WordPress As Enterprise CMS – Compelling Review Of Reviews

Date: November 18, 2024

November 18, 2024 November 18, 2024

WordPress As Enterprise CMS – Compelling Review Of Reviews

We were fortunate enough to retrieve this screenshot of an older website.

Those days required a series of bulkier & lengthier coding to put up similar content online. Soon with the growing popularity of the internet, the online presence of businesses increased drastically. This created a need for a centralized system through which businesses could generate unlimited content and display it on the web, bypassing complex coding.

This called for the birth of the Content Management System (CMS). If you’re seeking a reliable WordPress development company to streamline your web content management, look no further.

What we are about to discuss here is the ability of WordPress to be an enterprise-ready Content Management System (CMS). And why enterprise businesses are different, depends on the size of their organization and the level of efficiency in their cross-department communications.

As a medium-sized or large business, you may have a sizable product or service inventory. If you are planning to sell them on a global scale, you’ll need websites for different regions, languages, and product/service lines.

Any enterprise marketer would want to focus more on generating quality content around their product/service rather than investing their time in managing technology. It is deemed a futile practice as there are genuine technology partners worldwide for outsourcing the development and maintenance of enterprise-level CMS.

There is also a related term called Enterprise Content Management (CMS) which is beyond the scope of this blog. An ECM looks to automate document flow within the organization and not their web content as is the case with a CMS.

Let’s move on.

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What To Look For In An Enterprise-Grade CMS?

Banking on our work experience as the preferred digital solutions partner, we have identified a few important criteria for any CMS to serve an enterprise-grade solution. They are tabulated as follows:

Easy Administration

An enterprise-level CMS offers a range of simple and powerful admin tools in a single software package; using which the administrators can track scheduled content, manage notifications, add assets, and tweak plugins without hopping from one program to another.

Workflow Controls

Interdependence is the key to success in corporations. Thus, any CMS ought to have simple workflow controls.

Say, for instance, a marketing team will have writers create content; designers who look after the front-end appearance; and editors who check articles and product descriptions before passing them to the company’s legal team for a final check.

An ideal CMS would manage the workflow by providing appropriate permissions to valid profiles.

Multi-Platform Capabilities

Businesses are meant to expand their consumer base over time. Having a flexible website solution upfront will help them launch different mobile applications, web applications, and websites as they continue to expand.

To fulfill any of these scenarios, your CMS must be able to handle more than one platform.

Headless Content Management

Bigger organizations and corporations need a headless content management system, essentially, because the workflow here is highly specialized. These headless CMS platforms offer unparalleled flexibility and customization, crucial for managing diverse content needs across various digital channels.

Thus, your backend team can constantly generate content – web page text, blog posts, video content, product information, etc. – and store it in a database without actually worrying about the actual presentation. Using a range of applications, all the content in the database will be automatically optimized on tablets, computers, cell phones, and a range of apps.

Built-in Content Templates

Having content templates built-in CMS is great for maintaining an effective workflow, say for what you write and create meta descriptions and recommend categories and tags automatically; resize product images to fit your page specs or suggest widgets based on tags.

This leaves your team more time to improve the actual content instead of spending time on optimizing for “search engine crawlers”.

Detailed Analytics

The success of any online marketing campaign depends on how much your marketing team knows who your potential customers are, where they come from, the type of device they use to access your site, and which parts of your site they like to visit most.

As an Enterprise Marketer, you must consider choosing a CMS with popular analytics tools built-in or the ability to incorporate suitable plug-ins for the same.

Built-in SEO Tools

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO from a reputed digital marketing agency, is the foundation of any online marketing strategy.

The best CMS platforms stay on top of search engine algorithm changes (Google/Bing in most cases) and incorporate easy-to-use tools for content optimization.

Security

Having done all the work right from content generation to content deployment and marketing planning, the least you would want is a security breach.

Enterprise-level CMS platforms must put security first, and they must also have the capacity to patch vulnerabilities quickly when they arise.

WordPress As Enterprise CMS Solution

WordPress is the biggest blue whale in the Internet Ocean.

