Open source CMS vs custom website design with custom code.
The real costs of creating and maintaining a new website can hardly be estimated unambiguously even by the best among professional web developers. Using the Total Project Cost (TPC) methodology, we need to account for both the direct and indirect costs of running the website, rather than simply focusing on the initial costs of building it. In this article, we will compare what it costs to create a website with the most popular open source CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla и Drupal vs. shortcode project.
There are some key considerations to take into account before you dive in building a website:
Open source for your own license
Web content creation and management
Redesigning and updating content
Future upgrades and longevity
Long-term savings
Custom code - a necessity of the past?!
Having custom code for your website has its own pros and cons, and in some cases, it may be the most beneficial choice depending on your website's needs. If you had asked web developers a few years ago whether to choose a custom framework or an open source CMS when building a website, they would have told you that the capabilities and features of an open source CMS limit the website, whereas with custom coding it is possible to adapt to any needs and requirements. This is changing at a rapid pace as open source software has started to rapidly evolve and take a larger share in the industry. For example, Drupal's exponential growth and unlimited scalability space has become quite impressive and hard to ignore for large organizations. Currently, Drupal serves as a direct competitor to the concept of custom code: people can integrate, process, and modify the CMS to get the exact results they expect for their website. With the introduction of Drupal 8, new application programming interfaces (APIs) have been integrated into the CMS to allow for maintaining an untethered Drupal site through the Restful Web Services API, enhance the user experience through faster page rendering and better caching protocols, and an API to convert Drupal, the language of your website, depending on where visitors reside-things that would have only been possible through custom code in the past. Not to mention that building custom code is impractical, since in most cases the benefits that an open source CMS brings out - the scalability of a custom framework, ultimately saves companies and organizations time and money.
- Open source for your own license
Choosing a content management system (CMS) for a website is one of the key decisions to make before moving on to other decisions. When talking about a CMS, there are two directions a company can take: using an open source CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal or licensing with their own software. If an organization chooses Custom Code, they need to regularly invest in an IT department to take care of implementing new features, updates and website maintenance. Open Source CMSs are constantly evolving and bugs are found and fixed faster thanks to the large communities of developers working to improve the CMS. Companies have the freedom to run it on multiple websites, resulting in significant cost savings and adapting the software to business requirements. Additionally, to further increase the functionality and convenience of the CMS, organizations can opt to use custom modules that enable content management through Drag and Drop. For example, the module Glazed Builder is currently one of Drupal's most powerful editors and is seamlessly integrated with Drupal 8 as well as Drupal 8 and 7. It can create all sorts of templates and layouts without having to do any coding. Compared to the cost of licensed software, the cost of an open source CMS is practically minimal, the CMS is more flexible and gives organizations the power and freedom to build any kind of website without necessarily using the services of developers.
- Web content creation and management
Content creation and management is an integral part of the daily life of major websites and more. Any open source CMS provides the tools and flexibility needed to create new pages or edit existing ones. In many cases this will still require the assistance of a developer who will be responsible for handling it, but this is not mandatory. Thanks to the development of content editors and page builders like Gutenberg, SP Page Builder and Glazed Builder, managing and creating content is something anyone can do without relying on an IT professional. They eliminate the need to go through an IT department every time a change needs to be made to website content. This also drastically reduces IT costs and saves valuable time, both of which can be reinvested in other company assets to provide more value to users.
- Redesigning and updating content
The web environment is constantly evolving and changing at a rapid pace. Along with it, customer expectations in terms of user experience and the value that a website can provide them is also growing. In order to position and stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to periodically update the overall look and feel of their website and move forward by introducing new features that come online regularly. It is also important to systematically update content to keep information relevant and interesting to the visitor. When building a website, it is necessary to compare the long-term costs and tools available to redesign the website and update the content. Open source software shines when it comes to empowering organizations in this aspect. Additionally, organizations can deploy pre-built themes that fit their business model or create custom unique themes using page builders.
- Future upgrades and longevity
A website can be up to date for a maximum of between 2-5 years before it needs a redesign or a complete overhaul. Incentives that motivate businesses to improve their digital assets may include: security reasons, a dated website, meeting Google's requirements SEO or the need to keep up to date with the new technologies that emerge every year. Building organizational websites on an open source platform that provides the ability to be extended and tailored to meet the latest trends in web technology will prove vital when it comes time to upgrade the website. This will also eliminate the possibility of starting to build the website from scratch, simply because the core on which it is built from the ground up does not allow for scalability. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are known to be at the top of the industry when it comes to upgrades and room for future scalability. Over 75% of all websites on the web have been built on top of them.
Expenditure on CMS open source and long-term savings
Analyzing the total cost of building and maintaining your website before you start will save your organization a lot of money and time in the long run. These saved resources can be reinvested into other company aspects that will add value to both the business and the end user. The cost of maintaining a website on a daily basis could be significantly reduced by using open source software such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. A good example is the case of Georgia Technology (GTA)When GTA decided to migrate 65 websites to Drupal, it resulted in a 65% reduction in the platform's operating costs, and maintenance-related costs decreased by 75%, respectively. In the long run, the cost of operating a website with licensed software / proprietary code / exceeds the cost of an open source CMS. Unless there are very specific requirements for your website project that can only be achieved with personal /custom/ code, open source platforms will play a big role in minimizing the total cost of ownership of any business website.
In conclusion - Open source systems have evolved and changed a lot in the last 10-12 years. They no longer set boundaries and limitations for building any website project - on the contrary. In their face, we have some stable and scalable kernels on the basis of which we can build any type of website, while saving a lot of money on labor and development of an individual project. They have everything you need to build a presentable and serious website - a content management system, visual editors to build the layout and a very serious ecosystem of additional modules to upgrade and add new features. Behind them are serious communities of developers which guarantee us longevity and scalability of the project.
The cost of building websites on an open source platform are always many times lower than one with custom code and licensed software.
Sources used: CUC