Top 6 CMS Website Editors for Small Businesses in 2020

When it comes to managing the content of your website, a CMS (Content Management System) is incredibly important. For small businesses that are constantly expanding, a CMS system is a necessity for updating information, changing your products and redefining your brand.

Additionally, the customizable aspects of a Content Management System have widespread appeal amongst small business owners due to the capital saved by not having to avail of a web developer for every small change to content.

In general, they are fairly user-friendly systems that enable you to easily, add delete or edit text and image for your small business.

Trying to evaluate the best CMS system for you can be tricky. With such a robust market, the options seem infinite. Since the primary goal is to just edit content, surely there aren’t that many differences between them all?

Depending on the type of small business you run, there are a few defining features that each CMS system has. Some might suit your business model more than others.

Let’s explore the benefits of the most popular available today.

WordPress

Pros

• Huge ecosystem of plugins available 
• Loads of built-in tools in the dashboard
• Great selection of themes

Cons

• Because WordPress is built in PHP, for technical problems, WordPress specialists are required. 
• Its plugins are extremely useful but can frequently conflict with a personalized setup
• Doesn’t use the latest of web technologies so themes and sites are prone to being slow
  • This can have a negative effect on SEO

As the most popular option available today, WordPress has been dominating the CMS market for well over a decade. Its mass adoption across the web has led to a substantial presence in the CMS market. And perhaps most importantly it’s free for any small business owner to use.

In order to access more themes, a business plan is also available, this costs around $25 a month. There is quite a variety of themes and designs here, including industries from retail to hospitality.

Additionally, with a multitude of host and self-hosted options, the majority of WordPress’s functionality is free and open-source so it is widely supported to use on any popular domain host.

With a huge ecosystem of plugins, WordPress can help with pretty much any requirement when it comes to a small business’s website.

Types of plugins include

• SEO
• Image resizing
• Database Backups
• Caching
• Analytics
• Social Media

Drupal

Pros

• Supported by a huge active community
• Open Source Software
• Security is valued highly in archicture
• Trivial to install social features
  • Forums
  • Profiles

Cons

• More complex than an average CMS
  • Some basic coding knowledge required
  • Advanced interface
• The wrong combination of 3rd party modules can slow performance

Another great option for a small business owner is Drupal. Drupal may lack the bells and whistles of the WordPress ecosystem but it specializes in being a pure CMS service.

With a very large and active community, Drupal has become a go-to option for many small business platforms. Their optional modules may suit some businesses more than others. In particular, Drupal sites are very easy to implement social features on.

Drupal is also well-known for its scalability and security which making it widely appealing to small business owners trying to get started without worrying about compromising user data.

Magnolia

Pros

• Strongly focused on security
  • Built using Java, Mangolia seeks to employ the latest in security measures
• Allows the use of headless CMS
• CMS can be tailored to specific industries
  • Ecommerce
  • Analytics
  • Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Retail
  • Finance

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Inconsistent documentation
• Versioning and collaboration features are somewhat lacking

A new player on the CMS scene, Magnolia finds itself attracting new small business owners. For many, the main attraction of a CMS is its ability to be set up easily and java-based Magnolia CMS is targetting small companies that need websites to meet all their business requirements.

Additionally, Magnolia offers the option of utilizing a headless CMS. This means that a small business owner can create their own custom frontend and use Magnolia as their backend data to populate their website.

And although this is an advanced feature, it is a fantastic flexible option for a business owner to expand down the line. The use of a headless CMS gives the freedom for a business owner to hire a developer to create a custom-designed web application instead of an ordinary website.

With security being at the core of the system, Magnolia employs a software architecture that separates a website’s public and private data elements.

Security is at the heart of the system, too, as it employs an architecture that separates your website’s public and private elements to help combat attacks. You can even define what users and admins are able to do, so you’ll always know who can write, edit, view and publish certain content. Prices are tailored to business needs.

If you are looking for more details on web applications and their functions have a look at this post here.

Bynder

• A huge range of collaboration tools
• Hugely specialized for marketing
• Focus on sharing-style guides amongst collaborators

Cons

• Tailored to one niche (Marketing)
• Expensive

• Styling colors
• Correct usage of assets i.e images

Bynder also provides well defined high-quality workflows. This ensures that all members of a brand’s content team are able to understand and follow each step of the marketing content’s lifecycle.

