WordPress vs Sitecore: Business, scalability, and operational considerations

When you think about a CMS, you think mainly in terms of creating, managing, and delivering content. That’s what content management systems facilitate, after all. 

But, when you choose a CMS, you want to ensure your CMS doesn’t just help with content creation, management, and delivery, but also with your business goals that tie directly to your content channel.

So it’s essential to evaluate how the CMSs you’re considering align with your business goals. 

In addition to seeing if a CMS aligns with your business goals, it’s also important to see if it can accommodate your growth. Unless a CMS can potentially catch up with your 5-year growth plan, you might want to reconsider. Essentially, you’re looking at scalability here. This can include support for integrations, architectural flexibility, and performance, among other things.

Finally, in addition to business and scalability considerations, you also need to look at operational considerations when choosing a CMS, because these tie directly to your CMS (and your content channel) ROI. Here, you’re looking at many things, from how easy a solution is to accessible support options.

Let’s examine how these aspects work for both the CMSs.

Alignment with business goals

Here’s zooming in on the top business goals a CMS contributes to and evaluate how Sitecore measures up against WordPress for each.

Hitting a certain content velocity for supporting sales enablement. Many factors come into play here. From the ease of creating content and support for custom editorial/publishing workflows to support for reusable content formats and lower reliance on IT, you need to look at many things. In general, we can say that both Sitecore’s XM Cloud CMS and WordPress offer solid support for maintaining a high content velocity. Note that earlier versions of Sitecore’s editors were not particularly user-friendly in this area.

Supporting organic growth (via SEO!). Here, you’re mainly looking for 1) out-of-the-box support for SEO, 2) support for optimizations via plugins or third-party solutions, and 3) general technical platform optimization.

With Sitecore’s SXA, you can easily add SEO metadata to your content. This metadata includes your page’s SEO title, keywords, and description. You also get tools for SEO factors like sitemaps and URL redirects.

With WordPress, on the other hand, you can enhance your search visibility beyond the platform’s default SEO features by adding a plugin like Yoast to your setup. Websites that want to unlock growth through the search channel know the WordPress+Yoast combination to work.

Also, both platforms support schema via third-party solutions. It’s considerably easier to get started with schema on WordPress (simply because WordPress is simpler overall).

Enabling support for global expansion. Both Sitecore XM Cloud and WordPress VIP offer multisite and multilingual capabilities and also offer personalizations based on geo-targeting.

Facilitating omnichannel strategies. Sitecore is a headless-first CMS built to help you orchestrate enterprise-grade multichannel content campaigns. You can realize similar capabilities with a WordPress headless setup too.

Beyond these, your business goals may also look like maintaining regulatory compliance, boosting customer engagement and satisfaction, and securing long-term savings in content operations, among others. 

Consider how both Sitecore and WordPress align with your specific goals to determine which platform can best support them.

Scalability considerations

Integrations

When it comes to scalability with respect to integrations, WordPress is the clear winner. You’d only opt for Sitecore if you want a fully unified digital experience stack that includes your CMS and other solutions from a single vendor.  

Your CMS should seamlessly integrate with your entire digital experience tech stack—meaning you’ll need to consider many integrations as your business grows.

With Sitecore, it may seem like you’re getting a complete digital experience stack directly from the platform, but that’s not entirely the case. 

For instance, even if Sitecore covers many aspects of your digital strategy, you’ll still need to tap some best-in-class third-party solutions such as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the rest. 

Additionally, Sitecore’s ecosystem can lead to vendor lock-in. This means that once you start building your digital experience stack around the Sitecore CMS, you may default to using its proprietary tools for all your needs instead of exploring third-party solutions that may offer comparable value at a lower cost.

In other words, “all-in-one” often falls short of being truly comprehensive. Being locked into a closed solution suite can also limit your ability to make cost-effective decisions.

These problems can only compound as the need for additional third-party integrations with your CMS only increases as your business scales.

This is exactly where WordPress shines. Unlike Sitecore, WordPress is built with a vendor-neutral business model, allowing you to select the best-of-breed solutions for all your digital experience needs. 

WordPress integrates with virtually anything, giving you complete freedom to (eventually) build an experience stack customized to your requirements.

Here’s what this means for your business:

• Full control over building your digital experience stack.
• Cost savings through using more affordable solutions where they fit.
• Flexibility to further customize your tech stack, including the option to switch tools as needed without being tied to a single vendor.

