Deciding between two content management systems (CMS) is no easy task. Your CMS is an important long-term investment, so you must ensure you choose a platform that will meet all your requirements, both now and in future.
If you’re currently weighing up the pros and cons between Contentful and WordPress, there are some key differences between the two platforms that you should be aware of.
To make this evaluation process easier for you, and help you pick the best option for your business, this article provides a direct, objective comparison between these platforms.
Platform Overviews
Different types of software will provide you with different capabilities and limitations. The Contentful and WordPress platforms can both deliver quality enterprise-grade websites, but they each take a slightly different approach.
Contentful
Contentful is a cloud-based “headless” CMS. Being headless means that the back-end of the platform you use to publish, edit, and manage content is not directly connected to the front-end of your live website.
Your content is managed and stored in one central hub, hosted within the cloud, and this is the back-end of your platform (also known as the “body”). APIs are then used to take your content from the back-end and present it in website form.
A headless CMS gives you a high level of flexibility and customisation with your website’s front-end. These same APIs allow you to publish your content in different formats in different channels as well, facilitating a multi-channel approach to marketing.
This makes Contentful a flexible platform that can meet a range of different content requirements, but it is admittedly more complicated than the traditional approach to website management.
WordPress
WordPress is a traditional CMS that provides a more straightforward approach to managing your website. You can use WordPress to build sophisticated, dynamic sites with a simple, user-friendly set of tools.
While most businesses use WordPress in the traditional way, the platform can be leveraged with a headless approach as well, allowing it to match the scalability and multi-channel capabilities of solutions like Contentful.
WordPress gives you the flexibility to choose how you’d like to develop your website, based on the complexity and size of the project, and the objectives you’re trying to achieve. In the likely case that you’re working with a web design and development agency, that can all be handled for you by your partner.
The Scalability of Each Platform
Your business will grow and evolve over time, so you need a platform that can quickly and easily scale up with new features and functionality. You also need to ensure the platform can handle high volumes of traffic and maintain performance as your audience grows. That’s why scalability is one of the most important aspects to consider when choosing a CMS.
How Scalable is Contentful?
One of the main benefits of a headless CMS is that the infrastructure allows you to grow your digital presence rapidly, on a large scale.
The back-end offers easy customisation, and the cloud-based nature of the platform allows you to scale up dynamically whenever you need to.
Its multi-channel capabilities also inherently promote the idea of developing your content in different formats at a larger scale, while always maintaining consistency. This enables you to produce individual pieces of content once and easily repurpose them across different channels a number of times, saving valuable time and resources.
This can all be done without any concerns over technical issues like server capacity or network bandwidth, because the platform is delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
How Scalable is WordPress?
WordPress is a highly scalable platform in its own right, currently used to power the websites of some of the largest and most successful businesses in the world.
The platform is agile and scalable enough to grow seamlessly alongside your business and adapt to your changing requirements, whichever way you decide to use it.
As mentioned earlier, taking the headless approach with WordPress can provide the same enhanced scalability and pervasive multi-channel capabilities as Contentful, if you require those aspects from your CMS. This can also deliver benefits with speed of development and time-to-market, saving you valuable costs with your agency partner.
Expanding your WordPress site with the more traditional approach is made even easier than most other CMSs as well, thanks to the platform’s unique block-based editor. This is a method of building websites that provides great benefits in the areas of flexibility, efficiency, and ease-of-use.
WordPress also allows you to continually enhance your site with new features and functionality through bespoke development, with almost no limitations on what can be achieved.
Ease-of-Use
Like all technology, some tools are more approachable for the majority of users, while others will require some existing skills. This makes ease-of-use a key part of your criteria when selecting a platform to manage your website. You’ll be using it almost every day, after all, so you need to be comfortable with it.
How Easy is Contentful to Use?
While Contentful being solely a headless CMS does have its advantages, such as scalability and customisation, this approach also creates some challenges for the average user.
For example, adding content to Contentful can be difficult because it doesn’t provide you with a way to preview how your content will look in the front-end of the website.
Contentful doesn’t have a simple editing interface on the front-end, so there’s a much higher risk of error with this platform than with most others.
