Creating and Hosting a Website: Part 2 — CMS (WordPress, Joomla and others)

A content management system (CMS) is a program that is installed on hosting and allows you to manage a website through an administrative panel: add pages, publish content, and change the design without editing code. The most widespread CMS is WordPress: according to W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites on the Internet run on it. Among other well-known systems are Joomla and Drupal, and in Russia the paid 1C-Bitrix is widely used.

Flexibility and control

CMSs are installed on your own hosting, so the site owner gets full access to its files and database. CMSs are used to build websites of any scale: from blogs and corporate sites to large online stores.

Advantages

• Flexibility. Thousands of themes and plugins have been created for popular CMSs to extend site capabilities; if necessary, you can write your own.
• Control over data. All files and the database belong to the owner. The site can be moved to another hosting provider or handed over to a different developer.
• SEO capabilities. Plugins and settings allow detailed control over how search engines see the site.
• Large community. There is extensive documentation, forums, tutorials, and many specialists ready to take on the work.
• Scales with the business. As load increases, the site can be moved to a more powerful server without reworking it.

Disadvantages

• Requires hosting. The domain and hosting are purchased separately, which means extra steps and expenses.
• Higher barrier to entry. Basic technical knowledge is needed for installation and initial setup: how to upload files to the server, how to create a database.
• Updates and security. The owner must monitor updates for the CMS itself, themes, and plugins. Most WordPress vulnerabilities are found not in the system core but in plugins and themes, so an outdated plugin is a common cause of hacks.
• Performance. Without setting up caching and optimization, a CMS-based site runs slower than a static site.

Cost

WordPress (the self-hosted version, not WordPress.com), Joomla, and Drupal are free. You will have to pay for other things:

• hosting — an obligatory expense; the cost depends on the provider and required resources;
• domain — renewed annually or for multiple years in advance;
• themes and plugins — many are free, but premium themes and extended versions are sold separately.

Required skills and difficulty

• Skills:
  • working with the hosting control panel: uploading files, creating a database;
  • working with the administrative panel of the chosen CMS;
  • installing and configuring themes and plugins;
  • troubleshooting simple errors.
• Difficulty — medium. You’ll need to understand the technical side, read documentation, and experiment. However, for most tasks ready-made solutions already exist, and you don’t have to be a programmer.

A CMS is suitable for those who need flexibility and full control over their site and who are willing to spend time maintaining it.