The game to win the blog, website and webshop builder market, is on. The industry is exploding, especially during a time where COVID-19 is upon us and social distancing is a must. Problem is, when starting your journey it is almost impossible to choose the best option given the vast amount of website builders and Content Management Systems (CMS) available today.
Content management systems are simplified technologies for maintaining blogs, websites and webshops without development knowledge. Website owners have something called an admin panel, through which they control everything. Via this admin panel, they create pages, simply insert media, or even drag and drop elements that enhance each page.
CMSs work on prebuilt components like templates, themes, and plugins. Simply put, these prebuilt elements are blocs of code providing ready-to-use UI and functional features. So you don’t have to build them from scratch, but can customize them if you want to. More importantly, many CMSs are open source, which means they – or at least some of their services – are free to use.
Today, there are hundreds of content management systems available. Some of them we know, some are completely new to all of us. All in all, almost 50% of the world’s websites are built with a CMS. But with a list so long, what are the most popular website builders and CMS to build your next blog, website or webshop?
Wix
Initially launched in 2006, Wix currently owns 2.4% of the market share and powers 1.4% or the world’s websites. Wix promotes its platform as the free website builder, but also offers multiple, flexible premium plans for its users. In other words, for personal sites and small promotional sites hosted on Wix, their basic plan is free. Although limited, this package still provides plenty of themes and customization options.
However, anything from there is part of a paid plan. For example, if you want to connect your current domain with Wix, the monthly fee is €4.50/month. But Wix ads will be visible on your site. So, If you want to remove the ads, you need the Combo plan, which is €$8.50/month For Business and E-commerce plans, the plans are quite different, with the basic plan starting at €17.month.
In a nutshell, Wix is for those who are looking for a cheap starter option that can be scaled, although with a cost, quite fast.
WordPress
When it comes to WordPress, there are some quite amazing statistics that brings confidence to whoever is considering going with this open-source CMS (Content Management System). The most prominent statistic is that more than 33% of all websites are powered by WordPress!
That said, despite having ‘word’ in its name, is much more than just blogging or making websites on the internet. So, read on and find out some things you didn’t know about WordPress, one of the world’s favourite CMS platforms.
1. WordPress make it easy for anyone to create a blog, website or webshop
When you add up the development hours spent building WordPress, it corresponds to about 112 years! One remarkable thing regarding WordPress, is that it is based on 423,759 lines of code, which of course has been thoroughly tested and configured. As a result of all this hard work, WordPress is arguably the most user-friendly, out of the box version website builder, today. Whether you are an expert content writer or just getting started, WordPress is there for you.
As a result of all the hard work of the WordPress community, the CMS offers some very useful features:
Quality editing tools everyone can use
WordPress offers a very intuitive and user-friendly interface that makes editing content easy. It includes typical features found on CMS platforms such as a readability analysis, to help editors present their content in a way that is easy to understand.
Media management
Once you upload an image, video or other media to WordPress, it stays in there. This is quite handy for reusing images such as logos that are employed daily. Also, it can help you track what media you have utilised before.
User management
In many instances, there may be more than one person managing the website and each of them has different roles. An important thing about WordPress, it allows you to define access levels accordingly, giving you full control over your platform.
Built in the comment section
If applicable, for instance in a blog, subscribers and others can engage with a built-in comment section. This is easy to manage and allows users to interact with you and your page. It also allows you to format this into a forum and moderate content in the comment section.
Thousands of easy to use themes
WordPress by default, comes with 3 themes, to make editing your blog or website easier. However, there is an ever-expanding catalogue of themes, constantly being created. If upon the thousands of themes you can’t find something suitable, its also possible to create and upload your own.
Plugin compatibility
WordPress supports thousands of plugins. These allow creators to add in even more features to their pages. Some make editing for the creator much easier, while others are designed to benefit end users.
Following its open source nature, WordPress allows users to write their own plugins too. There are thousands of plugins that can be used for endless possibilities.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
This is almost a must-have for any CMS platform, WordPress offers users the ability to make their pages more SEO friendly. This helps your pages be favourite by search engines like Google and come up earlier in search results.
2. WordPress has WooCommerce to convert your blog or website into a webshop
According to BuiltWith, WooCommerce powers around 3.3 million or 22% of all e-commerce websites in the world.
trends.builtwith.com
WooCommerce is more than capable of handling any type of physical or digital products. The WordPress library provides you with variations setups for colors or sizes, even download functions for the online products you sell.
What makes WooCommerce so popular is that it is an open-source plugin easy to install, working on an already successful and widely adopted open-source CMS like WordPress. An added benefit of WooCommerce is that other plugins have been built on top of WooCommerce that further enhance your webshop’s features. Some of these plugins are good for selling digital goods like ebooks and music. Some work well with physical goods like clothes and shoes. Either way, you have full control over your store.
