Best Platforms For Your Business Website

As a business owner, you may become a little confused when choosing which platform is best for your website. From website builders, content management systems and full blown eCommerce management platforms – there’s quite a lot of platforms to choose from, and even more things to consider when you are choosing! In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the top platforms used in web design and what they can do to get the best website for your business in Stockport.

WordPress

Chances are you’ve heard of WordPress, even if you aren’t quite sure what it is. WordPress started way back in 2003 as a simple blogging platform, but has since grown into the most popular content management system used in website design, holding by the the largest market share. In fact, according to research from W3Techs, WordPress powers 35% of the entire known internet – that’s over a third! Of all the websites powered by a content management system, WordPress powers 62% of them.

But why is WordPress such a popular choice? Simply, it is a very user-friendly and open-source platform, and as such has a massive thriving community of developers who contribute thousands of plugins, themes, tools and extra features you can use on your WordPress website to customise your online brand to your heart’s content.

Now you may be thinking WordPress is only used by bloggers and small websites – surely this thing isn’t an appropriate choice for a large company? Well, let’s have another dive into the statistics with QuantCast (a list of the top 10,000 most visited websites on the internet.) In this, we can see that in the Top 10,000 list, WordPress powers 38% of the websites. In the Top 100,000 list, WordPress powers 36% of the websites. It’s clear to see WordPress is used by a huge range of different users and website types, both small and large.

As a favourite of many website designers, even of our own Stockport-based website design company, you can’t go wrong with WordPress. Even our own website is built using WordPress!

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress, which turns your simple WordPress website into a fully functional eCommerce store. Due to this, it is very easy to install and configure. In addition, it is very user friendly and easy to navigate – simply because it just uses the exact same WordPress dashboard and back-end system. It is very customisable and has endless opportunities, you can sell actual physical products or virtual items/services to easily take payment online directly from your own website. WooCommerce allows for advanced features and configurations such as shipping costs based on area, product weight, features to up-sell related products, automate emails to customers, easy to optimise for SEO and more.

Joomla

A common name to appear alongside WordPress. The general view of Joomla is that while it is not as user-friendly as its CMS counterpart, it can prove to be more flexible in certain areas. An example where Joomla may outshine WordPress is for the creation and management of websites that doesn’t require much text-based content, such as a graphic design portfolio. It also provides more advanced user management, making it a good choice for websites that feature account membership subscription plans. Not to mention Joomla provides multilingual support for website visitors without the need of extra plugins or extensions, always good for a large international business or a website that needs to cater to different languages.

However, Joomla is limited in the number of plugins, extensions, themes and templates you have available compared to WordPress. This means you may have to manually add the more advanced features you require on your website.

Drupal

Drupal is very similar to Joomla: it is great for custom-post type websites, provides advanced user management options and has multilingual support straight away. There are additional features which sets Drupal apart from its CMS competitors. Drupal uses an advanced taxonomy system to categorise and organise your website content and products, making it a good choice for large scale eCommerce websites. Another benefit is advanced security: many web developers have consistently pointed to Drupal as being a far more secure content management system than both Joomla and WordPress – another reason why many large eCommerce stores prefer Drupal.

On the other hand, Drupal is extremely unfriendly for new users (as far as a CMS goes.) One look at the user interface will have many people scratching their hands and wondering what to do – which is why it’s recommended to have some sort of professional website development experience before dabbling in Drupal.

Magento

Magento is a CMS purely dedicated to running an eCommerce website. So if you’re planning on creating a blog, portfolio or service-based business website – give this one a skip! This CMS is a favourite of many Fortune500 companies and very large retail eCommerce companies, including the likes of Nike, Ford, Vizio and more. Magento provides many advanced eCommerce features that your customers will love, and that other CMS platforms simply can’t provide. These include things such as: shoppers accessing purchase history, saving products, advanced payment options, and the advanced feature of managing multiple eCommerce stores from a single website dashboard – very handy for those Fortune500 companies!

Conclusion

So there we have it, just some of the many content management systems you can use for your business website! There’s even more platforms out there, but we decided to keep it simple and stick with just the well-known ones. As you can see, every platform has a unique usage and you should be very careful when deciding on which platform to use for your business website.

Require a Business Website?

Do you need a professional website for your business? Contact our professional team of website designers in Stockport. Our team takes the time to get to know your business, understanding your unique requirements and, if needed, suggest the best choice of platform we can use to develop your business website. Give us a call on 01925 552050 or learn more on our website design service page.