Site design, information architecture, customer security, speed, mobile friendliness … there are dozens of moving pieces to an online business. However tightly integrated your business blog is to your core business processes, it is ultimately a separate entity. Blogs are run by separate and unique software that is not dependent on software that runs your business. Although it is often possible to run an entire web site (and many business processes) with WordPress, it’s also very straightforward to separate complex proprietary site software from a business blog. In fact, it is preferable from an operations standpoint to limit blog interaction with complex backend connections. The business blog should be seen as a communications channel and very rarely needs back office integration.

Content Management Systems, CMS Market Share

WordPress is an open source content management system written in PHP using MySQL. This platform reportedly powers up to 25% of all web sites according to W3 Techs. These numbers are astounding and are a testament to open source software offered free to the public. Anyone can download the code and install it at their own domain name if their host supports PHP and offers MySQL powered databases. — WebSite101

All business hosting supports PHP and offers mysql databases that will, between the two systems, allow you to run the self-hosted business blog within a folder on your own domain – which is preferable for SEO and the best site structure scenario. If you look at the URL structure of most sites running WordPress as their CMS you’ll see one of the following patterns:

  1. website.com/post-title/ (Optimal)
  2. website.com/blog/post-title/ (Good)
  3. blog.website.com/post-title/ (Acceptable)
  4. blog.website.com/2016/11/?postID (Weak)

The first two options above represent the best site structure and both are options for WordPress as content management for the entire site. Numbers #3 and #4 URL patterns are weaker for site structure, but sometimes required due to hosting or software limitations. Number 4 is weak for SEO and easily changed in WordPress settings – so avoid it if you are setting up a new blog or are using WordPress as your business CMS.

cms market share wordpress

Because WordPress is so powerful and offers amazing extensibility and plug-in tools interoperability – it is a strong option above any of the minor players above to run many business web sites. There exists an excellent ecosystem which allows developers to create business tools as plug-ins that are widely used by most web businesses and they’re available for free or very inexpensively sold to business users. It’s possible to easily gather leads, run email campaigns, measure web traffic, run shopping carts, and connect to payment processors – all within WordPress.

Design and Business Identity
Your front end designers are very likely to be familiar with how to customize the look and feel of WordPress. Commercially available design templates are widely available and extremely flexible due to the way the software works. Your business blog can look exactly like the rest of your site, even if they are run separately in the different structures shown in the list above. We’d love to show you how that is possible.