Choosing the Right Website Development Platform: Top Picks for 2024
- By Aman Bhati
- May 22, 2024
The internet is filled with custom website development platforms. These solutions are often confusing and may deviate from your dream of building a scalable business website that helps you achieve business goals. In such a perplexing and overwhelming situation, hiring the right website development platform is essential to achieving business goals (lead generation, sales, or brand awareness).
Website development services and needs are ever-evolving, and hence, selecting the right website development platform is more crucial than ever in 2024.
This blog post will help you choose the most appropriate website development platform and pave the way to help you achieve your business goals, from branding to sales and everything in between.
Keep reading to stay updated and ahead of the competition.
What is Website Development?
Website development is the process of building a robust, scalable, visually appealing, and engaging website. While the purpose of building a website may be different for different businesses, the end goal is to maintain and improve online visibility, attract traffic, and generate leads.
The selection of the right website development platform ensures that your business is found online, just like watching a Netflix series on your laptop or smartphone, and persuades visitors to take action.
Different website development platforms use different website development processes to help companies attain, maintain, and regain customer attention (which has now shrunk to 3 seconds only). Thus, a robust website is the need of the hour for businesses of all sizes and types.
If you are perplexed by the several website development platforms available, this blog post can be a game changer. Keep reading!
What are Website Development Features?
Website features are the elements that add functionalities to the website for a better user experience. Some of the themes, plugins, and templates add value to the website with their ease of use, functionality, and value addition. Hence, website development features play a pivotal role in enhancing the web presence and organic search results by solely improving the user experience.
Different website development platforms (often known as content management systems because of their content management roles) offer various features to enhance the user experience and simple navigation.
What are Website Development Services?
Website development platforms offer website development services to other businesses or individuals to help them serve their customers online and make their presence felt by the target audience. Website development platforms promote their services by creating robust and appealing websites that entice customers adroitly.
Website development platforms use enticing drag-and-drop editors that are super easy to use. These editors can help anyone with basic knowledge. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are website development platforms that are preferred and used by hundreds of online businesses.
WordPress: The Powerhouse of Websites
WordPress is one of the most prominent names in the circles of websites and content management systems (CMS). It is known for its super-easy interface and massive community of users and developers. Nearly 43% of all websites run on WordPress. The website development process of WordPress is different from that of other website development platforms.
WordPress has a list of its pros and cons. Some of the pros of using WordPress include:
- User-friendly interface: WordPress is easy to use thanks to its intuitive and simple interface.
- Big community: WordPress has an active community of developers who contribute plugins and themes to help other community members create visually appealing websites.
- Massive library of themes and plugins: WordPress has a library of hundreds of free and paid plugins and themes that allow users to customize and use the website’s design and functionality.
- SEO-friendly: WordPress websites are easy to rank on the search engines due to their SEO-friendly interface and design with the use of one of the free third-party plugins.
Some drawbacks of WordPress include:
- Security Issues: WordPress websites are easy to target. They are vulnerable, and if not maintained properly, they can become easy targets for bugs and hackers.
- Performance Issues: WordPress can experience performance issues if it is not optimized. Hence, the user needs to keep the website optimized.
- Customization Issues: WordPress has a massive library of themes and plugins but has customization issues as well.
WordPress can be used to create different types of visually appealing websites, including:
- Business websites
- Blogs
- Educational websites
- E-commerce websites
- News websites
Some of the big brands using WordPress for their websites include Sony Music, BBC America, Vogue, The Walt Disney Company, Facebook, Microsoft Corporation, CNN, The White House, Usain Bolt, Time Magazine, and Toyota.
What is Joomla?
Joomla is the second-largest website development platform. It boasts one of the most highly claimed website development platforms and offers a range of benefits and features. Joomla 4 was recently released, making it even more user-friendly and accessible.
Joomla offers the following advantages, which include:
- Multilingual Websites: Joomla offers powerful multilingual support, making it a preferred choice for creating multilingual websites.
- Easy-to-Manage Access Control: You can exercise granular control over user roles and permissions to access specific content and functionalities.
- Personalized Design: You can customize a wide range of templates and extensions to create a fully functional and robust website.
- SEO Friendly: Joomla websites are compatible with the search engines and easy to optimize for the search engines.
Some potential drawbacks of using Joomla include:
- Complex and Challenging: Joomla is more complicated than WordPress. Implementing a custom design without coding knowledge can be challenging.
- Limited free templates: Joomla has limited availability of free templates. So, it becomes challenging for non-technical users to create visually appealing and professional-looking websites using free templates.
Joomla has been used to create a wide range of websites, including:
- Government agencies
- Non-profit organizations
- Corporate websites
- E-commerce websites
- Educational institutions
Some notable examples of websites built on Joomla include Linux.com, Harvard University, The Hill newspaper, and Hotel Holiday Inn.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is another most-used website development platform. It is renowned for its scalable and flexible web solutions. It is generally used for large-scale and complex websites that need advanced features and customization options.
Like any other website development platform or CMS, it has some pros and cons.
Some of the advantages include:
- Granular access control: Drupal’s granular access control allows you to define and control user roles.
- Multilingual Websites: Drupal is a good choice for multilingual websites,
- High customization: Websites built on Drupal are highly customizable. They offer a powerful module library to extend functionality and customization.