Performance

Sitecore Cloud XM has a cloud-native architecture deployed on Microsoft Azure. 

As a result, Sitecore Cloud XM’s content delivery is powered by the scalability, performance, and reliability that you can expect from Microsoft Azure, including the ability to auto-scale based on demand and leverage Azure’s global network for fast, secure content delivery. 

Sitecore’s Edge delivery layer also ensures lightning-fast content delivery to all intended channels. 

That said, frontend or “head” optimizations are equally important in maximizing performance, as you’re working with a headless architecture with Sitecore Cloud XM.

WordPress VIP, on the other hand, is hosted on Automattic’s infrastructure, which is optimized for WordPress environments.

With WordPress VIP, you get performance optimization tools like adaptive caching, auto-scaling servers, object caching, and edge caching, among others. These features help WordPress VIP handle enterprise-level traffic and deliver content at lightning-fast speeds. Third-party CDN solutions can further optimize content delivery—enabling a scalable, resilient infrastructure that meets the demands of global enterprises.

There’s one more performance consideration in headless implementations: Frontend hosting

Sitecore XM Cloud doesn’t ship with a default frontend. Even WordPress, when used in a headless setup, doesn’t offer a default frontend. In headless configurations, WordPress serves as a backend-only content management system (CMS). In these cases, you need a third-party frontend hosting solution. This third-party hosting solution hosts your frontend(s). 

Both the CMS solutions support several frontend hosting solutions for hosting your frontend. Vercel is the most popular choice for hosting Next.js-powered frontends. Netlify is popular with JAMstack frontends. Then there are AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. 

The downside, with both, though, is that you’re dealing with two hosting providers, two codebases, and multiple interfaces. And of course, frontend hosting adds toward your TCO too (for both Sitecore and WordPress).

As far as scalability is concerned, a lot of your headless CMS implementation’s scalability depends on your frontend hosting too. So they’re another thing to factor in for both Sitecore and WordPress in headless architectures.

Futureproofing your CMS choice

A CMS sits at the heart of your sales and marketing cycles, and so you want to use one that stays with you for a foreseeable future.

The best way to do this is to choose a CMS that doesn’t just support you right now but can also do so for a solid few years.

For example, if you’ve seen how Sitecore’s solutions work, maybe, today, you’ll be happy to go with Sitecore XM Cloud. If you’d recall, Sitecore XM Cloud is basically Sitecore’s CMS solution. Let’s say it meets or exceeds all your content creation, management, and delivery needs for now.

But that can also become a problem when you become ready to add layers of personalization, marketing automation, customer analytics, and more to your Sitecore ecosystem—because Sitecore XM Cloud only deals with content management. It’s basically a SaaS CMS.

Let’s talk about personalizations for this example. So if you wanted to add personalizations to your Sitecore setup and you have Sitecore XM Cloud, you’d need to purchase Sitecore’s Personalize solution and integrate it with your Sitecore XM Cloud instance. Generally, with such solutions, you tend to go with native services over picking the more comparable and cost-effective third-party options.

Alternatively, you might have to consider upgrading to Sitecore’s Experience Platform (XP) as Personalize is one of the many components that form Sitecore’s digital experience platform. Naturally, the more components you choose to compose your experience stack, the bigger your annual contract will be. Not to forget the additional costs that come from further customization, integration, and support of the solutions you add.

If you do choose to go with a third-party personalization solution, you might have limited choices. Also, you’ll need developers who know Sitecore to do it. And you already know that while Sitecore has a good developer community, Sitecore development resources can be pricey.

Now, compare this to WordPress.

With WordPress, you can achieve a good degree of personalization with simple plugins. For more, you can use any third-party personalization solutions. Because WordPress is such a huge CMS, all top personalization vendors offer integrations with it. You can also find high-quality WordPress development services to do the integrations for you, without using your entire month’s marketing budget.

In other words, with WordPress, even if you start with a basic CMS setup, you can build upon it as needs arise.

Operational considerations

Ease of use

The best way to evaluate Sitecore XM Cloud and WordPress for their ease of use for the real end users–content creators–is to use them side by side.

