Alternatives to Wordpress
Feb 03, 2016
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There truly are many alternatives to Wordpress. Many Wordpress websites have pain points that cause users to grow out of the platform or seek a closed source platform.
Before we jump into that - let's address where Wordpress came from.
When we started building websites over 16 years ago (in the late 90's), everything was custom. Wordpress was just a blog tool...for people wanting to blog. Blogs didn't exist yet to make money. They were literally a place to share information; a hobby, craft, journal or expertise. As people garnered more traffic the ideas to make money came naturally from advertisers wanting to buy links, marketing firms offering to purchase ads or the sheer traffic from your website initiated thoughts of monetizing traffic.
Around 2004 or so folks wanted to "add a blog" to their website. Blogs turned into websites. The natural transition was to install a Wordpress Blog and link to it. Many blogs were subdomains or directories on their existing site as separate software not integrated with their "ftp" static files.
I remember the first day a customer called up to tell me their website had been hacked. We found that one of their forms on the Wordpress installation had been accessed through a "backdoor". We cleaned out the nasty scripts and thought that we isolated the hackers.
It wasn't until their site starting slowing down (major load times) that we knew their Wordpress had been hacked again. Same thing happened with some other open source software that we hadn't built. We started to see quickly that Wordpress was good for the businesses who knew how to maintain them, but not for our customers who are mostly small businesses and not webmasters.
To be free of the stress and liability of a Wordpress - that was supposed to be "free", we decided to build our own blog. Wordpress is free to download and install, but it is not truly "free" if you want it customized and configured to adapt to your organization. You'll have to hire a php developer which can get a bit costly.
There were other reasons to drop Wordpress like plugin conflicts, plugin vulnerabilities and bugs all over the place - but I'll save those articles for another time. Ultimately - we realized that our customers needed a closed source platform that was more secure from many of the spammers that take advantage of open source exploits that WordPress is notorious for.
Thus was introduced our first module - the LunaSoft web builder with built-in Blog. Now our customers could access their blog and website files from one login. We soon dropped Zen Cart for our own little shopping cart.
So what are alternatives to WordPress? There are hundreds if not thousands. What you really have to look for is what your pain points are currently from WordPress and what platforms might solve those. We've found that Drupal and Joomla come with many of the same problems that WordPress comes with, with regards to security, plugin issues and lack of user friendliness. If you just need a blog platform - blogger isn't bad and it's free. You can even have your own domain now. There are other web builders like Wix, Weebly, Godaddy, Squarespace, Web.com, etc. These tend to cater to the starter website that doesn't need much functionality or features.
We build LunaSoft as an alternative as you get a high end web builder that is completely customize-able and intuitive. LunaSoft allows for easy password protection of pages and group access to pages. It also takes into account SEO meta tags, urls, scripts and dynamic google sitemaps. Of course we're biased - but if you need to grow and scale - you have an out of the box solution that can be customized and configured to do just about anything.
If you need a secure, closed source platform then LunaSoft is a good option. LunaSoft - the Wordpress Alternative.
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