Sitecore vs WordPress .

When searching for a Content Management System it’s important to consider your business goals and what you want to achieve in the long-term. Whilst Sitecore and WordPress are both brilliant pieces of technology, they are both also very respectively different platforms that suit very different audiences.

In the world of digital we are quite often asked what makes one product different from another, what does one do better than the other. In this blog I aim to tackle those questions and allow marketers to make better, more informed decisions about the potential platforms available.

Content Management Features

WordPress is essentially an open-source, blogging platform that can be built to look like a website with the right theming and plugins meaning that, whilst it’s great for blogging, it’s a very basic CMS. Sitecore on the other hand, is an enterprise level platform that powers 32,000 of the largest sporting, travel and banking businesses; making it a great commercial platform. Unlike WordPress, Sitecore doesn’t require any plugins, you simply need a well-trained development team or an award winning Sitecore-partner agency.

With Sitecore features such as basic content reuse are much simpler; you can easily fill a variety of areas within your site from the same content source making it quicker to update and change data in a variety of locations - perfect for offers and events! In WordPress this functionality is much more limited and requires you to manually input the content into each location. Therefore Sitecore is a much better choice if you’re planning on reusing and updating content.

Versioning, otherwise known as revisions in WordPress, enables you to create a different version of your site when making lots of updates and allows you to preview the site before pushing any changes live. This functionality is very similar across both platforms.

Sitecore and WordPress both have workflow functionality. However, with Sitecore this is much more advanced and intuitive as it creates tiers of users and permissions; allowing managers to review and approve content before it goes live and track overall site changes back to the correct user.

Marketing Features

Unlike Sitecore, WordPress has a complete plugin library for 3rd party platforms, however, the lack of integration and marketing tools makes this CMS far inferior to that of Sitecore, which not only has its own marketing features but integrates with others too.

Sitecore also allows for personalisation of content, making it easy for marketers to create and display different messages, copy, blogs etc. to the allocated, pre-defined personas of their visitors.

In addition to this, the release of Sitecore 9 includes Machine Learning and Marketing Automation functionalities in the form of Cortex; an AI feature that takes all of the hard work out of segmentation and personas helping marketers to create the most seamless user journey yet.

Roadmap and Future Features

If you’re a business that has already put together a brief, roadmap and have plans for future development of your website and digital platforms then you’re ready for an enterprise platform such as Sitecore.

Updates, Scalability and Security

WordPress’ popularity makes it more vulnerable to hacking attacks and therefore experiences regular updates which have the potential to break plugins and themes. As a result of this there is a security risk for larger companies, especially those using the platform as an ecommerce solution.

I recently sat down with Senior Client-Side Developer, Jamie Donnelly and asked him for his thoughts on Sitecore Vs Wordpress, here’s what he had to say, “at some point when scaling up, Wordpress maintainability can become an issue. For example, keeping all of the third party elements up-to-date to ensure the site remains secure. With Sitecore, almost everything is under one roof, meaning the platform is more secure and therefore has room to scale.”

Interested in learning more about the Sitecore platform? Find out more about the latest release here.