3. WordPress is available in 50+ Languages. Content is Published in Over 120 Different Languages
One of the most notable things about WordPress is the fact its available in so many languages. The current version of WordPress (4.7) is available in 52 languages, which includes the dozen that make up the most spoken languages worldwide: Chinese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Urdu, Russian, Bengali, German, and Japanese.
WordPress can provide translation for websites into other languages, in a way that is easy to use. At the moment, the English language version of WordPress leads the list with over 70 percent of sites. Next is Spanish at almost 5 percent and Portuguese at just over 2 percent.
The smart thing about WordPress is by offering its platform in some many languages, it has an advantage in emerging markets. Three times as many internet users will live in emerging markets by 2022, when compared to developed markets, according to forecasts made by the Boston Consultant Group, in September 2018.
WordPress inclusivity does not just accommodate to people from all different linguistic and technical backgrounds but also people differently abled. They provide many themes to allow creators to add assessability features on their content. While it’s ultimately up to the creator to employ these, its a positive step forward in making the internet more user-friendly for users with disabilities.
4. WordPress has more than 55,000 plugins
As discussed, the range of plugins, which can be made by developers, are a key part of the WordPress product. While WordPress on its own is a great product, the range of plugins really helps it stand out.
They host over 55,000 plugins for free which offer a range of functionality including; online booking system, e-commerce modules, social media components as well as tools to make editing easier. These plugins have been downloaded over 1 and a half billion times. This only accounts for plugins downloaded through WordPress. In addition, there are thousands of third-party plugins are available either for free or purchase, that can be acquired elsewhere.
Experienced users and developers warn about WordPress plugins. Using too many plugins can cause issues. In his article for UpWork, experienced WordPress creator and developer, Miljan Bivolarevic explains more about this issue. He highlights that the use of too many plugins can result in websites becoming slow and crash. Plugins also add to the risk of users facing security issues. However, Themeisle which is one of the third party companies that source themes for WordPress, claims that during a test they carried out, WordPress does not get much slower with add ons.
5. WordPress combats spambots
Recently, on our DailyW blog, we published an article about the plague of robocalls and how 2019 is the year this may be finally curtailed. A much worse problem is the seemingly endless amount of spambots, that flood comment sections. One of the best things about WordPress, it’s possible to use plugins such as Akismet, if you have a comment section, to curtail spam.
These plugins work by filtering your comment section just as your email client does. They look for spambots and other problematic comments. The utilised data collected by users and put it all together to block known spambots and learn to recognise new ones. For instance, Akismet used this data which has helped them prevent 23 billion brute force attacks in 2016.
In a nutshell, WordPress is for those who are a bit more tech-savvy and want the freedom, flexibility but also responsibility to choose the best themes and plugins from the largest repository and community in the world.
Squarespace
Not far behind Drupal, we have Squarespace, also launched in 2004. Squarespace currently enjoy 2.5% of the total CMS market share, powering 1.5% of the world’s websites. However, this technology is actually closer to Shopify in their business strategy rather than Drupal or Joomla!.
Much like Shopify, Squarespace provides an easy to use solution to a quick and professional website. However, Squarespace is not as limited as Shopify, offering options for classic websites, e-commerce platforms, and brand building.
Being also extremely user-oriented, Squarespace is easy to use, where users literally create their site step-by-step. And the first step is choosing a template, where users have a plethora of beautiful designs available for them. Sorted by each site type – such as portfolio, e-commerce, etc – the templates work like Drupal’s distribution bundles.
The templates come with themes and functionality needed for each specific site. Unfortunately, unlike WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla!, Squarespace is paid for. But, on the bright side, this service is quite affordable, with monthly fees starting at $16.
Moreover, developers and businesses looking for a more customized solution can also add code in the traditional FE triad – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – as well as serverside languages like PHP, and Ruby or Ruby on Rails.
In a nutshell, Squarespace is for those who are looking for an intuitive, slightly more pricy, but crisp experience for both the website creator and it’s visitors.
Shopify
Although it cannot compare with WordPress, Shopify is still the second most popular CMS today, with a 4.4% market share. Shopify was created in 2004, by Scott Lake and Tobias Lütke as a personal online store for snowboarding gear. The reason Shopify exists today is that the two founders were disappointed with the existing solutions at the time. So, they took the matter into their own hands and build their own solution using Rails, a framework based on the programming language, Ruby. But, Shopify only became available for the public in 2006.
Today, Shopify is part of one million online platforms, including popular websites like The Washington Post and PC Magazine. However, what makes Shopify special is that is built for scale, speed, and most of all security. The team invested heavily in their APIs and even created their own Ruby-based templating framework, Liquid. More impressively, they acquired a massive network of 3000+ security researchers around the world.
Just like WordPress, users can create their own Shopify hosted store, or integrate Shopify on their existing website. Shopify is easy to set up and provides a drag-and-drop UI for quick customization. On the downside, Shopify is a paid service, with prices starting at $29/month.
In a nutshell, Shopify is for those who are looking for a low-cost, scalable and fast option to start selling online through both a blog or a webshop.
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