·¬ÇÑÉçÇø

Marketers and publishers are tasked with ensuring their brand’s image and messaging are consistent across all channels. This creates the need for a digital environment that supports streamlined output with no disruptions, ultimate flexibility for changing business needs, and customization for systems and processes to ensure everything runs smoothly—all while simultaneously appeasing both internal and external stakeholders. It’s simple, right?

Brightspot vs. WordPress VIP

Choosing the right CMS: WordPress VIP vs. Brightspot

By Alistair Wearmouth
October 15, 2024

With thousands of CMS options on the market, choosing the right CMS can be a daunting prospect. Here, we take a side-by-side look at Brightspot and WordPress VIP to help identify if Brightspot is the right CMS choice for your organization.

4 Min Read

We all know creating these digital environments is a tall order, so to help, organizations turn to content management systems (CMS) for the solution to their needs. There is a wide variety of popular website builder platforms that allow users to create blogs, news sites, corporate websites and intranets, and within those platforms are features and functionalities that support publishing workflows, content scheduling, website themes and much more.

Today, many rely on WordPress—a behemoth CMS solution that’s familiar in name and functionality. However, though WordPress currently has over 27 million , it’s not the best CMS choice for everyone—including many of those 27 million users.

The good and the bad of WordPress as your CMS solution

WordPress has built a diverse ecosystem of users because it has a number of attractive catch-all functionalities. The platform’s vast variety of designs, for example, gives users access to templates that dictate what a site could and will look like. If a user finds a template that exactly matches their vision, they’ll be off to the races.

WordPress is also considered easy to use, with an intuitive interface that’s well known by developers. The code behind the platform is clean and simple, which makes it effortless for search engines to read and index a site’s content.

Perhaps most significantly, WordPress is a free open-source solution that allows a degree of flexibility as to how you can customize out-of-the-box elements and the types of themes and plugins, free and paid, that you can incorporate to create your desired digital experience.

These benefits aside, WordPress has certain downfalls as well, and they shouldn’t be overlooked in the process of choosing a CMS partner:

• A complex dashboard: WordPress’s dashboard can be difficult to navigate for the simplest of tasks, and can become impossible to work through for more elaborate things. 
• Cumbersome plugins: With no development background, plugins are difficult to manage. For users, knowing what the best plugin is or if updating a plugin will break something on the site isn’t always straightforward—and, If and when something does break, development help is needed immediately. Too many plugins can also be detrimental to site performance, with slow site speed being a factor considered by Google and other search engines when it come to page rankings.
• Incomplete search functionality: The platform’s search capabilities are sub-par and often result in requiring the user to look things up manually.
• Tedious customization: While there are a wide variety of templates to choose from, customizing designs to match unique business needs can potentially result in laborious rework. 
• Lack of flexibility: Within WordPress templates, options are limited. This makes it difficult to move things around to customize the site, and can result in needing development assistance. If the templates don’t feature pre-built controls and settings, you will need some development experience to build the experience you really want or need on your website.

Seeking Wordpress alternatives for your CMS solution

Alternative CMS solutions exist that can be a better fit depending on your unique business needs and requirements. Organizations looking for a solution that grows as they grow should start looking at alternative solutions to Wordpress as their CMS—and they can do so with Brightspot. Here’s why:

• Ease of use: Brightspot CMS was built by editors for editors, designed to lessen the dependence on IT and allow for seamless publishing. Brightspot GO, for example, requires minimal reliance on development resources and has flexible workflows to support any publishing process. With the use of basic guides and a list of parameters, users can launch a new site in just a few days, and once the content is uploaded, they can simply decide how they want it to look. Users can also independently build sites based on comprehensive editorial guides to quickly become super users, and set up multiple sites in weeks instead of the months required with other CMS solutions.  
• Variety and customization: Brightspot has multiple themes that each have countless options for how content can look. This gives the user many different ways to customize a site without the need for IT help. Our unique data framework approach also allows for rapid iteration, with out-of-the-box components and content models relevant to more than 25 use cases. Additionally, customers can leverage any front-end model, meaning they can maintain their current look and feel, and use Brightspot as the back end only.
• Speed and agility: Through an integration-ready and migration-friendly approach, as well as a solution that acts as an extension of an existing business logic, businesses can adapt and scale fast to be able to connect with audiences where and when they want. The Brightspot platform is designed to grow with content businesses—it scales as you scale. And unlike WordPress, Brightspot offers a headless CMS, which provides flexibility for content management and fast, fluid content delivery to any front end.

Which CMS solution is right for you ultimately depends on your organization’s needs and long-term goals. Some businesses, like Televisa, have made the switch from WordPress to Brightspot to streamline their operations and achieve greater flexibility for their business needs. In 2017, Televisa moved from WordPress to Brightspot after working across nine disparate WordPress instances, which previously left them unable to publish in real time and created significant overhead. Now, with Brightspot, eight of Televisa’s websites are headless and can all be operated from one CMS.

Organizations across all industries are digitally transforming, including marketing and publishing companies—and to do so successfully, they need the right CMS that will meet their evolving needs. WordPress does some things well, and will work if you’re looking to manage a single site and design, but a one-size-fits-all platform won’t cut it anymore for everyone in today’s rapidly changing landscape. For businesses building to scale and for the future, they need one complete solution that is easy to use, customizable, fast and scalable.