical. An outdated website can send the wrong message to site visitors and negatively affect your search rankings. One of the keys for maintaining a modern site is choosing the right content management system, or CMS.
A content management system is a web-based application for managing websites. Content management systems use an editor, similar to popular word processing programs, that allows for non-technical users to update their web pages without having to learn code.
If you’ve launched a website in the past ten years, it probably has a CMS. Check out What CMS Is This? or What CMS? or take a peek at the source code to find out what’s powering your site.
If you’re like most companies, nonprofits, and individuals, your site probably uses the Coke or Pepsi of content management systems: WordPress or Joomla.
Joomla was first released in 2005. Over the past decade, it has been a CMS favorite of developers for building complex corporate websites and e-commerce sites. To get the most out of the system, users tend to need at least some level of technical coding knowledge.
WordPress started in 2003 as a blogging system. Since then, it has grown to be the largest platform for managing websites on the planet. WordPress is an open source project, meaning thousands of users are working to make the system better every day. It’s the back-end for millions of websites and blogs, including popular sites like Reader’s Digest and The Walking Dead’s official site.
Both platforms sound great. If you have a Joomla site, why would you want to switch? There are 3 important reasons to move your site from Joomla to WordPress.
1. Safety isn’t expensive; it’s priceless.
Hackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities in websites. The WordPress Security Team, backed by the WordPress global community, works to identify and resolve security issues to keep the bad guys in check. If you’re a technically-inclined person or you’re working with a developer, your site will be updated with the latest releases and security protocols. Version upgrades go smoothly with WordPress, keeping sites up and running – which is a good thing.
2. It’s easy.
In business, time is money. In life, time is a finite resource. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. Whether you’re making daily updates to your website or posting changes once in a while, you want a system that’s easy to use. Because of its technical nature, Joomla has a steep learning curve. For editing text, adding photos, uploading documents, embedding videos, etc., WordPress wins hands down. If you can type a Word doc or send an email, you’ll have no problem using WordPress.
3. There’s strength in numbers.
WordPress is the most widely-used CMS in the world. As of February 2016, WordPress is used by 59% of all websites whose content management system we know. This is 26% of all websites on the Internet. Because of its large user base, WordPress has earned a reputation for being the most well-supported system for managing websites. A Google search for “WordPress help” returns 213,000,000 results vs. 19,700,000 results for the same Joomla search. That’s the power of the Internet at your fingertips.
If your current website uses a Joomla content management system, it’s time to get with the program and switch to WordPress. When your new WordPress site is up and running, you’ll be asking yourself, “What took me so long?”
By Jason Piasecki, Partner + WordPress Convert
Jason has been part of over 400 website launches over the past 20 years. He designed and programmed his first website in 1996.
