When evaluating an enterprise content management system or CMS, there are several factors to consider. Let’s get started by defining the category. When considering if WordPress or Optimizely is the right fit for your enterprise site, here are the critical areas to evaluate.
What is an enterprise website?
In our opinion, a critical factor in defining “enterprise” is scale. Enterprise websites are typically extensive sites with thousands of pieces of content. Scale also includes the sheer number of visitors. It is common for an enterprise website to have millions of pages monthly. The number of CMS users is also a key factor for enterprise sites. For an enterprise site, marketing, information technology, and business users are all actively working in the CMS. In other words, enterprise websites require that permissions, privileges, and user administration are built-in. Securing content and access to specific areas of the website, in addition to controlling publishing workflows, are essential to managing an enterprise website. It’s typical for an enterprise website to be the most critical marketing channel in the business’s portfolio. Given the significant investment and high stakes, data security is also a key factor. Enterprise sites need to mitigate risk and manage security concerns responsibly.
Enterprise Websites Scale:
- Thousands of pieces of content
- Millions of Sessions Monthly
- Workflow Governance
- Access Levels for Larger Teams
- Manage Risk and Data Security
Feature Comparison of WordPress vs Optimizely
Optimizely Features
CMS Features
- Intuitive content editing
- Approvals and workflows
- Visual page and site creation
- Versioning
- Scheduled publishing
- Enterprise search
- Digital asset management
- Targeted content
Personalization
- AI personalization
- Intelligent content
- Real-time optimization
- Behavioral content
- Smart segmentation
- Recommendations and rankings
Marketing Features
- A/B testing
- SEO
- Channel optimization
- Analytics integration
- Advanced analytics (Insight)
- Social channel distribution
- Reporting
- Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Could Platform
- Cloud hosting
- Elastic scaling
- Web application firewall
- Content delivery network
- Vulnerability management
- DDOS Mitigation
- Database monitoring and backups
- TLS/SSL
- IPv6
- HTTP/2
- Websockets
WordPress Features
CMS Features
- Intuitive content editing
Approvals and workflows- Visual page and site creation
- Versioning
- Scheduled publishing
Enterprise search- Digital asset management
Targeted content
Personalization
AI personalizationIntelligent contentReal-time optimizationBehavioral contentSmart segmentationRecommendations and rankings
Marketing Features
A/B testing- SEO
Channel optimizationAnalytics integrationAdvanced analytics (Insight)Social channel distributionReportingCustomer Data Platform (CDP)
Could Platform
Cloud hostingElastic scalingWeb application firewallContent delivery networkVulnerability managementDDOS MitigationDatabase monitoring and backupsTLS/SSLIPv6HTTP/2Websockets
WordPress is a great CMS for small websites with few users. A quick feature comparison illustrates the disparity between an enterprise solution like Optimizely and WordPress. WordPress is not designed for enterprise. That said, market confusion often starts with the false comparison of WordPress managed hosting providers like WordPress VIP and WP Engine. WordPress managed hosting supplements the CMS and supplements much-needed features to close the gap. There are many other factors to consider.
WordPress Plugins
Pros of WordPress Plugins
- Large library of plugins
- Easy to install
Cons of WordPress Plugins
- Heavy reliance on plugins to add needed enterprise features
- Daily updates required to patch security flaws
- Reliance on unpredictable 3rd party plugin developers
- Causes site code bloat
- Plugins slow sites down
- Difficult to govern the addition of new functionality via plugins
- Plugins are not platform “baseline,” and there’s a big difference in coding best practices compared to an enterprise where plugins are built into the codebase regularly updated, documented, and supported
WordPress Site Performance
Pros
- WordPress VIP will assist with common site performance challenges including server-side caching but recall that WordPress VIP is managed services and not baseline functionality of the CMS.
Cons
- Site speed is heavily dependent on the quality of code and theming best practices
- With a vast number of WordPress developers, code quality is a crapshoot
- WordPress databases are slow and often bloated by plugins
WordPress Site Localization
Pros
- WordPress Core supports multilingual within the CMS but not for the end-user.
- Plugins and services available like TranslatePress, WPML, Polylang
Cons
- Multilingual support is not out-of-box and would require a 3rd party plugins and services and code updates.
- Creating a globalized site with localization would require custom code and additional plugins for most websites.
