Today content management systems (CMS) are becoming more widely known to the general public and not just to the people who spend their days playing with code like us. More often then not when I first speak with a potential client they often say things like "I heard I should have a WordPress site" or "my sister made her website using WordPress she said it was easy." My answer if often thats great WordPress is a very widely known and used CMS platform now days but what do you want your website to do? What are your business goals? Rarely do I get the answer back "I just want my website to be a blog about my dog and his daily activities." And if that is your answer then yes WordPress probably is a great fit for your website needs! However more often clients say to me I need a website that speaks to who we are as a company, I need a website that provides resources to my clients, I need a website that engages my customers and gets them to sign up for our services. And with that we get down to it if you take nothing else from this rambling of mine take this away:

WordPress was built as blogging tool. MODX was built as a pure CMS.

Website Design in MODX vs. WordPress

With Wordpress everything is reliant on templates built-in or from third parties. This can be great if your a DIYer and just want to pick something that looks good to you and get going. However thats not we do here at Three Eyed Bird we want to give you a custom website that truly fits who your company is and doesn't feel like a recycled theme. Can you do that in Wordpress? Sure you certainly can and we have seen very successful examples of that however customizing the layout for a WordPress website takes extra work as you have to circumvent many of the built-in restrictions. This can be a very time consuming and frustrating adventure for the developer depending on the quality of the template and documentation that was chosen. With MODX being less reliant on pre-built templates there is greater flexibility for what we can build with the same amount of time.

Back-end Management in MODX vs WordPress

Once your website is built you are going to need to update content right? Using MODX we are able to easily customize the way you as a client maintain your websites content. We are able to build a workflow for you that makes sense for your company. Do you have a certain group of employees that need editing access to only 5 pages of the website? We can do that! Do you want to have a photo gallery that is featured on certain pages but not others? Not a problem. Do you want to have the same blurb of content on all the pages in a only certain section? No big deal we can handle that. Seeing a theme here? MODX is very powerful and allows us to build an intuitive back-end interface for maintaining the content of your website. With WordPress originally being built for blogging the backend manager doesn't feel as intuitive. It was designed for the purpose of posting new blog articles and overtime it has added other CMS features. However accessing them isn't always as logical as it could be in our opinion.

Speed & Security MODX vs. WordPress

Lets talk about page load. Page load is important because it is a factor that Google and other search engines rank your site on for SEO. Out-of-the-box MODX has pretty good speed optimization and offers caching by default. Wordpress out-of-the-box is pretty bloated and depending on the amount of plug-ins you are using gets even more bloated slowing down your page load. Optimization can be done to both platforms improving speed however in our experience MODX just runs faster.

Over the years we have also found that MODX is a more secure platform and generally has less security breaches then WordPress sites. Every platform has occasional security hiccups and nothing is without flaws. However, with popularity of WordPress and its large library of themes & plug-ins of varying quality we have seen that there is a bigger risk of security vulnerabilities.

To Sum It All Up

MODX vs Wordpress - everyone has their own opinion on what the best CMS out there is. Now we're not going to say the WordPress is terrible and no one should be building on it but what we are going to say is we choose to build on MODX. And here's why: it allows us to build a website that truly fits our clients and their needs. We can build whatever we want! The sky is the limit and thats not such a bad thing.