Granted, Contentful’s user interface (UI) is well structured and intuitive, but it’s also known for being more difficult for non-technical users than platforms like WordPress.
Handling the API rules is also complicated without the help of an experienced web development team. If you’re working with an agency, you may end up calling on them regularly for tasks that you could likely handle yourself in other CMSs.
How Easy is WordPress to Use?
Conversely, WordPress is renowned for its simplicity and ease-of-use. Even if you don’t have any existing knowledge of coding or content management, WordPress is very approachable and easy to learn.
When you first get started with WordPress, virtually everything you need to set up and manage your website will be readily available within the platform.
Publishing, managing, and editing in WordPress are all quick and convenient, thanks to an intuitive back-end that provides you with everything you need to build out a content-rich website.
Thanks to this ease-of-use, most of the people within your team will be able to use WordPress, allowing you to share the responsibility of the daily management and running of your site.
It is worth noting that taking a headless approach with WordPress does also require experienced web developers to be able to manage the platform though.
Security
Security should always be a top priority with any software you introduce into your business. If you’re considering a CMS that seems like it could be unable to provide the enterprise-grade security you need, it’s wise to continue looking for more reliable alternatives.
How Secure is Contentful?
As a cloud-based SaaS product, Contentful comes with useful in-built security features, including HTTPS data encryption, role-based access controls, and multi-factor authentication.
Headless CMSs also take a different approach to security compared to traditional platforms like WordPress. Its use of APIs allows you to control access to your content through a token-based authentication system, and it uses industry-standard encryption and secure storage measures to protect your data. With that in mind, Contentful should be seen as a very secure and robust platform.
How Secure is WordPress?
WordPress is a secure, platform. To find proof of this, you only need to look as far as the wealth of global enterprise businesses that have chosen WordPress as their CMS.
As with any software, though, there will always be vulnerabilities or potential risks that can arise in certain scenarios. For example, WordPress regularly releases updates to its software, and failing to test your platform upon these releases could lead to bugs or security issues creeping in. Similarly, certain plugins can create security problems if taken from the wrong sources or left untested for too long.
Finding an experienced agency partner you can depend on is usually a wise move to reinforce the security of your website. That partner will also be able to support you with important related services like hosting, maintenance, and ongoing optimisation.
Cost and TCO
Your CMS also needs to deliver good value for money and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
To understand your long-term TCO, you’ll need to take into account things like license fees, hosting costs, maintenance, bespoke development with your agency, and more.
Contentful’s Initial Costs and Ongoing Investment
Contentful has basic and premium pricing plans for businesses, although you can use the platform for free to see if it’s a good fit first.
The basic plan starts at around £250 per month and supports up to twenty users, so it’s only suitable for small businesses. The premium plan is priced based on the resources you’ll use, such as number of users, API requests, and storage. You can usually expect this to start at around £450 per month.
However, as mentioned earlier, most businesses will require a lot of support from an agency to get the platform set up in both the back-end and front-end. You’ll likely need ongoing work from an agency to ensure you can use the platform to its full potential as well, which won’t come cheap.
All these things tend to add up to a high TCO over time, making Contentful less cost-efficient than some of the other CMSs around today.
WordPress’s Low TCO
WordPress is one of those solutions that is far more cost-efficient than Contentful, with a much more reasonable TCO.
Its software is open-source and the platform free to use. This means your initial costs are limited to just hosting, agency fees, and any other support you may need once your site is live. Plugins and extensions of the platform are licensed and paid for separately.
As WordPress is such an intuitive and easy-to-use platform, it’s also affordable to run it and manage it, even if you do use an agency to handle that for you. This includes any bespoke development or customisation requirements you may have, which experienced agencies can often deliver with a very fast time-to-market as well.
Which Platform is Right for You?
Both these CMSs will enable you to build sophisticated, high-performance websites that will support your business goals and allow you to gain an edge over your competition.
As you’ve seen throughout this comparison article, they each have their strengths and weaknesses, as do all the other CMSs available today. That means you need to base your decision on which one is the best fit for your specific business.
For example, a headless CMS, whether that’s Contentful or WordPress, may be too complex in many cases. But if you’re looking to execute a holistic multi-channel marketing strategy, it might be the right choice for you.