WordPress powers over 37% of the web as its interface is familiar to content creators who often need little to no training to operate the platform

The evolution of WordPress as an open-source platform from individuals using it as a personal blogging site to opportunistic entrepreneurs using it to create eCommerce sites and big corporations like CNET coming aboard with funding is surreal.

Modern WordPress is a robust, capable website builder and content manager. Major media companies, including Facebook, CNN, New York Post, Slack, Capgemini, TED, Hachette, Spotify, and Microsoft, now choose WordPress as their default digital publishing tool.

While there are several review posts on using WordPress as an Enterprise CMS solution, we thought of going the extra mile by presenting you with a compelling review of reviews based on our client-work experience.

One Manager working in a Tech Enterprise reviewed WP CMS and wrote, “We have about 150 WordPress sites that we manage through a combination of Installatron and InfiniteWP; it’s not difficult to keep your sites secure.”

“We support users with a variety of skill levels; secretaries with no prior web publishing experience are now able to make updates to their department sites, while power users run their blog networks.”

WordPress As Enterprise Content Hub

The most common issue in any large organization relates to streamlining content production across multiple teams. The content might be siloed across several CMS, and the technology, marketing, and design teams may only be comfortable operating certain platforms.

Here comes an enterprise content hub that removes those barriers, simplifies the content technology stack, and creates a pathway to a more effective content strategy.

Although the above video from Ahrefs explains the content hub using HubSpot, we hope that you get an idea of how you can better optimize your content for your audience.

The flexibility of WordPress also makes it an ideal choice for an enterprise content hub. It is also because of the familiarity of interfaces to content creators who could readily operate the platform.

Additionally, WordPress software natively supports the REST API. In terms of security, granular access management is covered by role-based access control and WordPress supports multiple Single Sign On (SSO) solutions. Thanks to the extensive enterprise WordPress ecosystem, extendability options are covered with seamless third-party integrations.

For example, a WordPress Content Hub supporting GraphQL could use either the wp-GraphQL plugin or proxy requests through an external GraphQL server such as Apollo Server.

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Understanding WordPress Themes & Page Builders

As simple as it is said, websites using WordPress run on themes & page builders.

Further said, a WordPress theme is a collection of code, functionality, and styles that you can install onto your website. Essentially, it is a toolkit to build your website. Its functionalities and styles are modified using the page builders or any other plugin, without having to touch the code.

Watch the video below to learn the nitty-gritty of web development on WordPress and its User Experience with customer use cases.

We recommend using Elementor page builder for WordPress website development.

Enterprise WordPress Hosting

Weighing the time and costs involved in planning, building, and maintaining a content management system (CMS) isn’t easy.

One pertinent question always comes up: Do you self-host WordPress on an infrastructure provider, for example, Amazon’s AWS, or do you partner with a managed platform that provides enterprise WordPress hosting?

Below are some of the common responses from executive stakeholders when they were approached with the above question by the team at WP VIP.

“We were hosting on AWS and that created an enormous amount of overhead for us,” a new customer recently told us. “We would rather shift our focus from hosting problems, which is a solved problem, and focus our attention on creating new business value.”

“I’m not sure what WordPress VIP is running, but it put up the absolute fastest scores that I’ve seen by a wide margin. They blew my test rig out of the water.” Kevin Ohashi, Review Signal.

Evaluating WordPress against the earlier discussed criteria for a CMS to be called an enterprise-level solution, we find:

For easy administration: WordPress is reasonably easy to use. You can access multisite features, but you’ll need custom theme development.
For workflow controls: Planning and managing workflow using the basic WordPress CMS interface can be a trickier. You’ll need to go for a custom plugin development for a reliable workflow solution.
For multi-channel integrations: While WordPress itself isn’t a multi-platform CMS, it allows basic optimization for various devices. Again, custom plugins, and building web applications can help you overcome some WordPress limitations.
For headless content management: You can create a headless WordPress site using JAMstack or React. By using such a setup, you can keep the things that you have been accustomed to. Anyhow, WordPress was not built for the headless setup. If you try to teach a CMS a new trick like going headless, you are going against its core.
For SEO: WordPress doesn’t have any onboard analytics tools. However, WordPress has impeccable plugin support for SEO. Businesses choose website development on WordPress for being search engine friendly.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to successful content management. And so, one of the strengths of WordPress as an open-source platform is the flexibility it provides to customize your architecture with third-party integrations.

