How to Choose a CMS and Website Platform So You Don't Rebuild Everything in Two Years

You ask three developers what to build your new site on and get three different answers. One recommends WordPress because “half the internet runs on it”. The second suggests a website builder because “we’ll launch in a week and you won’t need a programmer”. The third says you need a “serious platform” and names something you’ve never heard of. All three sound convincing. And each of them, quite naturally, recommends what they work with themselves.

A website platform is like the foundation and utilities of a house: while everything works, you don’t think about them. You remember them when you need to add a floor, a second language, a warehouse connection, or when the developer has vanished and the admin password was only ever with him. You can redo a foundation, but it is always a separate project with a separate budget.

Below you’ll find what a CMS is, a table of selection criteria, a look at five platforms that were long considered the main ones (WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Weebly), and what has changed since then: Shopify, WooCommerce, builders like Wix and Webflow, headless and static sites. There won’t be a “best platform” ranking, because no such thing exists. There is a platform that fits your task, your team and your upkeep budget.

To keep the criteria from hanging in the air, one made-up example runs through the whole article: a Ukrainian natural cosmetics brand. About 150 products, sales in Ukraine and Poland, a site in two languages, delivery through Nova Poshta, a CRM for orders, a blog with skincare tips. A content manager updates the site, and there is no programmer on staff. The company is invented, the situations are typical.

A CMS (content management system) is software that lets you add and change pages, texts, photos, products and articles through an admin panel, without touching the code. When the content manager at our cosmetics brand adds a new cream, changes a price or publishes a blog post, she is working in the CMS.

The word “platform” usually hides three different things, and it pays to tell them apart before you even talk to a developer.

The main difference isn’t where it’s easier to drag blocks around with a mouse. It’s who owns the site and the data, who updates the system and what happens when you want to leave.

The most common mistake is choosing a platform by a familiar name or by launch price. You choose a platform by what the site has to do in a year or two, not on launch day. Go through the table and answer every row honestly.

For our cosmetics brand the answers look like this: someone without code updates the site, a shop with 150 products and variants, two languages with different prices, integrations with Nova Poshta, a CRM and Ukrainian payment providers, a small monthly upkeep budget, a wish to own the data. Even from this you can see that some options drop out before anyone has shown a design.

If you don’t have answers to these questions yet, gather them before you meet a developer. How to evaluate the contractor and what to ask them about the platform is covered in “How to choose a website developer”.

Figures about “half the internet running on WordPress” get repeated year after year and are often out of date. The most widely used public data source is W3Techs, which scans millions of sites and counts what they run on. The data below comes from the W3Techs overview, checked on 28.10.2026.

According to the same data, another 32.1% of sites don’t use any CMS that W3Techs recognises: these are custom builds, static sites and plain old HTML pages.

Market share shows how easy it is to find a contractor, plugins and answers on forums. It doesn’t show that the platform is right for you. Drupal, with its 0.6%, runs large government and university sites, and for them it’s a deliberate choice, not a mistake.

WordPress started as a blogging platform, and today it powers company sites, media, portals and shops. Its main strength is the ecosystem: thousands of themes and plugins, plenty of developers on the market, answers to almost any question. For a content manager the WordPress admin is usually clear from day one: pages, posts, media, menus.

Now the honest part. WordPress itself is free, but a site on it doesn’t maintain itself for free. You pay for:

• hosting that meets the WordPress requirements: currently PHP 8.3 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 and HTTPS support are recommended;
• regular updates of the core, theme and plugins, with a backup before them and a check afterwards that nothing broke;
• paid plugins, which are often sold as a yearly subscription rather than a one-off purchase;
• the time of the person who figures out why the form or the cart broke after an update.

A typical situation: the site was built on a heavy theme with thirty plugins, nobody installed updates for two years, and then one of the plugins becomes the gateway for a hack. WordPress itself is less to blame here than the lack of someone looking after it. If your site is already live and slow, start with “How to speed up a WordPress site”: it goes through the theme, plugins, cache and hosting.

For our example brand, WordPress with WooCommerce is a real option: there are modules for Nova Poshta and Ukrainian payment providers, plugins for two languages, plenty of contractors. But monthly upkeep has to go into the budget from the start, otherwise the savings on the licence will be eaten by the first emergency call to a developer.

Drupal is an open-source CMS for complex sites: portals with several content types, roles and access rights, large numbers of pages and languages. Unlike WordPress, multilingual support is in the core: the official Drupal guide lists four core modules for it (Language, Interface Translation, Content Translation, Configuration Translation). You just switch them on instead of hunting for a third-party plugin.

The price of flexibility is the entry threshold. A content editor in Drupal can work without code, but you won’t be able to configure and develop the site without an experienced developer. And there are noticeably fewer such developers on the market than for WordPress, so expect their hourly rate to be higher.

