Best CMS For 2023

If you want to start your own website in 2023, there are many easy ways to do so with the help of one of these CMS, or content management systems.

You must make an important decision when choosing a CMS. In this article, I will list the best CMS, from which you can choose the one that best suits your needs. To choose the best content management system for your website, you must first determine your needs and understand what you can easily manage.

How to select CMS for your website?

Choosing the right CMS is a critical decision. If you choose the incorrect one, switching is difficult and may harm the website’s search engine ranking. So, I recommend that you read these guidelines before proceeding to CMS discussions.

What is the purpose of your website?

Before you begin creating a website, take some time to consider the purpose or nature of your website. Many times, people choose CMS that is not designed for the type of website they intend to build.

I was in this situation when I chose Weebly for my first blog in 2011. I found it simple to create a blog with Weebly at the time, but I later regretted my decision. I’ll get into it later in this article.

Know the difference between Hosted website and self-hosted website

The CMSs I’ll be mentioning are both hosted and self-hosted. It is critical to understand both types and what works best for your website.

Hosted CMS

A hosted CMS is one that does not require you to host it. Simply sign up for the service, subscribe to their free/premium plan, and begin building your website right away.

I suggest you should use a hosted CMS only if you know nothing about web hosting, cannot afford to pay a web developer to maintain a self-hosted CMS, and simply do not require the extensive functionality that a self-hosted CMS provides.

Self-Hosted CMS

Self-hosted CMS, on the other hand, necessitates the purchase of your own hosting as well as the installation of the CMS. You must maintain your server, and if a server upgrade is required, you can contact your hosting provider and upgrade your server.

The functionality of hosted services is limited. If you require a function that CMS does not support, your only option is to wait for the company to develop that feature for you. Self-hosted CMS, on the other hand, offers thousands of plugins. If your CMS lacks a specific feature, you can simply install a free or premium plugin.

Support

Last but not least is the support. Before you choose a CMS, ensure that its company or community provides adequate support. Assume your website is down and you are unable to understand the error; in this case, the support team or forum will assist you in resolving the issue.

In this case, the self-hosted CMS comes out on top. Most self-hosted CMS have large community-managed forums where you can post your questions and, in most cases, get immediate responses.

Whereas hosted CMS managed by companies have a limited number of people to assist, you must either create a ticket for support and wait at least 24 hours for a response. Remember that if you submit your support ticket on Friday, you will most likely receive a response on Monday. Though some self-hosted CMS have forums, there are only a few people to help, so getting a response can take some time.

So, these are a few pointers to consider before deciding on a CMS. Let us now look at some of the most popular CMS in 2023.

Best CMS for 2023

WordPress

The first on our list is WordPress. It is the most widely used free and open-source content management system. WordPress powers over 60 million websites, making it the best platform for any type of website. It has a total market share of 34%, which means that 34% of all websites on the Internet use WordPress.

You can easily customize the look and feel of your WordPress website by selecting themes from the Theme page. WordPress has a ‘Themes’ page where you can find thousands of free and premium themes. Because WordPress is an open-source CMS, there are a plethora of premium themes available for any type of websites, such as a blog, an e-commerce website, and a variety of other categories.

Envato Market is one of the largest marketplaces for WordPress premium themes. You can look through the Envato WordPress category to find hundreds of premium WordPress themes for blogs, shopping sites, and single-page websites, among other things.

It is not difficult to set up WordPress. A new user may need half an hour to configure WordPress on a dedicated server or 5 minutes on a Cpanel-based hosting account. On LinuxAndUbuntu, I have covered WordPress in detail. Please follow WordPress 101 series to learn WordPress.

WordPress has the best customer service. The WordPress forum contains a large database of WordPress-related errors and solutions. Whatever error you are experiencing, there are numerous articles and user-posted solutions available in the WordPress forum.

For some who can’t use self-hosted WordPress, there is also WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress platform from WordPress.

Joomla

Joomla is yet another well-known free and open-source content management system. It is not as simple as WordPress, but it is superior to other platforms in terms of usability, support, and capabilities.

Joomla powers about 2.8 percent of all websites on the internet. It is the world’s second-largest CMS.

Joomla, like WordPress, can be easily hosted on your server. You can install Joomla with a single click from most cPanels, or you can download Joomla archive from the official website and manually install it on your server. I intend to write a step-by-step tutorial for installing Joomla on a server. I’m hoping to have it published soon.

As previously stated, Joomla is not as simple to use as WordPress. You will need to spend some time getting used to it.

