When making the all-important decision of which CMS to use, it can be reduced to four key considerations: site purpose, customisation, security and ease of use.
Purpose
What are you using your site for?
WordPress first began as a blogging platform and, in this space, it excels. There’s a catalogue of pre-existing themes and blog specific plug-ins that allows a blog built in WordPress to really shine. This strength is also it’s weakness if your site is anything other than a blog; as themes are blog specific it can be difficult to create a site with any other purpose that has smooth functionality.
In contrast, Umbraco is a blank slate to build upon. As a result, site builds aren’t hindered by the themes available and the need to work around a blog-specific format. This allows not only for a wider spectrum of site purposes but a greater level of customisation.
Customisation
Umbraco’s blank page design allows almost anything to be built upon it providing the flexibility to develop a site that’s tailored to your requirements. It enables the ability to add features that are effective in engaging your audience or to have greater control over layout and subsequently influence user journeys.
WordPress, due to its theme and plugin approach to development, is considerably more restricted and is instead editable rather than fully customisable. This limits the end result meaning sacrifices will have to be made.
Security
Whilst often an afterthought, security should be an integral consideration when building any site.
WordPress’ background as a blogging platform, while making it a popular option, has meant that it’s role as a CMS is secondary to its main purpose. This presents issues when creating a fully customised page and, as a result, many sites rely on 3rd party plugins to give the look and functionality they’re looking for. This creates a security problem, with multiple easy to hack plugins throughout each site, leaving customer details exposed to potential breaches. To avoid security issues, it’s important to update to the latest version of WordPress periodically, however many 3rd party plugins simply don’t work with new updates and require you to run an older, less secure, version of WordPress.
Umbraco being built in .Net gives it the added benefit of Microsoft’s security knowledge behind it.
Ease of Use
Familiarity with WordPress is one of the main arguments we hear for continuing to use the platform. Its simple set up allows anyone to create an account and populate the template page for a functioning website with no coding knowledge required. Umbraco’s open design can be daunting at first however, once familiar with it, its easy to navigate layout makes it intuitive to use.
If looking at setting up your first website, with no CMS experience, Umbraco’s consistent layout can be a better option to get to grips with, keeping the need for future site edits and updates in mind.
So, should you use Umbraco or WordPress to build your website in 2020? Unless your site’s main purpose is blogging or providing news, we’d suggest an Umbraco build for its security and customisability.