Football CMS vs Wordpress: which one to choose for your news website?

Intro

In this blog post, we will be comparing FootballCMS to WordPress. We compare both CMSs on several aspects such as ease of use, SEO, features, and cost to determine which CMS is best suitable for football news publishers.

What is the main difference between FootballCMS and WordPress?

The main difference between FootballCMS and WordPress is that WordPress is a general CMS that is a ‘one-size-fits-all solution’ for business websites, E-commerce companies, bloggers, etc. FootballCMS is a CMS that is 100% specialized for professional football news publishers who want to grow their business without worrying about performance, hosting, SEO, and security updates.

So if you want to start a business website, a small blog, or an online store, you should definitely go for WordPress (or another similar CMS). But are you looking for a CMS made explicitly for online football news publishers that is constantly updated with performance, security, and SEO updates? Then FootballCMS just might be the one you have been looking for. 

90% of our clients switched from WordPress to FootballCMS, and no one switched back.

So what are the reasons online publishers switch from WordPress to FootballCMS?

We have asked our clients the main reasons for switching from WordPress to FootballCMS. Here’s what they told us:

- They were fed up with consistently having to update the code and plugins themselves or hiring a third-party developer to do it for them.

-With WordPress, it was impossible to develop specific football features to engage their users more. Like prediction games, live scores, vote man of the match etc. FootballCMS comes with all these features included, you can see them here

- Their WordPress website was hacked, and they were really worried about future security issues.

- A high monthly cost of paying a developer to optimize their WordPress website every month while not getting the best performance out of the website because of having to use external plugins for everything.

- Their website could not handle extremely significant traffic peaks around big football news events.

- They felt that the WordPress interface was hard to use and ‘messy’ because of the many features in there that they were not using.

What are others saying about Wordpress?

To answer this question, let’s take a look at what people have been asking about WordPress on Google by typing in “Why is WordPress so” and let Google auto-fill suggest the most asked questions using this phrase. So the most common questions are why WordPress is so ‘slow, hard to use, complicated, and expensive.

What others are saying about WordPress.
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An incomplete system means installing a lot of plugins and a slow and insecure website

To understand why WordPress is so hard to use and so slow, we have to look at the history of WordPress and its architecture. WordPress started in 2003 and is written in PHP. Since then, it got many updates, but the system's core remained unchanged.

As many clients (E-commerce, Business websites, Bloggers) started using WordPress, everybody had different needs that needed to be accommodated. So WordPress started their famous plugin store, where everybody can download plugins for their WordPress websites.

But there are some major issues with using WordPress plugins:

-Installing a lot of plugins slows down your website.

-When you update your WordPress website to a newer version, there is a high chance that many plugins will stop working.

-Everybody can make a WordPress plugin. WordPress is not responsible for maintaining these plugins as they were made by individuals or companies who often stop updating their plugins after a while, which causes performance and security issues for your website.

-The more WordPress plugins you use, the more vulnerable your website is to security issues and hacks.‍

So how is FootballCMS different from WordPress?

Automatic weekly updates vs Slower manual updates

The football news industry is ever-changing at an increasingly fast pace. It is crucial to continuously update your software to stay on top of these changes and be one step ahead of your competitors.

As Google is constantly updating its algorithms, keeping your website technically up to date with Google's latest requirements can be hard. At FootballCMS, we update our system at least once a week to maintain optimal performance, keep up with the changes in SEO requirements, improve security and add new features.

When your website runs on WordPress, updates are available less frequently, and you have to manually update your website.

Specialized features for football news websites

FootballCMS comes with a lot of features that are specially built for football fans. You can offer your users a complete match center with fast live scores and let your users vote on the man of the match after every match.

Besides this, your users can also pick the favorite lineup of their favorite team before every match and predict the score before every match in a special prediction game. All of this will ensure higher user engagement and more recurring traffic. You can see all features here.

Integrated news SEO features vs SEO plugins

Optimized on-site SEO is vital for football news websites that want to grow their organic traffic. WordPress has no built-in SEO tools (you have to rely on third-party plugins for this), whereas FootballCMS has several built-in SEO features tailored specifically for football news websites.

Our system also allows publishers to connect their Google Search Console with their website, which gives you incredibly powerful SEO insights by combining search data from Google itself with the data from your website. It’s similar to having an SEO consultant on payroll and at your disposal 24/7.

Native mobile apps come with FootballCMS

If you use WordPress as the main CMS for your website and want to offer a mobile app to your readers, you need to hire an expensive external mobile app developer to build native mobile apps that connect with your CMS. After these mobile apps are created, you must keep paying developers to constantly update your mobile apps to meet the newest requirements from Apple and Google.

FootballCMS comes with a mobile app solution that gives you two native mobile apps (iOS & Android) that have your design and are continuously updated. This way, you can offer high-quality mobile apps to your readers to download from the App Stores and don’t have to worry about updating your mobile apps.