Joomla does not have a theme directory for customizing the look and feel of your website. As a result, you will heavily rely on third-party theme developers. Joomla themes can be purchased from the Envato market. On Envato, they have a large collection of Joomla themes.

What if Joomla’s default features run out for you? Joomla, on the other hand, supports free and premium plugins that you can install to get the features you want. You can find a plugin by browsing their plugin directory. At the time of writing, Joomla plugin directory contained over 5,934 plugins.

What if you encounter a problem while using Joomla? Joomla has a forum where thousands of issues have been discussed and resolved. The solution to your problem has most likely already been posted. Joomla also has well-written documentation, which can be found at docs.joomla.org.

Drupal

Having been released in 2001, Drupal is older than WordPress. Drupal is used on 1.3 percent of all websites, accounting for a 2 percent market share in the content management system market. The CMS is not popular among ordinary users such as bloggers and eCommerce website owners, but rather with the government and its agencies, large organizations, and other security-conscious individuals.

Drupal is well-known for its adaptability when it comes to creating custom post types such as polls, videos, and so on. Choosing Drupal necessitates a little more knowledge and money for its upkeep and scalability. If you have both, Drupal can be customized and scaled to meet the needs of the user. It is safe to say that after a slew of major updates in recent years, Drupal’s user interface has seen significant improvements, but not enough to compete with WordPress’s interface. It is still in need of a good editor, and the overall design could be improved to make it more user-friendly for new users.

I recently covered Drupal in depth in this article, where I discussed the primary functions, strengths, and downsides of Drupal.

Some notable Drupal features include the ability to create new roles, multilingual support by default in Drupal 8 and higher, and thousands of Drupal plugins (modules). At the time of writing this article, Drupal’s repository contained over 48000 modules.

Squarespace

With self-hosted CMS comes a lot of responsibility. Everything from the website hosting to implementing a proper firewall for security must be taken care of. With Squarespace, you can delegate all responsibilities to the company. Squarespace provides website hosting with unlimited storage and bandwidth, SSL security, SEO features, templates ranging from blogs to eCommerce stores, and extensions.

It is designed for users who want to focus on their business rather than tinker with their websites for gaining more control on their website. The basic plan starts at $16/month and includes almost everything that a beginner would need. A business plan is available for more business-focused features, and two eCommerce plans are available for $26 and $40 per month.

When it comes to hosted platforms, you look to the company whenever you need a feature that isn’t available. There isn’t much you can do to develop the feature without interfering with the site’s current functionality. So, that is the limitation of any hosted platform. It’s fine as long as you don’t want something that doesn’t exist, which is impossible in the long run. Please see my article Migrating from Weebly to WordPress for more information.

Shopify

Shopify, as the name implies, is intended to create online stores. It is a one-stop shop for all of your eCommerce website needs. Starting an eCommerce store with Shopify is as simple as creating a social media account.

The benefit of using Shopify is that it is well-known and optimised for running eCommerce sites. Users get practically all of the capabilities that an online store should have, such as adding an SSL certificate, abandoned cart recovery, marketing automation, unlimited contacts, Ecommerce automation, staff account management, and so on.

Shopify now features approximately 70 website layouts. However, more Shopify themes can be found on marketplaces such as ThemeForest.

There is also an app store where you can add or personalise your Shopify site with new features or integrations. The Shopify app store provides apps in a wide range of categories, including store design, shipping & delivery, marketing, and so on.

Shopify is not a free service. They do, however, provide a 14-day free trial after which users can subscribe to one of their three plans starting at $29/month.

Wix

I personally tried Wix for a brief period of time when I started blogging. Wix is known for its easy-to-use drag-n-drop builder. It can be used to create a single page website, blog, and an eCommerce site.

Wix is an outstanding candidate for our list because their website templates span from Blog, beauty, business, online store, photography, and so on. You may create online stores, blogs, restaurant websites, and more with over 800 customizable website templates to select from.

There is an App store where you may add more functionality to your Wix sites. Apps can also be used to integrate third-party services.

Wix is also less expensive than many other shared hosting providers on the market. They feature distinct plans for general sites such as portfolios and blogs, as well as business sites such as ecommerce sites.

Conclusion

So these are my top CMS picks for 2023. I’m sure there are many more, but listing them all would be impossible. Many more popular content management systems are still available to me. For example, I’ve heard that Ghost is a good one, but I’ve never used it.

I’ll keep this list up to date by adding more CMS. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.

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