If you have just signed off on a new website redesign for your business, congratulations. You are in for a whirlwind of activity and a good bit of hard work too!
During the initial discussions regarding your website design project you may well be asked if you have any preference regarding what your website is built in.
Perhaps you have strong views based on previous experiences or perhaps you don’t really care - as long as the website looks good, you can make it do what you want and it delivers growth for your business?
We often have conversations with clients when they ask if Wordpress is a better platform than another Content Management System (CMS), such as the HubSpot CMS. Whilst we may be a certified HubSpot Partner and potentially a bit biased, our approach is that a client’s website solution must meet the needs of the client not our own development preferences.
In this regard, we will always discuss a client’s overall strategy and what it is they are trying to achieve before we recommend the best platform for their website needs. We also make sure we bear in mind that no matter the solution it must answer three important questions:
Given the launch of the all new HubSpot CMS Hub (Professional & Enterprise) we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to look at WordPress alongside HubSpot and compare some the ‘out-of-the-box’ features available with the HubSpot CMS Hub versus Wordpress, the world’s Number 1 Content Management System.
Owing to the popularity of Wordpress a lot of companies have decided to use it without really thinking why.
WordPress has evolved from a humble blogging platform to an extensive Content Management System which can be used to build a pretty robust website with an easy to use interface for adding new content for your visitors to consume.
With 75 million WordPress websites across the world in 2020, it is estimated that 35% of all websites are built in Wordpress, and if you look at CMS websites only, this figure rises to over 60% for the number of CMS websites built using WordPress (source: W3tech).
So, it is a completely understandable choice for someone to select WordPress for their website development as it must be doing something right!
At Enlighten IC, we have built a lot of WordPress websites in our day, and truth be told, if a client has a limited budget or they aren’t too focused on generating leads and driving sales, we will often recommend it as an option for them to consider.
One of the main benefits of WordPress is its flexibility. The WordPress platform makes it very easy to install Themes to give a website a particular look and feel along with the ability to add Plugins to provide the additional functionality which a company may require. In WordPress most functionality can be achieved through the addition of Plugins without having to resort to costly custom development. These benefits alone can make WordPress a much more accessible option for companies who want a website which they can continue to update themselves after the initial build, although this does come at a price.
The downside of this flexibility, however, is that quite often WordPress websites are built by pseudo-developers who know their way around a particular theme and can patch together a plethora of Plugins to deliver a website for their customer without really having much coding experience. This can lead to websites with bloated code making the website much slower to load (an important ranking factor for search engines), and owing to the large number of Plugins involved, lead to a lot of time in the future maintaining them due to the ongoing need to upgrade them every time there is a WordPress update and the Plugin developer in turn needs to update their Plugin for it to continue to work safely.
It is estimated that there are roughly 30,000 websites hacked around the World every day (source: Forbes), or to put this another way, every 39 seconds there is an attack on a website somewhere (source: Security Magazine). With WordPress powering a large proportion of websites (around 35% of all websites as mentioned above), it is a popular target for hackers. One unverified report we read mentioned that there are 90,000 attacks every minute on WordPress websites.
As of today’s date there are 56,161 Plugins on the WordPress Plugin directory which is great news if you want to quickly add functionality to your website for little cost, however, it is also great news if you are a hacker and want to exploit poorly built and unmaintained Plugins which people all over the world have installed on their websites. It is estimated that 98% of Wordpress vulnerabilities are down to poorly built and unsupported Plugins and with new research stating that the average WordPress website uses 22 Plugins to deliver the functionality required, this can lead to a multitude of security issues.
Despite these concerns, however, WordPress continues to be the World’s most popular CMS with the latest version of WordPress installed over 23 million times (and rising). If you don’t believe me and you would like to view the official figures, please click here to view the live download counter.
Now that we have had a quick look at WordPress it is time to look at the new HubSpot CMS Hub. Originally known as the HubSpot COS (Content Optimization System), HubSpot first launched its website management tool in 2013 and in the intervening period it has seen many developments and iterations as it has evolved into its current version, the 'HubSpot CMS Hub’, which was launched in March 2020. The CMS Hub comes in two flavours, CMS Hub Professional and CMS Hub Enterprise with the Enterprise version providing additional functionality to an already feature-rich list of built-in functionality.
The CMS Hub has many benefits over its previous incarnations never mind the obvious comparisons with other CMS systems such as WordPress. First up the CMS Hub has been built with two distinct audiences in mind i) the marketer and ii) the developer.
It is fair to say, that out-of-the-box the sheer breath of functionality and features available within the HubSpot CMS Hub are impressive and will help your Marketing, Developer (in-house or agency) and IT teams to focus on their own particular strengths and not get pulled into areas they have no interest in.