In the early stages of your evaluation process, it’s crucial to carefully consider your own unique requirements, objectives, budget, resources, agency relationships, and various other factors.
In order to make the right decision between two CMSs, you need to understand which one will be more suitable to deliver on your needs and expectations, both in the immediate term and for years to come.
Still not convinced? Discover five key benefits of WordPress’s industry-leading scalability in our related article here.
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- Configured firewall options, IP access lists, and anti-phishing attack technologies
- Full responsibility for rapidly patching OSes and libraries
- Long-term-supported Linux distributions for maximum security.
- Compliance with ISO 27001/PCI-DSS/TIA-942
- A 100% pass-rate for any data centre audits
- 24/7 data centre staffing with experienced engineers and specialist security teams
- Document review services for your external audits
- Bespoke consultancy available if you have any major certification requirements.
- A fully-managed service provided by a team with decades of experience
- Round-the-clock, hands-on assistance, 365 days per year
- Deep technical understanding and expertise
- Proactive support from dedicated engineering teams and account managers
- High-level consultancy, including advice on new projects and technologies.
Latest from agency
3 August, 2022
Celebrating 3 years with Leonardo Esposito
A fresh-faced Leo joined SoBold in August 2019, with a big booming smile and speaking in broken English. It was immediately clear how driven he was to learn and pick up new skills and it was a no-brainer to offer him a job to join our development team.
For much of his first year at SoBold, Leo was glued to Google Translate to try and properly understand the tasks he had been set, but each and every time the output of his work would be the same, outstanding.
As Leo’s English picked up, as did his confidence and skill-set and he made it clear that he wanted to focus on Back-End Development and he really wanted to take SoBold forward. Leo championed innovation in our development approach and much of the workflow we do today has been driven by Leo’s desire to set the highest of standards.
He is a key figure at SoBold and we are very fortunate to have him.
We caught up with Leo to find out more about what he get’s up to in his day-to-day life!
At what point in your life did you decide to become a developer?
During middle school, I tried to learn how to make games, which led me to development. I started exploring different languages and realized I really liked learning the syntax of as many languages as I could. Eventually, I got into web development, and since then I have tried to expand my knowledge of web development languages, trying out new frameworks, and both front and back end sides.
Describe your typical day
As of now I’m trying out double gym days, which means an early wake up (5.30am), gym at 6am, and finishing at around 8am. Then I go to work, have my day, and when I finish I go home and back to the gym. When I get back home it’s circa 8.30pm, so I have dinner, watch something on Netflix (not too much otherwise I end up snacking), then go to my room, and if there’s time and I’m not too tired I play piano, otherwise I go to bed ready to do it all again.
What’s your favourite project to date
Favourite project to date is Rede partners
Any advice for junior developers?
Never stop learning, be curious, and be always ready to challenge yourself, and question what you do. Change your way of doing things if someone else out there is doing it better.
If you had to change careers what would you do instead?
Theoretical Physicist or Volleyball coach
What was your most recent challenge and how did you overcome It?
Hit a plateau in terms of motivation, but managed to overcome it by getting less on my plate, and focusing on meaning, eventually, it became better.
What’s your favourite thing to do outside of work?
Workout, play music (piano, guitar), play video games (fav ones are Skyrim, Horizon Forbidden West and Fallout)
How do you think the designer/developer relationship could improve?
The main thing is communication and chemistry, once those are there the relationship improves by itself.
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Hosting
20 June, 2023
Enterprise-Grade Web Hosting Explained
The type of hosting environment you select will have a strong influence on the success of your website. It’s important for you to find a secure, scalable web hosting service that you have 100% trust in to deliver high-performance at all times.
To simplify the options available to you, this article will break down the various types of web hosting services, and explore the non-negotiables we believe you should be considering in your criteria when making your decision.
The Fundamentals of Enterprise-Grade Hosting
Some of the most important things to look for with your hosting environment include:
Security – Cyber security is obviously an essential priority, and this should be top of your list of criteria in the current climate.
Performance – Your hosting environment should be set up in a way that makes your site capable of handling large surges of traffic.