- Scalability: Drupal offers highly scalable and flexible websites, making it a preferred choice for large and complex websites.
Some potential drawbacks of using Drupal include:
- Limited themes and plugins: Drupal has a library of limited modules. Hence, it cannot be used for customizable template-based websites.
- Higher development costs: Drupal offers complex websites, making it one of the costlier website-building options. The more development time and resources are required, the higher the costs will be.
Drupal is used to create websites for varying industry verticals, including:
- E-commerce websites
- Educational websites
- Government websites
- Non-profit websites
Some notable examples of websites built on Drupal include Tesla, Pfizer, Oxford University, New York State, Grammy, Qualcomm, The Economist, The Emmy Awards, the Australian Government, General Electric, and Pinterest.
Factors to Consider Before Making A Choice:
Ease of Use
Ease of use is one of the most significant factors to consider while selecting a website builder. Consider this facet to make an informed decision, as your website will function accordingly.
WordPress is a renowned, beginner-friendly platform. It is designed to make it easy for beginners with no coding knowledge. It has an intuitive dashboard that beginners of any skill level can use to tweak the site, add blog posts, install a plugin, change its settings, and more. WordPress simplifies the process with the help of its drag-and-drop editor to develop feature-filled pages from scratch.
Joomla has a feature-filled dashboard and more built-in flexibility features than WordPress. It allows users to configure settings in the background and modify banners, media, and blog posts, redirect, change SEO settings, and more without installing any additional plugins.
Drupal’s dashboard offers numerous options to overwhelm users. The dashboard lays out these options to add content, manage users, enable modules, and more. Drupal, in comparison to the other two, uses a difficult website development process, and unless you are an expert, you need to hire a web developer.
Most of the users complain about the complex and outdated dashboard in Drupal.
Community support and resources
WordPress offers many resources, including different themes and plugins and other support, due to its large and active community of developers, users, and contributors. This includes extensive documentation and tutorials, themes, and plugins.
On the contrary, Joomla also has a big community, though not as big as WordPress. However, Joomla offers many resources and support, including multiple forums, templates, and a library of extensions.
Moreover, Drupal also has a dedicated community, but not as significant as WordPress and Joomla. However, it has a highly skilled technical and knowledgeable user base, offering multiple resources and support systems with advanced customization and development benefits.
Custom themes, plugins, and third-party integrations
From WordPress to Joomla and Drupal, every website development platform or CMS offers plenty of customizable plugins and themes to enhance the functionalities of websites and make them scalable. Among the top three CMS platforms, WordPress is known for its massive library of hundreds of themes and plugins.
Joomla provides a good number of extensions and templates to website owners. Although this number may not be as good as WordPress’s, the extensions provided are more secure and reliable and are carefully vetted to meet different purposes of website building.
On the other hand, Drupal has a robust library of modules, similar to plugins in WordPress and extensions in Joomla. Though the choice is limited compared to the other two website development platforms, Drupal modules are considered to be of high quality and security.
All the above-mentioned website-building platforms support a wide range of integrations, such as marketing automation, social media platforms, and payment gateway tools.
When compared, WordPress scores over the other two due to its larger user base and more extensive plugin library.
Price
Price is an essential factor to consider when selecting a CMS. Choose the one that is within your budget and serves the purpose of meeting (or exceeding) your business expectations.
WordPress is open-source software and, hence, free to download. All you need to pay for is a domain name, a hosting service, and any premium plugins or themes you want to install.
A WordPress website may cost around $200, and managing it might cost, on average, $11 to $40 per month. However, if you are willing to customize your website with a WordPress website development agency, connect with the experts.
Joomla, like WordPress, is also an open-source platform; hence, you’ll have to pay for domain registration, hosting, themes, and maintenance to create and run a Joomla site.
In total, running a website on Joomla may cost you $700 to $6,500 on average.
Although Drupal is also an open-source CMS, the costs associated with building and managing a Drupal site are much higher than those of WordPress and Joomla.
You’ll likely need to hire a web developer or agency to build and design a Drupal site. Depending on the scale of the project, the cost of building a website ranges from $15,000 to $42,000.
WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal
If ease of use of the website matters the most to you, consider WordPress for its user-friendly interface. It is easy to access, even for beginners. However, it may not be as flexible and customizable as Joomla and Drupal.
If you are willing to strike a good balance between flexibility and ease of use, Joomla would be a good choice. It has more extensive customization options than WordPress.
Moreover, if you are planning to build something scalable and flexible, Drupal is the best of the three. However, it may be challenging to learn and use compared to the other two CMS platforms. In that case, you may hire web developer or an expert agency like TRooInbound to help you out. However, Drupal’s customization options and advanced features make it a better choice for building large-scale and complex web solutions.
Conclusion:
The choice of the best website builder depends on your business needs and goals. In a nutshell, if you are a beginner and willing to build an easy-to-use website, go with WordPress. It has hundreds of free themes and plugins to help you out. If you are eager to make an online community, you should prefer Joomla for its ease of handling hundreds of users on one platform. If you are about to build a site with complex data organization, choose Drupal.
If you are planning to hire a WordPress developer or Joomla web development service, call TRooInbound.
Related Articles
This post first appeared on Which Is The Best CMS Platform For Inbound Marketers?, please read the originial post: here
