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When you work for yourself, the small things can add up quickly. Outside of what you create or do for your customers, you must market your business, manage daily operations, and keep track of your finances. And, if you’re like most small business owners, you don’t have an unlimited budget to hire others to do the work for you.

Given this reality, the last thing you need is to hire someone to build your website. Fortunately, content management systems can help you create a website and manage a blog without technical expertise or coding skills, saving you the expense of hiring a web developer.

In this article, you’ll learn what a content management system is, why it’s needed, and how it works. You’ll also discover popular content management systems and find out how to choose the one that’s best suited to your unique needs. Keep reading to learn the fundamentals of content management systems.

What is Website Content?

Before diving into content management systems, it’s necessary to understand what “website content” means. Website content refers to the information you find online. This information comes in a variety of formats, from product pages and customer stories to blog posts and press releases. It also typically includes rich media, such as images, videos, and audio.

People go to websites to get information that helps them learn about their options and make decisions about what to do next. You can attract relevant visitors, educate them about your offers, and encourage them to take action by publishing website content that’s relevant, informative, and engaging.

What is a Content Management System?

A content management system (CMS) is the type of software that empowers you to create, modify, and publish website content — with technical knowledge or coding skills. Content management systems include features like rich text editors, version control, search functionality, media libraries, and user management. By leveraging a CMS with a user-friendly interface, it becomes significantly easier and faster to publish content, which reduces the time you spend managing your website.

What Do Content Management Systems Do?

Content management systems offer many features that empower you (and your team, if you have one) to manage the content on your website. Without a CMS, you’d be left making manual updates to any page that required changes. For example, if you wanted to update your the size of your headings, you’d have to do so across your entire website. A CMS removes this burden, allowing you to move much faster.

Most content management systems offer the following core features:

Create, edit, and publish website content
Search through your repository of content
Add and modify user roles and permissions
Manage website navigation, structure, and taxonomy
Tag content and organize it by category
Track each piece of content’s revision history
Store media files, including text, images, video, and audio
Enforce a consistent overall look and feel
Optimize content for search with metadata and links
Empower visitors to share content via social media

Why Are Content Management Systems Needed?

Content management systems help you improve business operations and achieve superior outcomes. More specifically, they promote five key traits of a high-performing enterprise:

Efficiency: By allowing you to easily create, edit, and publish content without technical knowledge or coding skills, content management systems allow you to spend less time to achieve the same objective.
Effectiveness: By empowering you to optimize your website content for search and enable social sharing, content management systems drive superior business performance.
Sustainability: By storing all content and media and tracking its revision history, content management systems offer a viable system for maintaining a website over a long period of time.
Scalability: By enabling you to create new pages, add new content, and leverage new functionality, content management systems allow you to scale your small business as it grows.
Consistency: By enforcing your company’s brand standards through defined fonts, colors, and styles, content management systems help you build trust with your audience.

How Does a CMS Work?

Content management systems can be broken into two parts: a content management application (CMA), which is more commonly known as the “back-end” of your CMS, and a content delivery application (CDA), or the “front-end” of your CMS.

The CMA interfaces with you — the software user — who creates, modifies, and publishes website content. This back-end technology typically includes a dashboard that highlights recent activity and key metrics. In WordPress, this is called the WordPress Admin Dashboard, or wp-admin. From the dashboard, you can navigate to the content editor, manage users, and search through your repository of content, among other things.

The CDA interfaces with visitors, who navigate to your website to consume your content. It’s the front-end technology that delivers the content every time a user lands on a page. It’s what your visitors ultimately see.

How to Choose a Content Management System

Many different content management systems exist today, which allows people and businesses to choose the one best suited to them. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. That’s why it’s important to consider your needs first, then evaluate how each platform meets those needs.

In this section, we share several examples of content management systems. We then highlight 10 reasons why you might choose WordPress. Finally, we provide comparisons between WordPress and its main competitors across seven key criteria: ease of use, design, customizability, functionality, performance, support, and pricing.

Examples of Content Management Systems

Popular examples of content management systems include WordPress, Joomla, Wix, and Squarespace. WordPress is the most widely used CMS, powering 63.3% of all websites that leverage a CMS. WordPress and Joomla are both open-source, meaning their software is free to use, modify, and distribute. Wix and Squarespace are drag-and-drop, no-code website builders with built-in content management systems.