Scalability – As your business grows, it’s likely that your site’s audience will grow. You need a hosting provider with the capacity to scale your services seamlessly to meet your needs, both now and in future.
Resilience – It’s important to ensure your hosting infrastructure is robust, and that it can gauruntee you certain performance levels and up-time.
Support – If anything does go wrong, you need to be assured that you have a quick, efficient support service in place to get your site back up and running as soon as possible.
Sustainability – With sustainability a growing priority on the corporate agenda, the carbon footprint of your data centre may be another important factor in your decision.
Option 1 – Shared Hosting Services
Shared hosting services can provide you with a basic secure server for your website. However, as the name suggests, these servers will be shared with a large number of other businesses. You won’t have any dedicated server of your own with shared hosting.
This approach does have some advantages, particularly in the area of cost. These shared hosting environments can cost as little as £1,000 per year. However, the down-sides to this often outweigh that cost benefit.
In many cases, the low cost of shared hosting services can often be reflected in the performance levels. This is because, with such a high volume of websites hosted on the servers, your performance has no protection if other sites are experiencing high volumes of traffic.
It’s also likely that you’ll only have access to limited support services when any issues arise. Many of the shared hosting options will have a ticketing system for support, where you’ll be at the mercy of the number of requests ahead of you in the queue. This could result in your website being ‘down’ during times where it’s business-critical.
Option 2 – Private Servers with Shared Hosting Providers
Most shared hosting providers will offer the option of having your own private server for an extra cost. This is often referred to as a VPS, which stands for virtual private server.
Rather than sharing a server with thousands of other businesses, you’ll only be sharing with a few others. While this is significantly better than the regular shared hosting options, you can still end up facing similar problems with performance and scalability.
This is another cost-effective approach, though, with some improvements over standard shared hosting. If you rely on an agency to set this up for you, they’ll likely put their smaller clients on a shared VPS and give their larger clients their own dedicated servers to minimise any potential problems.
Option 3 – Enterprise-Grade Private Web Hosting
Often the most reliable and trusted approach to take is to have your own dedicated server, which comes with a wide range of additional benefits.
With this option, your website is placed on its own private server in the cloud, managed by a dedicated team of specialists who offer personalised, hands-on support and ongoing optimisation.
Security
Enterprise-grade security should be a core part of the hosting service you choose, regardless of whether it’s private or shared. However, you’ll be guaranteed far greater security, with drastically reduced risk, when you work with a private hosting service.
For instance, a hosting provider should offer robust protection for your site, including:
Of course, compliance and certifications are another crucial aspect of cyber security these days. While some shared hosting providers may have the basic levels of compliance in place, most private hosting services will boast:
Performance
When taking this approach, you’ll receive your own bespoke service and will be provided with a hosting environment tailored to your specific requirements.
This will optimise everything included in your hosting package, from your preferred caching, loading speeds, performance requirements, up-time, and more.
You’ll also be able to set up a content delivery network (CDN) to make your website faster and more readily available to all visitors around the world.
Scalability
Private hosting gives you the capacity and flexibility to scale seamlessly anytime your website’s traffic increases, or if you have peak times for traffic.
This is an intelligent way to future-proof your investment, with the confidence that your website’s performance will be consistently excellent as the size of your audience increases and your site expands. This also applies to situations in which you need to scale unexpectedly due to short-term increases in demand, ensuring business continuity is always maintained on your site.
Resilience
Private hosting providers have guarantees for their resilience, and for your site’s up-time, covering all possible bases. This even counts for unusual scenarios like floods or fires.
It’s wise to look for a provider who offers back-up and disaster recovery services for the maximum resilience.
Back-Ups: Managed back-up services provide you with a tailored regiment, alongside rigorous testing, for guaranteed restorability.
Multi-level back-ups are taken for you, both locally and remotely, to minimise risk. You’ll also be able to choose from a range of replication technology options for your load-balancing and various fail-over scenarios.
Disaster Recovery: Private hosting providers will also use disaster recovery measures, such as geographically-distributed platforms and back-up data centres, providing you with full assurance that your performance and up-time are always maintained.
