Finding the Best CMS for Your Small Business

Content management should not be harder than the business it supports. When this article was first published, Lucid compared three open-source options small companies were usually offered: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

The original piece argued that all three were customizable and widely used, and that they were not equal for a non-technical owner.

Ease of use. WordPress was described as the system designed for people who were not programmers. Joomla was called usable, but with more technical overhead. Drupal was the steepest — most successful users already knew HTML, CSS, and often PHP.

Extensions and themes. The article used then-current plugin and theme counts to say WordPress and Drupal had much larger libraries than Joomla, and that WordPress led on ready-made themes. Those counts are out of date. They are not repeated here as current facts.

Community and security. All three had large communities. The original conclusion was that Drupal assumed a technical operator, while WordPress had more day-to-day help for common publishing tasks. Security was treated as a three-way concern, not a reason to pick one system by default.

The conclusion as published. WordPress was Lucid’s overall recommendation for small-business sites on ease of use, flexibility, and support. That was a 2017 opinion about the CMS market as it stood then. It is not a current service offer, and it is not a claim about every project.

If you are choosing a system now, treat this as history: how a Miami engineering firm thought about the problem in the late 2010s.