Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
-
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind.
Cheers!
-
Joomla can be very slow for large sites and drupal requires programmers. I would also recommend looking at the yoast wordpress seo plugin. I use it for all my sites and he has alot of info on how to optimise wordpress.
I am a regular reader of dawn, Good to see they are finally upgrading
-
add a +1 from me for wordpress. As mentioned above, there are several large sites using it effectively.
-
Thanks Barry,
The thing is we've already made the shift to WP but I was wondering thats an OK solution for a popular news website. As for Google news, we're amongst the favorites their when it comes to Pakistan news, as that's where we operate so that's not an issue. Thanks for giving the rest of the pointers!
Best,
Rishad.
-
Well, if the New York Times can use it...
Things to remember though:
- You'll need this - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-news-sitemap-generator/ - or similar.
If not (and there's no real reason not to) then think about your URL structure, you must use a non-date like number (minimum 3 digits) in the URL. Thus please take into account your permalink structures to include something like %post_id% or other identifier.
-
To be included in Google news you need at least 3 journalists (I think). As you're a newspaper I don't see that being a problem, but make your staff list easily found on the site.
-
Even as a real news site you may initially be rejected from Google news (I'm sure they do it just to weed out the people that don't really believe they should be there). So if rejected submit again
-
Speed. Cache everything - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
-
Categorization. Make sure you have your site structure down and not just adding things haphazardly.
-
User roles and permissions. If journalists are going to be adding directly, make sure you've set up what they can and can't do.
-
Think hard about going for it. Movable Type is a very good option for news sites as well and is much more secure (this is a fact, I WP, don't jump on me for saying it - http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/06/movable-type-a-history-of-secu.html - Although WP is a bit better now :D). MT is updated far less regularly and is usually much more stable as well. So just consider your options.
-
Unfortunately, our techies are just as bad as our journalists. I guess we should stick with Wordpress then, I am aware of the scalibility issues but journos are most comfortable with the platform so can\t decide which way to go because our website is going to get larger and larger in the comng times!
-
Thanks for the resource brother...
-
I would definitely check out other CMS solutions such as Drupal, Joomla and MODx.
I love Wordpress for small sites (less than 1000 pages), but I think the CMS has some problems in terms of scalability - especially if you require lots of different templates - or even worse - multilingual variations.
If you have lots of developers, you obviously have the muscle for massive customizations, which makes it more likely to succeed.
Another criteria to keep in mind is the tech savyness of the journalists. If you aren't too comfortable with IT, Wordpress might be your best bet.
In sum, Wordpress will probably favor the journalists, while Drupal / Joomla / MODx will favor the tech team. Don't know who you want to help out the most
-
If you are looking to engage community I wholeheartedly recommend Buddy Press for Word Press. Plenty of useful plugins for it around.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do things like using labels on an element that is not a form input affect how google sees us in regards to accessibility?
Do things like using labels on an element that is not a form input affect how google sees us? It's an accessibility error that our devs have made - using a label element because it looks good, not because it's an actual label on a form field. Just wondering how that affects accessibility in Google's eyes.
Web Design | | GregLB0 -
Does redirecting the existing URLs in the website without reducing our current rankings? The new website runs on the bubble, so it seems there is no provisions to redirect the existing URLs to this platform?
Hi Moz Fans, There are some clarification needed in a website revamping and loosing of current website rank. Please go through the questions and would be great if you like to share some insights on it. 1. We would like to revamp our existing website by joining hands with the bubble visual programming platform. Thus, kindly let us know if there are provisions to redirect the existing URLs to this platform. We would also like to know if this kind of redirecting affects the current website ranking. If yes, how can we redirect the existing URLs in bubble without reducing our current rankings? 2. As a part of the revamping of our website, we would like to enquire about the possibilities of its relaunch via bubble. Does it cause any changes for the current rankings of our website if we redirect the existing URLs via bubble? If yes, is there any provision to redirect the URLs without affecting the current ranking of the website?
Web Design | | OceanAirTravels0 -
Migration from HTML to Wordpress - SEO Implications?
I am in the process of having a wordpress site developed to replace my current HTML site. (I currently have my website in html and a blog in wordpress in a sub directory). I am doing this in phases to try and preserve as much of my good rankings as possible. My first phase is to replicate my site with the exact same pages, meta data, and site structure. I'm hoping that google will see this as not much change and not change my rankings for the worse. I also made it a goal that my site speed tests be at least equal to what they are now. We will have to 301 all of the URLs however since it will be going from /example.html to /example. I believe my blog will also need to move into the root directory as well, so I need to 301 all of those pages. I plan to wait a couple months for Phase 2. Phase 2 involves replacing old content (photo galleries), and introducing new content (virtual tours, videos, new pages, etc.) One of my reasons for moving to wordpress is to keep up with current trends a little easier since I have very little time. (I am owner, website maintainer, SEO - all on my own). My question here is three parts. 1. Do you think this strategy will work to preserve my current rankings? 2. Do you have any lessons learned or advice to share with me to make this as smooth as possible? 3. Do I really need to wait to add new content? I might get antsy and want to do it sooner! 🙂 Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | CalicoKitty20001 -
Duplicate Title Issues using # anchor tags
Our homepage navigation uses anchor tags (?TabNumb=1#, ?TabNumb=1# etc) rather than directly linking to different pages to decrease load time (and simplify the build process I owuld imagine). These anchor links are showing up as duplicate titles in Moz. I am pretty sure if I were to use noindex or rel tags, that could have a negative affect on my search results. Any way to tackle this outside of a complete redesign of the structure? http://www.dedoose.com/about-us/?TabNum=2# as an example
Web Design | | sbnjl0 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
B2C directory website adding B2B ecommerce sub-domain
Hey fellow Mozzers, Just got back from Mozcon and enjoyed getting to know a handful of you. I do in house SEO for a B2B wholesaler. We have a B2C website directory for homeowners to locate contractors to work on their home. On the site we have a products section which includes tech specs but not pricing. Our contractors have been asking us to add the ability to purchase their items online, so we are wanting to add a B2B sub-domain (store.domain.com) to our website for the contractors to purchase products online. We do not want consumers to be able to purchase the items and will have pricing behind a log in. I have a few questions that I'm hoping you might be able to answer: 1. What would be the best practice to not have duplicate content errors with products that are listed on both sites? Should we rel-canonical items shown on both domains or do something else?
Web Design | | AC_Pro
2. We are not against having the new site be crawled, but will Google be upset/ding rankings because pricing is behind a log-in? Are there certain best-practices for B2B ecommerce sites?
3. Do you know of any other sites that have done this/do you have any recommendations on how to best implement this?0 -
Website redesign testing environment
An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there. I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses. If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?
Web Design | | jdossetti0 -
What is the best SEO friendly CMS platform?
Would like to build some content sites and would appreciate some guidance on what you believe to be the most SEO friendly CMS platform. I'm also hoping to find something that doesn't require much HTML and is pretty easy to jump into.
Web Design | | EdStaton0