Wordpress is the Orange Juice of Content Management Systems

Liza Rodrigues • Apr 30, 2020

What does the most common Content Management System (CMS) have to do with the most common breakfast beverage? Let me explain…

Did You Ever Wonder Why Orange Juice is the Breakfast Drink?

I heard a great podcast from ad-man Terry O’Reilly some time ago that stuck with me. It was all about how North America’s favourite breakfast drink became our favourite breakfast drink, all because of an ad campaign.

The largest advertising company in North America in 1908 was Lord & Thomas, who had a client California Fruit Growers Exchange. They had a large surplus of oranges which was causing prices to plummet. They needed to sell oranges, quickly, and to a much larger market than they had.

At the time oranges were only eaten as a fruit, by peeling and enjoying it in segments. It was not a fruit with which you could bake, which was how other fruits were marketed. So what other options were there? Well, Lord & Thomas put their best creative minds together and came up with a revolutionary campaign, with the headline “Drink an Orange”. This gave the market a brand new beverage, which was ideal for breakfast. The messaging for the campaign convinced the audience that not only was the juice delicious but it was recommended by physicians for its health benefits.

“ As an added incentive, [Lord & Thomas] actually hired a man to invent a juice extractor, and the print ads offered those glass juice extractors for just 10 cents a piece. It was an ingenious marketing idea. [Lord & Thomas] sold 3 million of them almost overnight.” - CBC.ca

women in 1900s working in factory to box oranges

What Does This Have To Do With Wordpress?

Wordpress is one of many Content Management Systems. It is not the most secure. It is not the most scalable. It is not the cheapest. It is not the fastest. It is not the most intuitive to use. It is not the most flexible.

So why is Wordpress the CMS of choice for more that 35% of all websites in the world?

In 2020, over 455 million websites use WordPress.com. That means that the WordPress market share is 35% of all websites in the world! This is an increase of 2% compared to 2019 and a 4% rise from the previous year. Also, over 20% of all self-hosted websites are currently using WordPress. - Creative Minds

(update 3 November 2021: WordPress now powers almost 43% of the web, with a total of 708 million websites. Source: Manaferra)

Because Wordpress was the first to offer tools to create websites with little to no programming knowledge, and for free, it exploded into the market. It soon became the CMS of choice because everyone’s friend’s brother’s child could “develop” a website for a few hundred dollars.

Here comes the orange juice…

Wordpress ambassadors (1) have marketed the platform as the best CMS with the following messaging:

It is relatively inexpensive to get developed
Wordpress developers (2) are readily available
It has a large online support community
Any feature or functionality is possible (3)
It is easy to manage content (4)
It is inexpensive to host a Wordpress Website

So, if you were asked: Which beverage is the best for breakfast?

Your likely response: Orange Juice.

Why?: That’s just how it is.

So, if you were asked: Which CMS is the best for your website?

Your likely response: Wordpress.

Why? That’s just how it is.

Is it though?

A CMS is a vital decision for your business and online presence. Each business is unique - in the way that you engage your customers, in your brand identity and messaging, in their culture, etc. This means that your technical and functional needs will also be unique.

In our experience, we have had many clients requesting a quote for a Wordpress website. After assessing their needs, we used a platform that was less expensive to develop and much easier for them to manage their own content and pages. We have also had situations where after assessing the client’s needs, it was clear that their business would outgrow a well-performing Wordpress website in a year or two, and would have had to reinvest in a more robust platform. And then of course there were clients that were perfectly suited for a Wordpress website.

My only conclusion here is: Don’t drink orange juice with your breakfast out of habit - find out what other options are available to you so that you can get the best out of your meal!

Annotations:

I use the term “ambassadors” for the many digital agencies, web development companies, and developers that have not really looked beyond Wordpress as CMS options. It is a choice often based on the development skills available to them rather than what is best for the requirements.
Wordpress offers tools to develop websites without programming knowledge. Therefore, it is an important step to vet a developer as an actual programmer or coder before hiring them to develop your Wordpress website.
Wordpress was initially created as a blogging platform. Therefore its core functionality includes “pages” and “posts”. Anything beyond that, including sliding banners, is an additional piece of software that is added to the Wordpress core software, known as “plugins”. This creates some risk to the website, as plugins are developed by different developers, and have version updates that are not coordinated. In addition, having many plugins can negatively impact the performance of the website.
This is a misconception. After having vetted many CMS platforms, I can confidently say that Wordpress is not near the top of the list when we sort based on ease-of-use. Wordpress is for those that are already familiar with it. Additionally, developers have different approaches to how they make content editable within Wordpress, so that can also make it challenging for editors.

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At Mawazo Marketing we work with owners of B2B companies who want to accelerate their business. We help them with a concrete digital growth plan, a website that saves operational cost, and a digital marketing system that generates leads. For qualifying clients we offer a 5x ROI guarantee: if we don't reach the objective, then we pay back the difference. Book a Free Strategy Session to find out more.

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