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WordPress vs. Custom CMS: What’s best for your business? Read more: WordPress vs. Custom CMS: What’s best for your business?

From Diamond Star Media Blog
For people looking to build a website, the option of platform often comes down to two difficult choices: custom CMS or WordPress. With pros and cons to both, choosing one platform over the other can become a mind boggling and time consuming experience. And once you’ve settled on a platform, how can you be confident you’ve made the right decision? Both have pros and cons. Let’s take a few minutes to compare.

We’ll begin with a crash-course on WordPress for those who are unfamiliar with the platform.
Originally designed as an open source CMS for blogs, most people agree that WordPress is still ideal for this specific application – blogging. Over the years, however, WordPress has overstepped its original intention and become a popular way to build quick, cheap websites. In this way, WordPress differs from custom CMS, which is a tool designed for the purpose of developing entire websites (not just blogs). Because of this, a professionally designed website utilizing customized CMS is usually a more time consuming process and a more expensive undertaking.

Benefits of using WordPress: The reasons why people use WordPress for websites is obvious. In addition to being less expensive than customized CMS, thousands of WordPress themes are available for immediate use, which is a great benefit both in time and money. Furthermore, the open source nature of WordPress encourages a wide developer base ranging from amateur to professional, allowing plenty of support at varying price points. Lastly, WordPress is quick to implement and offers thousands of readily available plugins to instantly increase a website’s functionality.

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Comparison: But if custom CMS is more expensive and time consuming than WordPress, why use it at all if WordPress seems to be good enough? For starters, custom CMS allows a website to be designed to a client’s exact specifications and can offer flexibility that would be impossible with WordPress. Security is also greatly increased due to professionally implemented development along with advanced website functionality. Even the integration of third part apps becomes smoother. Granted, you’ll spend more, it’s a more time consuming process, the code is often proprietary (meaning the development team maintains ownership), and clients lacking web development skills often remain at the mercy of their web developers for updates. Like we said earlier: pros and cons.

Our advice: If you take everything into consideration and still feel that WordPress is the right choice for you, move forward wisely. Be aware that the open source nature of WordPress means that everyone in the world has access to your source code, making your website far more vulnerable to hacking. Likewise, there’s a greater chance that your WordPress developer is a rookie who’ll take little to no precautions regarding security. There is also the temptation of overusing the numerous plugins that are readily available, thus impeding a website’s intended functionality. Lastly, be aware that any modification to WordPress technically turns it into proprietary code, hampering your website’s ability to accept future standard WordPress updates. In this situation, you’ll wind up dealing with many of the downsides of custom CMS without any of its perks.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. But before you choose, just make sure you know what’s best for you and your business – now and for the next several years.