Comparing The Best CMS For SEO: Function Vs Usability
Content management system (CMS) is one of the foremost things to consider if you are going to develop a new website or redesign your old website. What exactly a CMS is? How does it help the user in designing and developing a website? Which CMS should you prefer for your website? Let’s get into the details of these questions and try to understand the concept.
WHAT IS A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)?
A content management system is basically a computer application or a set of programs that are used to create, organize and edit the digital content of a website. These applications help those individuals who lack technical knowledge, to manage or edit content easily on a website without getting into any detailed coding related work.
For someone who wants to take care of SEO as well, CMSes can prove to be a boon or a bane, as the right CMS will allow for a wide range of SEO related customizations and will be easy to use.
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?
Here are a few reasons why a content management system is important for your business:
1. Increase in efficiency — You can develop sites and pages in almost half the time you would take normally with the help of CMS.
2. Increases search engine ranking — It helps the publishers in keeping the content fresh and also invites external contributions like comments, forums etc. and this in consequence improves search engine ranking of the website.
3. Easy search of information for users — New content gets indexed automatically in order to be instantly found and all this with the help of a powerful CMS.
4. Mobile optimization — Mobile optimization is offered by advanced CMSes.
COMMONLY USED CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Some of the most commonly used CMSes that also allow SEO related optimizations are:
1. WordPress
2. Joomla
3. Drupal
4. Magento
5. Wix
LET’S GO INTO THE DETAILS OF THESE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMSes) COMPARE THEM
WordPress
WordPress was made in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. It is perhaps the most used CMS all over the globe. 75 million websites run on WordPress and 39 million are hosted on the free wordpress.com domain.
Advantages:
· It gives one-click installation to the users and takes only 5 minutes to install.
· Technical knowledge is only necessary for WordPress if you want to make core changes. Otherwise, you can simply leave your website as it is. This makes it user-friendly.
· You can use any third party SEO plugins with WordPress in order to best optimize the content of your website.
· Themes of WordPress even help you in serving mobile device optimized versions of the main site.
Disadvantages:
· As third party plugins are used in WordPress, this makes it prone to attacks and a target for hackers.
· Premium themes and plugins are quite expensive and it may become difficult for small business site owners to buy them.
· Sometimes the speed of site may become slow and it may take more time to respond. This is due to the fact that WordPress sites have lots of generic codes plugins for incorporating functionality into the site.
** In terms of SEO, WordPress is SEO-friendly. However, it needs a lot of optimization and an advanced knowledge of CMS maintenance. This can prove to be a hassle for new users. Fortunately, with the help of WordPress SEO Plugins, it is quite easy to make a WordPress Blog or website search engine friendly. As covered by our blogs, there are many best SEO practices that can be followed to take advantage of Wordpress websites.**
Joomla
Joomla was released in 2003 by Mambo. 2.8 million websites run on Joomla CMS which makes it the second most popular CMS in the word. Joomla lies somewhere between simple WordPress and advanced Drupal.
Advantages:
· It can also be installed in one click and it takes 10 minutes to complete the installation process.
· It has many extensions available for e-commerce which allows the management of content and products in one place.
· Plugins, components, modules, templates, and languages are the five extensions offered to users by Joomla in order to improve the content of the site.
· Its engine is capable of modification in order to sustain a large amount of traffic (hundreds of thousands of visitors a day). The modification needs to be very heavy to handle such amount of traffic.
Disadvantages:
· Security level is less when compared to other CMSes and is prone to threats.
· It can be harder to find additional modules and add-ons to customize your site.
Some of the plugins and modules of the Joomla are paid and you can even face some compatibility issues.
** Same as WordPress, Joomla is SEO friendly but it’s not a CMS that new users can work on comfortably. Joomla is not horrible when it comes to SEO, as it provides a number of ways to manage such optimizations as well. However, it can be little difficult to perform proper on-site optimization if you are a newbie. Advanced users will find Joomla easy to micro-manage due to the presence of a variety of modules and plugins. **
Drupal
Drupal was released in 2001 by Dreis Buytaert and 1 million websites run on this CMS. It is the third most popular CMS in the world.