Refer to this official report by WordPress that surfaces best-in-class, proven technology integrations in key business areas like e-commerce, marketing automation, and business intelligence. All senior leaders can learn more about it to improve the agility of their marketing and operations.

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What Marketers Dislike About WP Enterprise CMS?

WordPress is really just an enterprise-ready CMS and not a full-fledged CMS for enterprise-level applications. As an open-source platform, although WordPress is scalable to larger applications, there are still some concerns about it in the minds of digital marketers.

A verified user on G2 Reviews said, “Although WP platform for blogging has gotten better, I find the website building more difficult, especially loading widgets, and styling the way I want.”

However, the user appreciated WordPress sites for being search engine friendly and therefore, great visibility online.

While Marketers have not outrightly rejected WordPress as their preferred CMS for large-scale operations, they are still concerned about the following issues:

Security breaches: Being an open-source platform, WordPress is always providing a potential back door entry for potential hackers.
However, the risk can be mitigated by engaging a digital agency for the timely maintenance of WordPress CMS.
No active tech support: It’s hard for you to find tech support for any glitches during the operation of your website.
One way is to subscribe to WP VIP plans which would cost a bomb while another way is to outsource CMS development & maintenance to an experienced WordPress Development agency.
On-going maintenance is a must: Whenever WordPress rolls out an update, you’re at risk of breaking your template or plugin set. If a WordPress core update conflicts with existing plugins and themes, it won’t work until the third-party developer updates the plugin or theme.

Thus, engage a dedicated WordPress development and maintenance team.

A certain user in Education Management writes,

“WYSIWYG is incredibly important in web page work — WordPress desperately needs it. Plug-ins make some difference but not enough. Incredibly frustrating to work with text. Posts layouts are really simple — which is good and bad. Page design is NOT intuitive OR easy, and constant revisions are a necessity because you can’t SEE what you are doing! Really, NOT a good experience. Don’t know what we would have done without the assistance of a local consultant — so don’t fall for “anyone can do it!”

Partnership For Enterprise CMS Development & Maintenance – Why ColorWhistle Is The Right Choice?

WordPress As Enterprise CMS – Compelling Review Of Reviews (Nature) - ColorWhistle

Image Source: Nature.com

Such an irony! Isn’t it?

This is just one classic case of corporates, bigger organizations working in silos.

According to Forrester’s customer experience predictions, the majority of customer experience gains in enterprise websites will come from “finding and fixing problems, often in their back-end systems and processes.”

As website revamp/redesign strategists, enterprise marketers, IT directors, and Digital officers, you should be asking these five questions before upgrading your Enterprise Content Platform:

Are there unnecessary steps in your content creation process?
How much time are your developers spending on basic maintenance?
How strong is your site’s performance?
How easy is it to publish your content across multiple platforms?
Are you paying for anything in your enterprise content platform you don’t need?

Further, businesses should evaluate their options in managing technology – Do they need to understand and manage the complexities of hosting, security, and upgrades? Is there a better way? Can the platform be a commodity that is managed for you? – that then allows you to engage in higher-value activities that drive revenue, reduce costs or increase market share.

Still unsure? Go ahead and Contact us for a business call with Sankar, founder of ColorWhistle, to evaluate your CMS options. We will be happy to take you through the process of CMS development and the need for maintenance for your enterprise business.

Although the journal eventually made the article accessible to all for free, it could have avoided the embarrassment caused to itself.

Who would you blame for this? It could be happening in your organization too. Consult today for the details of our WordPress development services.

Call us at +91 (944).278.9110 or write to us to find out the best content management solution for you. We hope to hear from you soon to discuss your business needs!