Best CMS Platform of 2022
In today’s business world, having a web design is an absolute necessity.
However, as a business owner, you want a content management system (CMS) that helps you create, edit and manage your content easier.
WordPress CMS is one of the best content management systems that offers a robust web-building tool and thousands of plugins to help you build your dream website.
I’ve tried a bunch of content management systems. Here are the 5 best cms systems you should know about:
#1 WordPress
WordPress is the best cms in the world powering over 40% of the web! With millions of users. WordPress helps you get your website running in a lot faster than a website that’s coded from scratch. WordPress offers easy domain registration and hosting for both beginners as well as experts. With endless integrations and plugins, you can build any type of website with WordPress.
Wordpress.com and wordpress.org are similar in that they help you build beautiful websites, but they are quite different from each other. Wordpress.com is a lot easier to get started, but you have to use their hosting & they have there limitations to what you can and can’t do. With WordPress.org you can host your own website yourself with a lot more options to fully customize your site.
Features
Blogs: WordPress started as a blog site builder and eventually branched out to be a tool for building all types of WordPress websites.
Websites: WordPress provides you tools to build any type of website you need. Also, with different integrations and plugins, for example: you have different types of drag and drop page builders, premium themes, security plugins, and data systems to help you build your website the right way. Hassle-free.
Advanced eCommerce tools: WordPress partnered with WooCommerce, is a winning combination for you to getting your e-commerce store online quicker and easier. Although there are limitations to how far you can customize the layout and style of your product, cart & checkout pages.
Site Customization: With thousands of plugins, integrations, templates, and themes, WordPress allows you to build unique websites. More than this, WordPress has a community of developers constantly adding unique features to WordPress.
SEO friendly: There are a lot of different WordPress plugins that can help you implement search engine optimization best practices to accelerate and build your online presence.
Pricing:
All you would need to build your own website would be hosting, domain and a possible WordPress theme. Can get a great managed WordPress hosting account for as low as $6.99 with Siteground. A domain will just run you a couple of bucks upfront and then annual renewal. As far as a theme, I’d go with one that’s backed by a large community of developers and fans. A Premium Theme typically will run about $60 bucks. So, you could potentially be up and running your new website with a upfront cost of under a $100 bucks! With an annual ongoing cost of around $100 – $150. Plus you’ll have 100% ownership of your website. I don’t think it gets any better then that? I’ll let you decide
Some Pros:
1. Easy to make simple content edits, without knowing how to code.
2. Unlimited number of themes/templates to choose from.
3. Endless integrations and plugins to extend your website.
4. Easily scale your website as your business grows.
Some Cons:
1. It does take some technical chops in order to install WordPress onto your hosting environment/Domain name.
2. Although you can get a way with building a complete site with no coding, you are limited to what a tool offers you. Having some knowledge in HTML & CSS can really help further the customization you can do to your website to get a true unique site.
#2 SQUARESPACE
Squarespace offers a Simple, modern, and minimalistic cms. With thousands of well-designed templates, you can build your website from scratch in just a few minutes.
Features
Personal domain: Squarespace offers you a one-year free domain name for your yearly subscription. After which you pay a $20 yearly subscription fee.
eCommerce: Squarespace website is great for eCommerce. You have all integrations needed for selling your products and services. With tons of eCommerce templates, checkout, and a payment gateway, you can get your products in your customers’ hands as fast as possible.
Website analytics: With Squarespace data and reports, you get an accurate assessment of your website’s performance and how to improve your website.
SEO friendly: Squarespace simple and beautiful aesthetics makes it easy to rank your website.
Marketing tools: With Squarespace marketing tools, you can easily build and engage with your audience.
Pricing and plans
Square doesn’t offer a free or trial account. It offers 4 distinct pricing plans:
Personal plan: best for blogs, portfolios, and personal websites. It costs $12 monthly.
Business plan: best suited for small business owners and freelancers. It costs $18 and a 3% transaction fee.
Online store(basic): It costs $26 monthly without transaction fees.
Online store(advanced): This plan costs $40 and it comes with Squarespace full eCommerce
features.
Pros
1. Simplistic interface
2. Beautiful and modern themes and templates
3. 24/7 customer support
4. Great blogging features
Cons
1. Limited plugins
2. Limited functionality
#3 WEEBLY
Weebly is a popular website builder and cms that offers easy website building with an intuitive drag-and drop feature. Weebly allows you to build awesome blogs and eCommerce websites in a matter of minutes.
Features
Domain: Weebly provides you an easy to get started feature here with its domain and hosting. You can register your domain name and web hosting right from Weebly’s platform.
Ecommerce store: Weebly offers an all-in-one solution for your online store. With Weebly 4, Weebly
offers a robust eCommerce store with awesome functionality; invoices, coupons, sizes, and colors, sale prices. As well as reliable payment system integrations; PayPal, and stripe. Complete with SEO marketing features, blog, SSL security encryption, customizable contact form.
Web design: Weebly boasts an intuitive drag-and-drop web builder for building responsive web pages. Weebly also offers well-designed in-built themes and templates to get you started.
Video hosting and photo library: Weebly does an awesome job of providing you with free stock photos and copyright-free videos. You can also embed videos from youtube or use its custom video player to upload your videos.
