Content creation: Sitecore vs WordPress

At the heart of your CMS selection process lies the content creation experience. 

A good content creation experience translates to beautiful content, increased productivity, and enhanced collaboration, among other benefits. 

And all these together contribute toward your content goals.

Here’s how Sitecore XM Cloud and WordPress compare on the content creation experience front.

Going from ideation to production

Here’s what it takes to go from ideation to production on Sitecore Cloud XM and WordPress. 

1. “Designing” your content: Both the platforms come with visual editors that support inline editing. So you can choose from Components in Sitecore or Blocks in WordPress and design your content as you write it. The WYSIWYG editors with both hugely simplify content management. 
2. Implementing personalizations: If you want to personalize your content, you can do some basic stuff right out-of-the-box with Sitecore. This is possible through plugins on WordPress.
3. Adding media: Both the CMSs offer good media management and you can easily upload your videos, images, and documents to your content assets. If you use Sitecore, you can even consider their DAM solution. Alternatively, with WordPress, you can pretty much build your own bespoke DAM solution on top of WordPress. 
4. Moving the content along the editorial process: Both the platforms let you enforce editorial processes like adding stages for editorial and peer reviews. With Sitecore, it’s more straightforward whereas it’s possible with WordPress through customizations/plugins.

Publishing the content: With Sitecore, once you push your content to Sitecore’s Edge layer, the front-end delivery is handled through Sitecore’s global content delivery network. WordPress offers similar flexibility depending on your setup: In a traditional stack (monolithic WordPress), content is rendered directly through WordPress. And in a headless or hybrid setup, content is delivered via APIs, similar to Sitecore’s decoupled approach.The frontend solutions take it over from here.

Other than these, both offer features like content scheduling, versioning, and collaboration

Both the CMSs offer content scheduling, so your content can go live when you want, ideal for timing content campaigns to marketing calendars. 

Both the CMSs also support versioning and automatically save your latest versions. Also, because Sitecore comes with some lightweight in-built personalizations, you can create personalized versions of your page and use rules to deliver them to the intended audiences.

Also, while both the platforms support collaborating (built-in in Sitecore and through plugins in WordPress) on the editorial processes, only Sitecore allows for Google Docs-like collaboration on a content piece (co-editing, in other words).

The content team’s experience with the CMS (and why it matters)

If you’ve seen CMS migration case studies, you’ll know that a lot of times, businesses move to a new CMS because they see their content teams struggling with making the most of their existing CMSs. Often, this is due to bottlenecks in the publishing process, with content teams having to rely too heavily on the IT department for daily content ops like updates and publishing. The team at KFF experience this with their Sitecore CMS:

Publishing new content online? It was a broken workflow. “The [content] staff didn’t touch the CMS,” explains KFF Vice President David Rousseau. “They wrote things in Word, sent it to the production team, and they put it online.”

It’s important to note that such issues aren’t just about slowing the content pipeline, they can stifle creativity too. As KFF mentions in this case study, getting content creators to actually work inside the CMS helps them do more with content. “With WordPress, [our] workflow is changing dramatically,” says David. “We’ve trained many of our content creators in the CMS. And, the closer the content creators are to it, the more creatively they are able to think about it.”

WordPress is beyond doubt the world’s most loved content creation platform, celebrated for its user-friendliness. 

Sitecore, too, does nicely here with its XM Cloud’s Pages editor. This new editor builds upon Sitecore’s earlier editors that weren’t so user-friendly.

Training

While Sitecore’s content production has a learning curve, WordPress is quite straightforward.

Training and getting your new hires up-to-speed with how Sitecore and any customizations you may have built on top of it, too, can add considerable overhead to your daily content operations. 

With WordPress, on the other hand, you can safely say that anyone with even an hour’s worth of training can be ready to write their first post and submit it for approval!