Sitecore vs WordPress: Upgrades, support and maintenance

When it comes to support and maintenance, since we’re only looking at managed services for Sitecore and WordPress, both vendors ensure top-tier support.

That said, WordPress VIP’s simplicity, extensive community resources, and lower maintenance costs make it a more accessible option for organizations looking for long-term sustainability without heavy reliance on vendor-specific expertise. 

Sitecore XM Cloud, on the other hand, comes with higher complexity, a very niche developer community (compared to WordPress), and higher maintenance costs, especially for highly customized implementations.

Upgrades to the core platforms

Anyone who has used Sitecore, especially its self-hosted versions, can tell how complex upgrading to Sitecore’s newer versions can get—some users even compare it to re-platforming. 

Sitecore actually has a history of complex upgrades in its self-hosted models. In fact, with their XM Cloud offering, they actually wanted to resolve this and make their system truly future-proof. 

However, because Sitecore XM Cloud is still customizable, customizations can still pose challenges during upgrades, especially if you have a heavily customized setup.

With WordPress VIP, too, the platform’s core updates, security patches, and performance optimizations are entirely managed by the VIP team. 

Like Sitecore, WordPress VIP also ensures that your site is always updated with the latest version and security measures. 

But unlike Sitecore, WordPress offers greater flexibility for managing customizations within the platform’s architecture. WordPress VIP is designed to make updates and upgrades seamless, even for highly customized sites. 

Scope of support

When it comes to Sitecore, you get some best-in-class support, but if you compare its scope of support to WordPress (as we’ll do in just a bit), you’ll find it to be a little limiting. For example, if you’ve questions regarding potential implementation, it may fall out of scope. Sitecore’s documentation states:

Inquiries regarding implementation advice (such as sizing information, installation assistance, upgrade planning), questions about best practices or internal software architecture, errors resulting from unsupported or undocumented installation or upgrade scenarios, and integration with other software.

Also, raising support requests requires you to be qualified if you’re working with Sitecore’s managed cloud solutions:

For the above products, in addition to general access prerequisites, a user has to pass an appropriate Certified Developer or Certified Administrator training and also successfully pass an associated exam. Certified users can create new cases and service requests. Non-certified users can only view and edit those created for their company.

When it comes to WordPress VIP, you aren’t just getting a CMS but a true partner to manage and optimize it, too. From 24/7 support, performance debugging, deep troubleshooting, application downtime monitoring, and security reviews to on-demand guidance, the WordPress VIP team is available to work with your technical teams or any WordPress agency partners (like rtCamp) that you work with. 

Also, sourcing such support from third-party development partners is a lot more accessible for WordPress than it is for Sitecore.

Maintenance

With Sitecore, while the core platform updates are handled by Sitecore itself, maintaining your custom frontend solutions, integrations, and customizations will still require dedicated technical resources. 

Additionally, as your deployment grows, you may need specialized Sitecore expertise to manage ongoing customizations, updates, and infrastructure. You can expect to set aside about 15-20% of your licensing fee for these operations.

WordPress VIP typically has lower maintenance costs compared to Sitecore. That’s because of the availability of WordPress developers and the platform’s high adoption. That said, frontend maintenance costs will add for WordPress too if you use it in a headless model.

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