Technical support: Weebly provides premium live support for its premium subscribers. Weebly also
provides access to personal support through email and chat for their free plan users. Pro and business plan users have phone support and priority support.
Plugins and integrations: Weebly offers seamless integrations with other software to enhance your website. such as PayPal, Square, Stripe, and Apple Pay, Aweber, ship station, Eventbrite, Live chat. Shipo etc.
Pricing
Weebly comes with a free plan. Weebly’s premium plans give you more control and functions such as eCommerce store management or website monetization.
Here’s a breakdown of Weebly pricing plans to choose from:
Free plan: $0
connect: $8/monthly
Pro: $18/monthly
Business: $35/monthly
Business Plus: $46/monthly
Pros
1. Simple and user-friendly
2. Access to a variety of integrations and plugins
3. Responsive and mobile-friendly
4. SEO friendly
cons
1. Drag-and-drop feature is limited
2. Domain registration is pricey.
#4 WIX
Wix is an excellent cms that lets you build beautiful websites. With Wix, anyone can design and build a website.
Here’s what Wix offers:
Wix offers you a simple drag-and-drop feature, thousands of in-built themes and templates make Wix one of the most popular cms, especially for small businesses. You can also create responsive websites that look great on all devices.
Wix also has in-built SEO optimization, which lets your customers easily find you on the web. Wix provides a robust content system that includes email marketing, e-commerce, and contact forms engaging with your customers.
Pricing and plans
Wix offers 4 plans with its premium subscription. Wix’s Website plan is for creating simple websites. Prices start from $4.50 a month for domain only. For creating personal websites, you have base $8.50. Unlimited pricing for entrepreneurs starts at $12.50, which gets you more storage amongst other features. And the VIP pricing starts at $24.50 gets you more storage and other features than the other pricing plans. And 24/7 priority support.
Pros
1. Powerful editor
2. Beautiful and modern themes and templates
3. Affordable and easy to use
Cons
1. Limited integrations.
#5 BIGCOMMERCE
Bigcommerce is a seamless eCommerce cms for your business. Bigcommerce helps beginners to manage their businesses across different industries; health, fashion, photography, designing, automotive, and manufacturing. Bigcommerce is an open SaaS platform, which means – tech-savvy entrepreneurs can customize their eCommerce stores by adding a few lines of code to the platform.
Features
Bigcommerce boasts a barrage of advanced functionalities to help you smoothly run your business.
Here are Bigcommmerce core features:
Storefront design: Bigcommmerce provides you with the most advanced website building tools to design and build the most impressive, yet functional eCommerce website. Packed with pre-loaded customizable themes, you can edit your eCommerce store with Bigcommerce’s easy-to-use visual drag and drop web builder.
You also get seamless WordPress integration, mobile optimization, and a reliable and robust server-to-server checkout option.
Website optimization: Bigcommerce provides you with optimization options to enhance your eCommerce store. You have SEO optimization options, reports, and analytics to improve your website’s performance. Bigcommerce also provides you with an intuitive search feature that allows your customers to easily search your store for products they need.
Cross channel eCommerce: Bigcommerce allows you to sell your products and services in different
marketplaces and media channels, advertise on different social platforms, own multiple storefronts, and integrate effortlessly with your offline store.
B2B: Bigcommerce gives you more controls with its B2B features. Bigcommerce allows you to segment your customers based on pricing options, payments, product searches, and advertisement. Your customers can easily find the products they are looking for with Bigcommerce advanced search. International market tools and integrations: Bigcommerce accepts payments from over 100 different currencies, has an inbuilt language translator and its Global CDN feature makes sure your website maintains its performance across different world regions.
Core Commerce features Reports and analytics on how to improve your store, Shipping, catalog, opensource platform, automated tax services, staging testing for your advertising and marketing needs, and more.
Other services: 24/7 Customer support and a community of users to help you out in case you run in a jam.
Pricing and plans
Bigcommerce offers a 15-day free trial to test their services. After this, you can pick a plan. Standard plan which starts from $29.95 monthly, is ideal for building a personal online store. Plus plan which costs $79.95 monthly, is suited for a growing business with established customers. You get all marketing tools proven to boost sales.
Pro plan costs $299.95 monthly, this plan helps you scale your business with more marketing
integrations and comprehensive features.
Enterprise: this a custom plan with custom pricing. With this plan, you can get all BIgcommerce
features as well as some personal customizations. This plan is best suited for big businesses and large corporations.
Bigcommerce allows you to make monthly subscriptions. However, if you pay yearly, you’ll get 10% off your subscription for the Plus and Pro plans.
Pros
1. Robust eCommerce platform
2. Easy to use website builder
3. Access to the international market
4. Robust marketing and SEO integrations
Cons
1. Similar themes and templates
2. There are limits on annual sales for different plans
Best CMS of 2021 Conclusion
So that’s the break down of the top 5 best CMS systems you can choose from. Of course everyone’s needs are different based on what your going to be using your website for. If you’re looking for a CMS with the least amount of limitations, that’s easy to make simple content edits yourself without hiring a developer, that can easily be extended as your business grows, I would go with WordPress. It’s backed by the largest community of developers and fans! WordPress also powers more than 40% of the web. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon! Would you like to build your next project with a trusted web company? Here at Southtown Web Design we build all our sites on WordPress and look forward to discuss any questions you may have.