Advantages:
· Drupal is extremely versatile and can do almost anything you want. You can easily adjust your website the way you want with the help of modules offered by it.
· It can handle hundreds of thousands of pages and thousands of users simultaneously which makes it the best for large enterprises.
· Drupal websites can be viewed on smart mobile devices in the same manner as viewed on a desktop.
· There are thousands (16000+) of free modules (From CRM, Security, Social Media to SEO, Performance, Backup/Migrate and more) available to add specific features to your website.
Disadvantages:
· Drupal requires the most technical skills of the other CMSes, so you need to make an extra effort in order to build sites within its content management system.
· The breath of tools and capabilities that Drupal have, makes it a little slow as compared to WordPress.
Installing Drupal requires technical expertise.
** Drupal has the best SEO capability that is readily available. Users are presented with several modules for SEO activity and tracking of the web statistics. It is capable of producing customizable meta tags or creating title based URL nodes for a website. **
WORDPRESS VS JOOMLA VS DRUPAL
Magento
Even though mostly used as a shopping cart, Magento is a kickass CMS as well. Magento is a fast emerging e-commerce script and an open source CMS that uses MySQL and Zend PHP database. It was developed by Varien Inc. and released in 2015.
Advantages:
· Magento is the best option for the development of an online business website. It is a platform built exclusively for e-commerce. It has the best features for high volume online selling, customer, payment, inventory and loyalty program management.
· It is an SEO friendly CMS which helps you to be found by potential customers when they search for your store on the internet.
· It helps in scaling up your business as it has the power of managing multiple stores easily.
· Magento meets a global standard for payment security and satisfied 14 key protection criteria which makes it a very secure platform to use.
Disadvantages:
· Magento requires a good amount of space and memory on server otherwise it can be a little slow for you.
· The installation of Magento is a little difficult process as compared to others and you need to put extra efforts in order to make the interface of your store completely unique.
You need to pay for website hosting. Some of the Magento development companies also provide a development package inclusive of the domain and web hosting services.
** Magento is designed to be SEO friendly by default and this is why users need not do much in order to improve on-page SEO of a Magento website. The main thing to do is to enable URL rewriting. Users can also edit Meta tags for individual pages. However, modifying the HTML is not possible is Magento, which certain onpage SEO tactics require. All in all, Magento is good for you if you do not want to spend much time optimizing your website for SEO.**
WHICH ONE IS SUITABLE FOR AN ECOMMERCE WEBSITE- MAGENTO OR WORDPRESS?
Choosing one among the both depends upon the purpose of your website. If your goal is to sell a large number of products online, then Magento is the correct option. However, if you want to create or host a full-fledged website to post informative contents and blogs as well as sell your products, then WordPress will be a correct choice. WordPress will also give you the option to customize your website so that SEO friendly tweaks can be implemented freely, while there is no such liberty with Magento.
Wix
Wix.com is basically a cloud-based web development platform that was developed by an Israeli company (also called Wix). Users can create HTML5 websites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools.
Advantages:
· Wix has its drag and drop tool websites templates designed for a variety of industries like restaurants, hospitality business, service businesses, small businesses etc.
· They release new tools and designs on regular basis in order to stay at the forefront of CMS platforms.
· There is a dedicated team to support you with organized tutorials as well as through phone or email.
Disadvantages:
· Business owners are not allowed to change the website template after initial creation.
· Wix allows visible advertisements on their free platform which is not very professional for any business.
· Wix coding is not clean and concise due to its drag and drop functionality which in result in poor site structure and can slow down the load time of your website.
Wix is a great option for persuasive presentations. Artists, bands, photographers and other creative users will be very happy with Wix if they want a great platform on which they can present themselves with style.