WordPress Site Maintenance
Pros
- WordPress managed services may assist with common site update challenges like creating backups before updates are applied
- Backups and recovery provided by managed services providers
Cons
- Vulnerabilities in Guttenberg Editor
- WordPress Core and WordPress Themes and Plugins require almost daily maintenance
- WordPress Updates can break site (see WordPress 5.7.2 patches a critical vulnerability)
- 3rd Party Plugins always lag Core updates and require constant monitoring, patching, and regression testing
- WordPress plugins are common threat vectors including highly utilized plugins (see AutoOptimize plugin security issues)
- Expect unexpected updates due to security concerns
- Expect to find that a key plugin is no longer supported by its author
WordPress Integrations
Pros
- WordPress supports a REST API
- The WordPress API allows more customization of the block editor
Cons
- WordPress is not known for its API or integrations front end developers often complain about the difficulty in working with the WordPress API
- The WordPress API has had several major API security issues since its introduction
WordPress Developer Community
Pros
- WordPress CMS based sites are 30% of the internet
- There’s a huge community of developers working with WordPress
- A large unvetted community of contributors means it is easy to find a WordPress developer
Cons
- There are very few WordPress VIP level developers in the USA
- Code standards and best practices effectively don’t exist due to the vast number of developers in the community and heavy reliance on 3rd parties for plugins
- Size of community makes vetting a developer difficult
- Free is NOT always better. Heavy reliance on free plugins means support can be dropped or business models change unexpectedly. For example for freemium to premium as in the case of WP Rocket.
WordPress Security
Pros
- 🙁
- WordPress managed services providers assist with common site challenges like keeping plugins and WordPress core up-to-date
- Additional services are available for malware removal
Cons
- Keeping data secure is a major concern with WordPress
- Vulnerabilities in WordPress Core and popular plugins are exposed daily
- Enterprise website security is not included
- Hardening WordPress against attack can limit the functionality and ease of use of the CMS
- Threat vectors include WordPress Core, Themes, Plugins, and Hosting
- WordPress Core Vulnerabilities Jan 7, 2022
WordPress Multivariate Testing, Machine Learning, Experimentation
Pros
- 🙁
Cons
- No WordPress Core functionality for AB Testing or Multivariate testing
- Machine Learning and AI is not included in WordPress CMS
- Where Optimizely includes built-in tools for AB testing, experimentation, and personalization WordPress does not
Search & Navigation
Pros
- WordPress CMS search is built on Elastic Search and generally very functional for a content only website
Cons
- No CMS access to optimize or control search results
- No search results for commerce
- No Enterprise/Federated Search capabilities
- No search analytics
- Dealer search, directories, find-a functionality, and where-to-buy would be a very custom implementation in WordPress
- No dynamic navigation functionality
- No boosting, best bets, autocomplete, or synonyms
- Optimizely search and navigation is far more powerful
Plugin UX 
Variable UX in Plugins 
Difficult to use plugin UX
CMS User Experience
Pros
- WordPress CMS is user friendly before customizations
- WordPress Guttenberg editor is great for blogs and basic text-based contentt
Cons
- With heavy reliance on 3rd Party plugins to extend functionality to meet enterprise leads to many varying user experiences within the CMS, sometimes complicated UX depends on the plugins used.
- Expect a high learning curve for each plugin added
- The Guttenberg editor is now the default editor in WordPress and very limited compared to a page builder or visual editor approach included in most Enterprise DXPs
- The usability of the Guttenberg editor is widely critiqued for its difficulty of use
- The CMS editor is not designed for access control or editor privilege customization
WordPress Ecommerce Capabilities
Pros
- 🙁
Cons
- WordPress Core does not ANY include e-commerce capabilities
- Plugins like WooCommerce are designed for small business NOT enterprise
- Enterprise commerce capabilities would require a different platform unlike Optimizely where Content and Commerce are married WordPress has no such capabilities
WordPress CMS is not an enterprise CMS. If you are considering WordPress for an enterprise website be sure to ask your web development partner about the above considerations. Getting the WordPress CMS up to the Optimizely standard would take considerable investment and a high-risk tolerance. If you are truly seeking an enterprise CMS consider your needs against out-of-box features. Keep in mind managed services are not a substitute for a fully-featured enterprise CMS.
Great post. I would never have considered a side-by-side comparison of Worpress and Optimizely, but I can understand that many organizations will. To me, they are not in the same, since as you pro-con list clearly indicated, WordPress, while a great product, is not an enterprise level CMS.
Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately too frequently we see the comparison in RFPs including those run by professional consultants.