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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 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 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.

The vast number of available WordPress Plugins

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

WordPress performance highly dependent on managed services, theme, and plugin code quality.

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

WordPress Integrations

Pros

  • WordPress supports a REST API​
  • The WordPress API allows more customization of the block editor

Cons

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 vulnerabilities are common, almost daily.

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

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

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.

2 Comments

  • Joe Mayberry says:

    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.

    • postjoe says:

      Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately too frequently we see the comparison in RFPs including those run by professional consultants.