10 Reasons Why You Might Pick WordPress

You retain ownership of your website and its content

Our mission is to make the web a better place. That’s why we’ve designed services that give you full control and ownership over your website and its content. You’re encouraged to express yourself freely. At the same time, we ask that you adhere to our terms of service.

WordPress.com offers the fastest hosting

When your website is hosted on WordPress.com, you enjoy lightning-fast hosting that processes queries at incredible speeds and gets you through traffic spikes without issue. Read more about WordPress.com hosting.

WordPress enables extensibility through plugins

If you’re looking to extend your website functionality — either now or in the future — you’ll find a suitable plugin for WordPress. From search engine optimization and ecommerce infrastructure to email marketing and social media, WordPress offers countless free and paid plugins to choose from.

WordPress comes with robust theme selection

When building your WordPress site, you get to choose from thousands of beautiful and responsive themes, which range from free to paid. These templates allow you to maintain consistent styles across your website.

WordPress offers a thriving developer community

WordPress developers have access to comprehensive documentation, a blog that was designed to serve their unique needs, and forums where they can get help.

WordPress.com offers quality desktop and mobile apps

WordPress.com offers both desktop and mobile apps for your convenience. The desktop app scales to any screen size and works faster than the web application, resulting in near-instant page-load speeds. The company also offers its Jetpack mobile app, which empowers you to post content on the go, reveals insights about your site’s performance, and sends you notifications about new activity.

WordPress.com offers world-class customer support

WordPress.com offers paying customers live chat or email support 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The quality and level of expert help for customer support is unparalleled in the industry.

WordPress.com prioritizes security features

WordPress.com has a dedicated security team and offers automatic Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, allowing your website to load over https at all times. Other security features include automatic updates, automatic backups, and protection from denial-of-service attacks. To learn more about these features, read How WordPress.com Protects Sites From Common Security Issues.

WordPress is open-source software

WordPress is open-source technology, meaning it’s free to use, distribute, and modify for all users.

Website CMS Comparison: WordPress vs. The Rest

Ease of use

WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace are all beginner-friendly builders that offer both hosting and a content management system. Wix and Squarespace are intended for creating simple websites, whereas WordPress and Joomla are more fully functional content management systems that are designed to scale.

Because WordPress is so robust, it comes with a slightly higher learning curve. Fortunately, a thriving online community exists to help you overcome any challenges. On the other hand, you need an in-depth understanding of web design and development, plus professional coding skills, to get the most out of Joomla.

Design

To make your website eye-catching and user-friendly, WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace allow you to choose from hundreds or thousands of free themes or templates. The main difference is that WordPress and Squarespace allow you to change your template in the future. Wix does not allow people to change templates, which makes it difficult to refresh the website’s look in the future. If you decide to start over, you’ll lose all of your data and integrations.

Joomla doesn’t offer templates, which makes it harder to design your website. However, it does allow for every page to be designed differently, which makes it more customizable.

Customizability

To enable you to customize your website further, WordPress, Wix, Joomla, and Squarespace offer third-party extensions. WordPress has over 60,000 plugins, Joomla has nearly 6,000 extensions, Wix has over 500 apps, and Squarespace has 31 extensions. The terminology may be different, but WordPress, Joomla, and Wix’s extensions allow people to add features like contact forms and social media buttons to their websites. Squarespace, on the other hand, focuses on extensions intended to extend their commerce offerings, such as shipping solutions. While many of these extensions are free, premium ones are for paying customers only.

Performance

Both WordPress.com and Wix offer free plans. WordPress.com’s free plan offers 1GB of website storage and unrestricted bandwidth. In contrast, Wix’s free plan comes with half the storage (500MB) and just 500MB of bandwidth, which can result in slow-loading pages–a frustrating experience for website visitors. Squarespace only offers paid plans.

Paid plans from WordPress.com, Wix, and Squarespace all come with a free domain for one year. WordPress.com offers paying customers between 6 GB and 50 GB of storage, along with unrestricted bandwidth. Wix offers between 500 MB and 50 GB of storage, along with between 1 GB and unlimited bandwidth to its customers. Squarespace offers unlimited bandwidth and storage, with one exception: You can only store 30 minutes of videos.