** Wix is not SEO friendly. There are certain issues with Wix when it comes to SEO. Wix is improving this slowly with its recent updates. Wix used to add strange characters in the URL which was not at all SEO friendly. But this was fixed in 2016. Adding alt attributes was also not possible, but it has been fixed by Wix. However, some SEO customization that requires a user to edit the HTML coding of the website is not possible, as Wix does not allow HTML modification. Wix also does not support manual Schema or structured data integration, which is an essential part of onpage SEO. **
WHICH ONE IS EASY TO USE — WIX OR WORDPRESS?
WordPress is one of the best open source CMS available but still it is not the easiest web publishing solution. It does not provide that streamlined workflow that Wix provides in which you get everything (templates, hosting, widgets and more) with a single online account. With WP you only get a CMS, so there is a steep learning curve for a beginner.
Wix, however, does not provide many choices when it comes to SEO, and users who want to take care of that factor might end up getting the short end of the stick.
After learning about the best available CMSes in the market, the next question which arises is, “which CMS is suitable for my website among these best ones?” Now let’s try to figure that out.
WHICH CMS IS SUITABLE FOR YOUR WEBSITE?
Ø WordPress –
1. It is a very popular open source choice for small, simple, entry-level websites with easy to use interface and add-ons to expand functionality
2. It is easy to paste text from M/S word to your WP site, but this is not true for other CMSes.
3. It is appropriate for websites like blogging, business, ecommerce, business directory, question and answer site, school or college websites and much more.
4. Advanced SEO users will find it easier to use Wordpress due to the availability of a number of plugins.
Ø Joomla –
1. Joomla allows users to develop a site with much more content and structure flexibility as compared to WP.
2. Joomla is more complex than WP, so you need to have reasonable technical skills to work on it.
3. With a small amount of investment in efforts, you can have the ability to create fairly complex websites.
4. Joomla is a great choice for :
a) Websites which require multilingual features
b) Websites with frequent change in design
c) Membership or subscription based websites
d) Anyone who needs to build their own websites
Ø Drupal –
1. Drupal requires a much high level of technical skills as compared to the above two.
2. It is capable of developing the most advanced sites.
3. If you are not capable of learning the software or you can’t hire any expert or company who knows it, then it may not be a good option for you.
4. One code base can support multiple websites which make the operation of multiple websites very easy.
5. It is highly scalable and this is why most of the world’s busiest websites run on Drupal.
6. Types of site which can be built on Drupal are:
1) File Storage Sites
2) Social Networking Sites
3) News Portals
4) Blog Networks
5) Video Sharing Sites
6) Image Sharing Sites
Ø Magento –
1. Magento is exclusively built for ecommerce and has the best features for high volume online selling, customer, payment, inventory, and loyalty program management.
2. There is no problem in adding unlimited number of virtual products on your site with a large network traffic (10,000 to 100,000 visits a month) as there is a dedicated server of Magento to handle this.
3. The users of Magento are allowed to develop their website according to their desire as it is a highly customizable platform.
4. Magento provides default search engine optimized settings which can be edited to a limited degree.
Ø Wix –
1. Wix is an all in one platform which allows you to develop a website from scratch on your own.
2. If you are not technology savvy and you don’t have a big budget to hire someone to develop a website for you, then Wix can be a great option for you.
3. It is a very pro-active CMS with great innovation and continuous introduction of latest and advanced features to always keep you in pace with industry’s latest trends.
4. Like Magento, Wix provides default SEO settings that can be edited to a limited degree.
CHOOSE A CMS WHICH BEST SUITS YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS!
We have discussed about the best CMSes available in the market, their advantages and disadvantages and their comparison. Now it’s your turn to choose a CMS which best suits your business needs and SEO requirements. There are different CMSes for different purpose, requirements and different level of SEO friendliness. A correct choice of CMS can be a vital factor in the growth of your business, so choose your CMS wisely!
