Why WordPress is Best for Small Business Websites

Gone are the days when you would have to send changes to a webmaster and wait days or even weeks for new content to be added to your website. Every small business website should be running some sort of content management system.

There are numerous CMSes out there today, but the big three are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.  Which is best? There’s a great deal of debate around that, and everyone has their own opinion. Some even state that WordPress is just a blogging platform, and not a real CMS at all. In response to that, I would note that WordPress took first place in the 2010 Hall of Fame CMS Awards, edging out Drupal and Joomla.

Joomla, Drupal and WordPress all have their own advantages and disadvantages. To the best of my understanding, Drupal (and to an extent, Joomla) tend to be used more for large projects and medium-sized company websites, or at least more frequently than WordPress. WordPress tends to be used more for personal and small business websites. A lot more. WordPress is very popular. Here are some examples (as of the time of this writing).

Number of plugins in official repository:

1. WordPress: 14,239
2. Drupal: 7,859
3. Joomla: 7,458

Number of themes in official repository:

1. WordPress: 1,358
2. Drupal: 853
3. Joomla: ? (there appears to be no official template repository)

Elance contractors listing the CMS as a specialty:

1. WordPress: 20,841
2. Joomla: 14,937
3. Drupal: 7,556

Google search results for each term:

1. WordPress: 794,000,000
2. Joomla: 240,000,000
3. Drupal: 86,400,000

Clearly, WordPress is the most popular. You’ll find many, many more small business owners–including those running very successful Internet businesses–using WordPress than you will Joomla or Drupal. Popularity is not the same as quality, but what it does mean is that there is a much larger community. That means more knowledge, more experts, more problems solved than with less popular content management systems. In other words, it’s easier to find help.

I have to admit, I have not personally used Joomla or Drupal. I did some research of the systems, comparing popularity and comments on each system. Although, again, there are different opinions and different specialties, I found two core advantages of WordPress:

1. WordPress is the most popular: more community support.
2. WordPress is the easiest to use: it’s easier for you to manage your website and update it once the web designer has completed it.