Your primary hosting platform will be replicated to a disaster-recovery platform, which means that if the primary data centre is ever out of action for a prolonged period of time you can fail-over to the back-up systems.
While the more basic hosting services can take days to recover in similar situations, which could result in losses of business and even reputational damage, disaster recovery can often be done in a matter of minutes with a private hosting environment.
Support and Optimisation
Trust and confidence in your provider’s ability to deliver on your requirements are a vital part of your hosting service.
It’s highly beneficial to take an approach that gives you – or your agency partner – a close working relationship with your hosting provider. Availability and accountability are much greater with a private hosting service than with a shared approach.
A close working relationship provides other advantages as well. For instance, anytime you want to make upgrades to your hosting environment, they can analyse your traffic and identify the best time and date to do that with minimal disruption.
This is all part of collaborating with your agency and hosting provider, so they understand your unique business and tailor your hosting services. This is all done based on the conventions of your target audience and your specific requirements to deliver the best possible service.
In terms of support, private hosting providers will have powerful automation tools to proactively, continuously monitor your environment. That allows them to resolve the majority of issues before they’re able to have an impact on your site.
This can also involve 24/7 custom alerting systems, as well as a fully customisable monitoring portal, and multi-channel systems to alert engineers rapidly in the event of any problems.
In terms of your overall service with an enterprise-grade private hosting provider, you should also expect to gain:
Sustainability
If your business has sustainability as a priority or core cultural value, then this is another reason to opt for a private hosting service. While it’s not impossible to find shared hosting services with carbon-neutral data centres, it’s much less common.
Sustainability is also a key focus for us here at SoBold as an agency. As a result, we’ve worked hard to ensure we have an environmentally-conscious, carbon-neutral service offering.
The Verdict?
Having a fully dedicated, bespoke private server is usually the preferred choice of web hosting services. This is due to the unmatched levels of security, scalability, and performance that come with private hosting providers.
Of course, it’s important to note that this does also come with a higher cost than other options. However, the benefits and trust gained through their strengths in these key areas ensure strong ROI.
Not only do their flexibility and optimisation provide you with a high-performance website set up for success, but enterprise-grade security and resilience will also minimise your risk and save you significant costs in the long-term.
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Announcement
24 March, 2020
SoBold’s response to COVID-19
In response to COVID-19, we’ve put in place a number of measures at SoBold to make sure we can continue to provide our services to our clients around the world as well as do what we can to help contain the spread of the virus.
It’s helpful to reflect on the fact that we offer a service whereby the performance and outcome of work produced will not be affected at all.
We’ve moved to full-time remote work
SoBold has decided to close our office in London and have our employees work remotely until further notice.
We’re doing this in an effort to help prevent the spread of the virus because, while most SoBold employees are healthy and not in the high-risk category, we appreciate that is not the case for all of those around us, or in the wider community we live in.
We have a responsibility towards these people, including others who work in our building and those we come into contact with during each others’ daily commute.
We’ve set up enhanced support for remote work
We don’t believe it’ll cause much disruption to the rest of the team and business.
Most of our clients, for example, will be familiar with remote meetings; we regularly host virtual meetings between clients and SoBold.
All team members have access to reliable remote conferencing and workflow tools, so they can speak to anyone either within SoBold or outside of the organisation, whenever they need or want to.
This means we can continue to frictionlessly share and work collaboratively cross-functionally, with the ultimate goal of always delighting our clients and partners.
Free support to those directly affected by the closure of their businesses
We want to give back and help businesses and individuals that have been so badly damaged by the closure of their shopfronts, gyms, restaurants and other businesses in the hospitality industry.
We are offering free website help to these businesses during these tough times.
If you would like to get in touch with a team member about this, please email hello@soboldltd.com
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Digital Business
7 November, 2022
The Top Five Benefits of WordPress for Large Businesses
If you’re responsible for marketing, you’ll be well aware of the importance of a great content management system (CMS) for digital products like your website, mobile apps, staff portals, and so on. You may even need to create bespoke digital processes or systems unique to your business, such as internal training platforms or communications channels.