Bynder also features great versioning features. For example, within a branding organization its important that everyone uses the most updated versions of a logo. If this asset has recently changed Bynder ensures that the most up-to-date version of that assets is used for all content editors.

This will mitigate any potential mishaps where two versions of the same logo are being used in association with newly created content.

Don’t get me wrong, a service like Bynder is quite expensive and might not suit a small business owner. But its software will take the strain off any marketing budget. Additionally, its ability to create consistency within a brand’s content across multiple users has the potential to negate this cost from the time saved from rudimentary tasks.

Joomla

• Supports custom post types
• Innovative customization options
• Bilingual support out of box
  • This is particularly good for e-commerce sites
• High-quality expansive plugins/modules

As a staple in the CMS world, Joomla has provided great content management capabilities with its many configurable content options. It is thought of as a healthy choice for small businesses with content editing requirements.

However, this comes with some caveats. Joomla is not at user-friendly as something like WordPress. It has a steeper learning curve and will take longer to know how to work with it.

In terms of complexity, Joomla is often thought of as the middle ground between WordPress and Drupal. Offering a huge amount of customization, the design of Joomla sites hardly ever look alike. There are no cookie-cutter templates or repeated designs when compared to site builders such as Wix or Squarespace.

If your business goes beyond the scope of basic blogs or brochure sites, Joomla is often thought to be a very effective option for e-commerce due to the many e-commerce plugins available.

Its ecosystem boasts over 6000 extensions which cater to all kinds of use-cases for small businesses. While it’s not as expansive as the WordPress plugin ecosystem, the extensions available are filtered out to cut out poor quality options that often don’t work.

Essentially, Joomla cuts out this filler and places emphasis on the quality of the extensions available to its users. Its many e-commerce extensions allow for a wide range of store functionalities including shopping carts, security layers, backups as well as protection from malicious scripts and injections, protecting from users having their data compromised.

Joomla has built-in secure layers that protect against security threats. With CSRF protection to preventing other known vulnerabilities, Joomla is secure. Security extensions like Admin Tools and backup extensions like Akeeba Backup make it even more secure. These extensions allow you to add an additional security barrier in the form of captchas, protection from SQL injections, XSS attacks and more. Your customers’ data is safe with Joomla.

It is very similar to Drupal being a complete CMS and might be a little more for a simple portfolio site. It comes with a good administration interface, complete with nice drop-down menus and other attributes.

Joomla hosts above 3,200 extensions, so you could know the developer community behind the popular CMS is alive and active. But, Joomla theme and extension community relies on paid resources, so if you’re thinking about customizations, be ready with your wallet.

Wix

Pros

• Accessible website builder and content editor
  • Intuitive drag and drop system
• Great support for email marketing and general e-commerce
• Wix Turbo allows for much faster websites
• Reasonably Priced

Cons

• Recycled pre-built themes (lack of originality)
• The starter plan doesn’t remove ads from your site
• SEO helper tools lack some modern practices

As one of the most renowned cloud-based website builders available today, Wix continues to offer an accessible website building experience as well as a high-quality built-in CMS system.

It has plenty of designs and tools that cover a wide range of small business markets. This plays into the hands of a prospective small business owner, not only can you manage content but you can also build the website yourself.

Of course, this had both pros and cons. While it is great to be able to utilize a web creation tool to launch your business, it also takes time away from creating and publishing relevant content about your business.

Additionally, a lot of the themes that are available to use lack originality. These themes have been already applied by many business owners from a wide range of industries. As a result, the use of a Wix theme can make it more difficult for your website to stand out.

Wix have also introduced ADO (Artificial Design Intelligence) where the AI can build an entire website based on some criteria you specify. This is very much a handheld process and might limit the creative desires of a small business.

Some of the themes include:

• Restaurants
• Designers
• Portfolios
• Hospitality
• Musicians
• Ecommerce

Conclusion

From this list, we can see that there are now more options than ever for a small business owner to edit their content. Each CMS platform offers something uniques and different.

It is evident that a large number of market niches are catered for here. Interestingly, platforms are starting to cater to specific markets and their content managing requirements.

Platforms like Bynder are really highlighting how marketers need a certain type of CMS system in order to keep consistency within their brand’s content. Looking forward, I’d imagine other platforms will target specific niches just like this.