Content Management Systems (CMS) have made it possible for people to have websites and conduct business online with ease. Now, you can put up your website without coding experience. It is for this reason that CMS tools are the biggest website platforms online. If coding was a pre-requisite to creating a website or having an online presence, there would be far fewer than the current two billion websites in existence today.
Content management solutions also make the management of online content much easier. People and businesses can configure their blogs and online stores with the CMS tools at their disposal. CMS is a scalable business and even with the high demand, a few players have dominated this huge market:
1. WordPress
It is the largest Content Management System by a significant margin. It is the leading website software solution by a distant. Other than being an open source CMS, WordPress has been the favored solution due to the following factors:
- Flexibility: It has more than 14,000 free design templates and 18,000 extensions. This enables users to customize their website for various uses.
- It is easy to install: It is extremely convenient in this regard because it uses a Wizard to handle the installation process.
- It is great for SEO: Businesses want their websites to be SEO friendly. WordPress URLs are optimized for good performance on search engines.
- Mobile solutions: Mobile tools are massive with the upsurge of mobile usage in the recent past. WordPress has ensured that it is the ideal tool in this field.
When it comes to e-commerce, WordPress’ foray has come in the form of WooCommerce. It is the most dominant player, beating Magento to the punch in recent times.
WordPress is king in the world of blogging. Because it boasts a large community of users, plugins and themes are easy to come by. Therefore, people can easily customize their layouts and manipulate their blogs even as they change their content.
All this success has come with one major disadvantage; WordPress is a target of hackers. This has forced it to be active with regular security updates. Such updates demand constant administrative effort from site managers.
2. Joomla!
It is the second largest CMS agent in the market with a market share slightly shy of 7%. It has an object-oriented design approach that is favored by some segments of CMS users. They can write up their own extensions and avail them to the community via the extensions directory.
Although it is lagging behind WordPress, Joomla! Has had its fair share of success due to the following factors:
- It has a user-friendly interface
- Users can create their own extensions
- It is easy to install
The drawbacks of Joomla! come from the way extensions are managed. They need more hands-on implementation and the more advanced extensions tend to be expensive.
3. Drupal
Drupal has a market share of close to 5%. It has been a popular CMS because its modules enable the use of community functions like tag clouds, forums, and weblogs. Its lean installation coupled with the ease of customization has made it a hit in a competitive pool of content management solutions.
Although critics can argue that Drupal calls for numerous extra installations after the initial one, its merits for a certain section of users offset this anomaly. Its users are also buoyed by its flexibility more than anything else.
4. Magento
It is an open-source e-commerce platform that allows users to create their online stores and have control over their appearance and the functionality. It has a market share of about 2.3% with over 200,000 sites actively using it.
It is popular because it is great for SEO and its catalog management tools are top-notch. It also allows businesses to expand their operations without compromising on user experience. It can be used by people without a background in coding although a good understanding of the technical aspects of web development is an added bonus.
5. TYPO3
TYPO3 is the go-to open source CMS for the big online trading platforms and large-scale corporate portals. To use this platform, you require extensive technical knowledge in web development. It has a wide array of functions that enable businesses to implement all kinds of online projects. However, it is demanding in terms of maintenance and general configuration.
Conclusion
Content Management Systems have changed the way we establish and maintain a successful online presence. Having an attractive website that ranks well with search engines can be achieved without prior knowledge in programming. The big CMS’s are dominating and it is easy to see why this is unlikely to change in the near future.
