Comparing B2B Marketing Management Systems (3 of 3) - Website

To get the most out of your digital marketing, it’s important to have a quality website. Part of that goes into having the best content management system (CMS) that gives you the ability to create a rich, intuitive website that creates a positive experience for visitors.

Part 3 of our Marketing Management Systems blog series will give you an in-depth comparison of our top picks.

Content Management Systems

For MSPs, there are two quality content management systems that should be considered: WordPress and Joomla, the two most popular CMS platforms in the world.

WordPress was initially released in May of 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a project fork of b2/cafelog. For the first several years of WordPress's life, it was just a blog platform that later grew into a CMS. Over 60 million websites currently utilize WordPress as of April 2018, approximately 31% of all sites across the web whose CMS is known. WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPLv2.

Joomla was developed by Open Source Matters as a project fork of Mambo in August 2005. It has been downloaded over 93 million times as of May 2018 and is estimated to be the second most used CMS after WordPress. It is written in PHP, and currently has the option to store data in a MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL databases.

When deciding whether you should use WordPress or Joomla, consider the following:

Cost: Both of these content management systems are open source and completely free to use. But, you’re likely to have additional costs depending if you want premium themes, extensions, and plugins. If you’re designing a complex website, Joomla is the better choice because WordPress sites are very resource-hungry and will increase your hosting costs and decrease your loading time. But, you may end up paying more for different extensions via Joomla - more Joomla extensions are paid compared to WordPress ones.

Features & Functionality: Joomla tends to have a steeper learning curve than WordPress because you can create more complex, content-rich websites with it, but it has fewer options in terms of themes, templates, and plugins. WordPress is ideal if the main focus of your website is casual blogging or very basic ecommerce; after all, that was the main focus of this platform when it first came out. Joomla’s blogging capability improves dramatically once you install the EasyBlog component, which makes it comparably easy to blog. And again, the system allows for a more advanced website once you get used to using the system itself. Another big standout for Joomla is modules. In WordPress, you need to create page templates for all of your different variants of pages. In Joomla, you just pick the modules you want to load and then tell them what page to load on.

Security: Because WordPress is such a large platform, it tends to be in the news more often for being hacked. When a vulnerability does hit, hackers are more likely to target it since these vulnerabilities are more publicized. This can be a problem when users or bad web designers don't know what they are doing when they deploy updates and patches to their site. These same problems can occur with Joomla, but will likely not be publicized as widespread amongst news sites. In addition, Joomla attempts to take steps to make sure that their users stay safe by creating more frequent updates and patches, having security extensions, and offering a security checklist in their documentation.

Support: You’re likely to find the answer to your question using WordPress’ expansive community forum. Aside from that, Joomla tends to have more options about support: they have an official help portal, extensive documentation, a mailing list, and a dedicated IRC chatroom.

Our Choice: Joomla

For B2B companies like MSPs that rely on having websites that aren’t overly simplistic, Joomla is the better option. It is much better for scalability because it can act as a portal. In addition, Joomla’s modules make it very easy to put together a quick landing page or service page with new calls-to-action and other content.

Despite the initial learning curve, Joomla can better ensure that your sensitive information is secure, and allows you to create a more immersive experience for your customers that is sure to help you stand out from your competition.

Get The Most Out Of Your Digital Marketing

Check out the previous parts of our blog series if you missed them. And, contact us if you need help taking your email marketing, social media marketing, or website to the next level.