Joomla requires you to find hosting services elsewhere. What provider you choose will impact your website storage and bandwidth.

Support

WordPress users with issues related to the CMS itself can get support via the forums on WordPress.org. Those with issues related to hosting must contact their hosting provider. Many people choose to host their CMS via WordPress.com, in which case they can get customer support via live chat or email 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. On the other hand, Wix offers around-the-clock support, but only for English-speaking customers who engage with a chatbot, which connects you to a human only if needed. The company’s highest plans also come with priority phone support. Finally, Squarespace offers 24/7 email support to customers who are logged in. Squarespace’s live chat is only available to logged-in customers on weekdays between 4 AM and 8 PM EST.

All WordPress users can access thousands of resources via WordPress.org, including a knowledge base, community forums, and support groups. Wix also offers a forum, though it has fewer users and is not as active. Joomla doesn’t offer traditional support, but does have an online community where users can help one another. It also offers free video tutorials, which help you learn how to build a website with Joomla.

Pricing

WordPress, Wix, and Joomla are all free to use — though to use WordPress or Joomla you must find hosting elsewhere. Fortunately, WordPress.com offers a free hosting plan as one option. With Joomla, you must pay for hosting from a third-party provider, which can cost hundreds of dollars per year.

WordPress.com and Wix also offer paid plans with premium features. WordPress.com starts at $4 per month for an ad-free experience and maxes out at $45 per month for superior performance and ecommerce infrastructure. Wix starts at $5 per month for a custom domain and maxes out at $44 per month for ecommerce infrastructure and custom reporting.

Squarespace is only available to paying customers. Squarespace starts at $23 per month for the basic website builder and maxes out at $65 per month for commerce infrastructure with advanced shipping features.

To view in-depth comparisons between WordPress and its top competitors, read the following buyer’s guides:

How to Migrate From Another CMS to WordPress

Squarespace to WordPress

To migrate from Squarespace to WordPress, you must first export your Squarespace website. Navigate to your Settings page, select “Advanced,” select “Import/Export,” and click on “Export.” A popup will offer several destinations, including WordPress. Once the export process is complete, you can download your website.

Next, sign up for a WordPress account and navigate to Tools. Click on “Import,” select WordPress, and follow the prompts to upload your content. To ensure your images are uploaded correctly, we recommend installing and using the Auto Upload Images plugin. Throughout the migration process, you’ll also need to fix any permalinks, transfer your ecommerce infrastructure, and move your domain.

This blog post offers a step-by-step guide for migrating your website from Squarespace to WordPress. Read it to get detailed instructions and screenshots for each step.

Wix to WordPress

It’s easy to migrate from Wix to WordPress. All you need to do is navigate to WordPress’s Import tool and provide your website’s URL. From there, you’ll simply choose which features you want to add. Later, you’ll need to transfer your domain or choose a new one. See this guide for instructions on how to import to an existing WordPress website from Wix.

Weebly to WordPress

To migrate from Weebly to WordPress, you’ll need to first disable your website’s SSL, then download your website’s content from weeblytowp.com. You’ll then import the content from your WordPress account under Tools > Import, where you’ll upload the file you just downloaded from weeblytowp.com. View our Weebly to WordPress migration guide to get detailed instructions and screenshots for each step.

Conclusion

People visit your website to get information that will help them make important decisions. By providing relevant, informative, and engaging content, you can attract website visitors and encourage them to take action. Content management systems empower you to create, modify, and publish website content — without technical knowledge or coding skills. As a result, you spend fewer resources to achieve the same or better outcomes.

You can choose from popular content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Wix, and Squarespace. While each has its own strengths and weaknesses, WordPress is the most widely used CMS on the planet for a reason. With both free and paid plans, you get a user-friendly interface, powerful features, and the largest library of extensions on the market, plus an engaged online community and 24/7 customer support. WordPress is also the most secure and performant CMS available, yet has reasonable pricing that makes it accessible to creators, bloggers, and small business owners.

Ready to get started? Create your free WordPress account today to start building your website and publishing content.

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What Is a Content Management System and How to Choose the Best CMS for Your Needs