Security and peace of mind included

WordPress is popular for all kinds of websites, but it is also popular with hackers. Constant manual security updates are needed to keep the hackers out. Many installed plugins also mean a lot of possible vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit and take advantage of. Research shows that most of the WordPress websites that were hacked were done by hackers through exploiting third-party plugins. Also, the fact that the WordPress code is public makes it much more vulnerable to security issues.

At FootballCMS, we don't use plugins, all features are natively integrated into the system, and we take care of all needed security updates to keep your website safe.

High-performance hosting

‍Optimal hosting is essential for the security of your website and to make sure your website is always fast and stays online when facing big traffic peaks.        

When running your website on WordPress, you must take care of the hosting and all the DevOps work of upgrading your servers and running security updates yourself. This can be a big hassle and lead to security issues when you don’t upgrade your servers on time.

With FootballCMS, we take care of high-performance globally distributed hosting, upgrade regularly and scale with your traffic. This means zero hassle for publishers and a lightning-fast website that makes your visitors happy and optimizes SEO traffic.

Facebook like community features vs Comment plugins

When you have a business website or an online store, there is not much of a need to build up a big community and offer the possibility for visitors to leave comments, etc. But for football news websites, building up a big community can be essential for its success.

A big community means a lot of direct recurring traffic, which is a more reliable traffic source than traffic from Google, Facebook, and Instagram, which can decrease dramatically with an algorithm update.

Also, for making money with your football news website, building up a community of registered and active users is vital. Especially now that Google Chrome announced that they will block third-party cookies in their browser by 2023. So it will become harder for online publishers to monetize their visitors if they don't register at your website.

FootballCMS has a lot of built-in features to help build  a community on your website:

-An advanced comment feature stimulates our users to leave comments and can process 220 comments per second at peak traffic moments.

-Users and visitors can give likes to each other comments. Just as on Facebook or Instagram, users receive an instant notification on the website or in their email (they can turn this feature on in their profile) if someone likes or replies to their comment.

-There is a community page available with leaderboards based on site activity like the number of comments and number of likes

-There are extensive profile pages within FootballCMS’s websites where users can change their preferences and enrich their profile page with information like their favorite football player, favorite club, etc.

There is a built-in forum feature where site owners can start a forum on their website, create and close topics, etc.

These features help get more registered visitors, which will significantly increase recurring traffic and revenue.

WordPress has no built-in community features. You would have to use external plugins, which don’t even offer all the community features that FootballCMS offers.

Use the power of data-driven publishing to grow your business

In today’s online publishing world, data-driven publishing is essential for football news publishers who want to grow their companies and stay ahead of the competition.

The fastest-growing football news publishers are the ones that have made data an integral part of their workflow.

That is why FootballCMS offers actionable data insights so you can make confident decisions based on data rather than just a gut feeling. For example,  the possibility of performing A/B tests on your headlines and seeing extensive data on your best-performing articles and authors.

WordPress does not have any of these data features, and there are also no plugins that offer A/B headline testing or the same data insights.

The rich editor makes publishing fast and easy

‍We have used our professional publishing experience and all our client's feedback to build the perfect editor for professional football news publishers. With our block editor, publishing becomes easy and smooth. You can add related articles, social posts, and even polls with literally one click.

By offering a state-of-the-art editor, we make sure editors can easily publish rich and SEO-optimized articles and can publish faster than the competition in the case of breaking football news events.

The editor of WordPress is not optimized for football news websites. You have to add plugins to add related articles automatically, and to add social posts. You have to use special embed codes.

Why people hesitate to change from WordPress to FootballCMS (and why they shouldn't)

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We'll end this comparison by looking at the reasons why some publishers are reluctant to switch from WordPress to FootballCMS and why there’s no reason to be hesitant. .

Reason 1: "I am scared to be locked in when I use FootballCMS."

Solution: We want to bind our clients by giving them the best CMS and service to build their football news website, not by locking them into our system. That is why we explicitly state in all contracts that we are obliged to help our clients if they want to transfer their website’s content from FootballCMS to another CMS.

Reason 2:" I am afraid I will pay more than with WordPress"

Solution: As hosting comes included with FootballCMS and you will spend less money buying plugins and hiring external developers and SEO consultants, you will pay a lot less per month.

Reason 3: "I don't want to risk losing all my SEO traffic when I move to FootballCMS."

Solution: We are experts in SEO migrations and have made our own redirect manager within FootballCMS, so there are no dead links or strange redirects created when clients move from WordPress to FootballCMS. So new clients who move to FootballCMS never see a significant drop in their SEO traffic, but almost all clients see steady growth from the 2nd month they have moved to FootballCMS, and Google starts to pick up the changes.

Conclusion

In short. WordPress is definitely an interesting CMS for business websites, E-commerce, or smaller publishers for which SEO, monetization, or community building is not important. Especially if you don't mind doing your website's software and security updates yourself or hiring an external developer for this, but if you are a more ambitious publisher who wants to grow his business with a CMS specialized for football news publishers, you should definitely consider using FootballCMS

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