While both WordPress and Sitecore XM Cloud offer block-based writing experience to content teams. We may be a little biased here, but there’s just something about the WordPress editor that’s better! It’s designed to be as straightforward as possible, allowing content creators to focus on what they do best: creating content.

That said, even Sitecore is just as intuitive with the Pages editor built into Sitecore XM Cloud. 

For technical teams, the differences are more pronounced. Sitecore, with its highly customizable and enterprise-grade capabilities, often requires specialized training for IT, maintenance, and support. Enterprise-level deployments of Sitecore typically involve a steeper learning curve for developers and administrators.

WordPress, on the other hand, even with enterprise-level configurations like those for WordPress VIP, doesn’t sacrifice simplicity. It remains accessible, with a vast support ecosystem, extensive documentation, and a development community that ensures your technical team can manage, maintain, and scale the platform.

Beyond content creators and developers, there are site admins too who manage and maintain the CMS. There’s always some level of ongoing work on the CMS, whether it’s managing permissions, updates, or general site upkeep. With WordPress, this process is typically straightforward—an hour of training can often be enough to get admins up to speed. However, with Sitecore, the complexity of the platform means that even admin tasks require more in-depth, formal training to ensure proper site management.

Overheads that both CMSs add to routine content processes

We’ve already discussed the reliance on IT teams for daily operations like publishing and updating content. However, beyond this too, a CMS can introduce additional overhead to your routine business processes.

Take content governance, for instance.

Simply put, content governance is all about ensuring that you create, manage, publish, distribute, and maintain your content according to your business’s set strategies, policies, and processes. From enforcing a style guide and codifying multiple stages of reviews to automated quality checks for adherence to these, a CMS can do a lot here. 

Let’s look at the key areas for content governance and how Sitecore XM Cloud and WordPress compare.

• Roles and permissions: Both Sitecore and WordPress offer different user roles that let you control how your content moves through your content production process. For example, with WordPress, you get default roles like administrators, editors, and authors. With both, only authorized users can hit the final “Publish” button. Also, with WordPress, it’s also possible to create bespoke user access and permission management as complex as your needs. 
• Workflows: Think of these as content writing or marketing automation. Both platforms let you add customized workflows to your content production. With WordPress, you get a number of plugins for this. Plus, you can achieve pretty much a completely bespoke system with custom coding. 
• Content lifecycle management: This can mean many things from revision tracking and archiving to deleting content assets. Both Sitecore and WordPress offer tools to support this. 

It’s important to note that any customizations you do here will add some overhead when you deal with version upgrades or if the tools you use get updated.

Content compliance is important too.

In contrast to content governance, content compliance is all about ensuring that your content meets any external, legal, or ethical laws/regulations that apply to you. Here, you’re dealing with things like compliance with accessibility standards, compliance with laws like the GDPR, and more. 

Both Sitecore and WordPress could use help to support these. Take accessibility for example. To offer good accessibility, you may need to consider adding an accessibility solution like the ones from Skynet Technologies  to your Sitecore or WordPress stacks. Both will add about $500 toward your CMS costs annually for about 100k page views.

Finally, there are developer costs associated with customizations—whether you’re creating bespoke workflows or integrations with third-party solutions or general customizations—related to content ops. Not to forget that these customizations need ongoing support and maintenance too. 

All that said, when it comes to development, WordPress can mean significant amounts in savings. This simply ties back to the availability of high-quality development talent. Other than that, when it comes to the operational overheads, in terms of content governance and compliance, both CMSs are comparable overall.

Ability to hire ad hoc support as needed (outsourcing, staff augmentation, etc.)

Ideally, CMSs would ship with everything you’d ever need to put your sleek content out there. 

But that’s not the case.

For example, if you want to launch a paid advertising campaign, you’ll need to add a landing page to your CMS.

Likewise, if you want to add a case study, you might want to get a custom post type that comes with pre-built blocks for showcasing your results, client testimonials, before-after, and more.

And we’re just getting started.

All these things need development support that goes well beyond your initial CMS setup and ongoing upkeep.

Which means you do need considerable development resources to empower your content team to make the most of your CMS.

If you work with Sitecore, you’ll have to choose from a very small pool of development partners. That also means you won’t necessarily get competitive pricing. With WordPress, though, you can tap a huge community of development resources. In fact, businesses that go with WordPress over other CMSs see their costs go down across the board. They mention saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development alone.