WordPress is the most popular CMS available today, powering almost 45% of the world’s websites. That popularity is on the rise, too, as more and more businesses realise the vast potential of the platform and the benefits it can deliver.
However, there’s still a misconception that WordPress isn’t suitable for large businesses. That’s no more than a myth, though. In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world use WordPress for their CMS.
But what are the specific reasons why that popularity has spread into the enterprise market over the past decade or so? To answer that question, let’s take a detailed look at the benefits and advantages WordPress offers large businesses:
1 – Scalability and Agility
WordPress is famous for its high level of scalability. However large your company, or the size and complexity of your site – as well as the amount of traffic passing through it – WordPress won’t have any problem managing that load.
Scalability is one of its most prominent advantages for large businesses, because it’s also agile enough to easily evolve and grow alongside your changing requirements.
The platform is more robust than most realise as well, with enterprise-grade performance and speed. This great performance also means user adoption and retention will always be high, helping you drive strong return on investment (ROI) on all the digital products you build.
2 – Flexibility and Customisation
WordPress is equally renowned for its flexibility and customisation, which are particularly useful for complex or bespoke development projects. You can use its flexibility to build bespoke features and functionality into your website or create an entirely unique system from scratch.
In large organisations where company-specific processes and workflows are common within your sites, this makes WordPress a highly beneficial option.
3 – Fast Time-to-Market
Thanks to its simplicity and intuitive usability, WordPress is a very efficient platform to build with. That gives you the advantage of delivering development projects with a very fast time-to-market. This is a significant benefit of any CMS, as it helps you save time, reduce costs, and provides more opportunity to test, iterate, and innovate.
4 – Integration
WordPress is very easy to integrate with other systems. Because most large enterprises have a lot of legacy technology to consider when implementing new systems, this is a huge benefit WordPress has over more cumbersome CMSs.
WordPress also integrates very well with back-end systems that are vital to your daily operations, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, PowerBi, and so on. This minimises disruption to your business while integrating WordPress into your existing tech stack.
5 – Low TCO and Strong ROI
WordPress comes with a very low total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to other options. Unlike most CMSs, you won’t need to invest heavily in adding new features or capabilities, and you won’t need to worry about expensive extra work to manage upgrades or updates from the platform.
Because WordPress is so agile and rich with dynamic capabilities and features, it’s also proven to deliver strong ROI in both the short and long-term.
From a long-term value perspective, your initial projects won’t just stop at initial implementation, either. As your project or requirements evolve and your business grows, WordPress can seamlessly adapt and grow with you.
Other Points to Consider
It’s important to remember that every business, and every project, is different. While the benefits listed here do make WordPress an excellent CMS, you should still carefully evaluate how well it aligns with your specific objectives, requirements, budget, and other needs.
It’s also important to understand that most businesses will need the support of an agency with platform-specific skills and expertise to help you leverage a CMS to its full potential. As is the case with all platforms, it will be vastly easier to achieve your objectives and gain greater ROI, if you have the support of an experienced specialist partner to guide you.
If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, or need help deciding whether it’s a suitable option for your own requirements, we have a comprehensive guide to evaluating and selecting the enterprise options for a CMS here.
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Announcement
30 October, 2022
Transport for London renew Cookie Management Contract with SoBold
SoBold is pleased to announce that they have renewed their contract with Transport for London to manage and support a bespoke Cookie Consent Management Tool for use across TfL’s portfolio of websites which includes 30 domains.
SoBold recently became only the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner in the UK having been an authorised Reseller of Cookiebot since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place on 24 May 2018.
Transport for London’s desire to extend its relationship with SoBold for a further year, highlights the importance of the work SoBold are doing to manage its bespoke Cookie Consent Management solution across its portfolio of website which have missions of visitors per month. The contract renewal cements SoBold’s position as one of the leading Cookiebot resellers.
For more information on SoBold’s work to date with Transport for London, see their case study.
SoBold Technical Director, Sam Phillips said:
It is great to see Transport for London renew its cookie management contract with SoBold for a fifth successive year. Over the last year we have continued to evolve their bespoke solution adding in full IAB TCF support as well updating the design to reflect TFL’s updated guidelines. We’re looking forward to continuing to support TfL over the next 12 months.