Choosing a CMS

Start with five questions

Feature comparisons rarely decide anything, because every mature CMS can do most things. These five questions do.

1. Who edits the content, and how technical are they? This is the single most useful question, and it is usually asked last. If marketing publishes weekly, editorial experience matters more than any technical consideration.

2. How structured is the content? Pages that stand alone, or records with relationships — products, courses, staff, locations, events? Structure is where systems genuinely differ.

3. What must it integrate with? Payment, CRM, ERP, HR, single sign-on. Integration is often the largest part of a build, and it is the part most often discovered late.

4. Who maintains it in three years? A large talent pool is a real advantage. It determines what happens when your developer moves on or you want to change supplier.

5. What does being wrong cost? Some choices are cheap to reverse. Replatforming a large store is not.

Where each system fits

Platform	Choose it when	Think again if
WordPress	Content changes often and non-developers own it; you want the widest pool of people who can maintain it	Your catalogue or pricing rules are genuinely complex
Joomla	You already run it and it works; multi-language and access control are core requirements	You are starting fresh with no constraint — hiring is harder
Drupal	Content is structured, workflow and permissions are requirements, the site is a portal	It is an ordinary marketing site; the structure will not pay for itself
Shopify	You want to sell without owning infrastructure; catalogue is conventional	You need deep checkout customisation or complex B2B pricing
Magento	Large catalogue, multiple storefronts, pricing rules a hosted platform cannot express	A standard catalogue would do — it costs far more to run
Moodle	Courses need assessment, grading and completion tracking	You only need to host and sell videos
Open edX	Large cohorts take structured courses simultaneously	Many small courses with varied assessment — Moodle is lighter

Three traps worth naming

Choosing for the launch, not the decade. The build is a few months. Running the site is the rest of its life, and that is where the cost lands.

Assuming more capable is better. A system that can express complex content models will also make you maintain that capability whether or not you use it.

Building custom because nothing fits perfectly. Nothing ever fits perfectly. A custom CMS is a permanent maintenance obligation and it shrinks the pool of people who can ever work on your site. It is occasionally right, and the burden of proof belongs with it.

If you are replatforming

The content usually moves cleanly. What does not move cleanly is content structure, integrations and URLs.

Those URLs matter more than most people expect: search rankings and inbound links attach to addresses, so a replatform that changes them without redirecting discards years of accumulated value. Treat the URL map as part of the project from the start.

We will tell you when the cheaper option is right

There is no version of this where recommending the largest platform is in your interest and not ours. If a straightforward build on a common platform meets your requirement, that is what we will say.