What has changed since 2023:

• Drupal 7 reached end of life on 5 January 2025. If your site still runs on it, it no longer gets security updates from the community.
• Drupal 10 is supported until 9 December 2026, Drupal 12 is planned for the end of 2026, and the current version is 11, according to the Drupal release schedule. Major versions here need to be planned as separate projects.
• nasa.gov, long cited as the flagship Drupal example, moved to WordPress in 2023. That doesn’t make Drupal worse, the example is simply out of date.

For a cosmetics brand with two languages, Drupal is like a truck for driving around town: it’ll cope, but it costs more to run than you need. It makes sense when there are five languages, ten editor roles and content more complex than “page plus product”.

Magento has long been a platform built specifically for ecommerce, and since Adobe bought it, it has existed in two versions:

• Magento Open Source is free code under the OSL 3.0 licence. The repository README describes it as a foundation with basic ecommerce features on which you build a shop “from scratch”. Hosting, updates, security and development are on you.
• Adobe Commerce is Adobe’s paid commercial version with extended features, vendor support and cloud options.

In the Adobe Commerce release log, the current 2.4.9 line was released on 12 May 2026 with regular support until 31 May 2029. Older lines are gradually dropped from support, so a Magento shop needs planned updates, not “build it and forget it”.

Strengths: catalogues of thousands and tens of thousands of products, multiple warehouses and storefronts, complex pricing and discount rules, B2B scenarios. Weaknesses: heavy server requirements, complex development, a narrow pool of specialists and a budget to match. For the 150 products of our example brand, Magento is overkill: most of the budget would go not on selling cosmetics but on keeping the platform running.

Joomla is an open-source CMS that appeared in 2005 and was once a serious competitor to WordPress. The project is alive: according to the Joomla roadmap, the current 6.x branch was released on 14 October 2025 with security support until 16 October 2029, and the 5.x branch only gets security fixes until 12 October 2027.

Joomla has built-in multilingual support and a flexible access rights system. For an editor the admin is more complex than in WordPress, but you can work in it without code. The claim that “Joomla is mainly for ecommerce and social networks” and that it beats WordPress for large projects no longer holds: a shop needs third-party extensions, and Joomla’s market share, per the W3Techs data above, is around 1%.

The practical consequence of a small share: fewer new extensions, fewer contractors, a longer search for someone to maintain it. If your site is already on Joomla and works, moving just to follow fashion isn’t necessary. Updating to a supported version is enough. A new Joomla project is worth starting if you already have a team that knows it well.

Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder that Square bought in 2018. For a simple site without a developer it used to be a sensible choice.

In 2026 it’s no longer a question of convenience but of availability. Weebly announced it is winding down operations in 67 countries, among them Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan and others. Sites in these countries were unpublished on 27 September 2026, and account access remains until 26 December 2026 so you can export your data and transfer your domain.

This case illustrates the “ownership and data portability” row from the criteria table well. A platform can be convenient, cheap and stable for years, then change the rules for your country with a few months’ notice. If you still have a site on Weebly, export your data through the account settings (My Data) and start preparing the move now, including redirects from the old URLs so you don’t lose your search rankings.

The overview above repeats the classic list that long travelled from one article about choosing a platform to the next. In recent years, options that usually weren’t on that list have become prominent. A short note on each, no advertising.

Shopify: a cloud platform for shops

Shopify is a subscription platform for online shops: hosting, security and updates are on the service’s side, you keep the products, the design and the sales. According to W3Techs it’s the second most common system after WordPress. You launch quickly, and the admin is clear to someone without code.

What to check first. Whether Shopify’s own payment system is available depends on the country: in Ukraine, for example, Shopify Payments isn’t available, so a business there connects a third-party payment provider. And for payments through third-party providers Shopify charges an extra fee on every transaction: 2% on the Basic plan, according to the pricing page as of 28.10.2026. Add paid apps for delivery, reviews or filters to the subscription, and the monthly total comes out noticeably higher than the plan price on the banner. Modules for local delivery services exist, but check them before launch, not after.

WooCommerce: a shop on WordPress

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into an online shop. The plugin page lists more than 7 million active installations, and according to W3Techs it’s used by 19.7% of WordPress sites. Its strength is the same as WordPress’s: freedom, your own data, plenty of modules for local payment and delivery services. Its weakness is the same too: updates, plugin compatibility, hosting that handles the load and someone who keeps an eye on all of it. Paid extensions here are often sold as subscriptions as well.

Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, Tilda: website builders

Builders give you a quick start and a good looking result without a developer, and the service takes care of security updates. For a business card site, a landing page or a portfolio, that’s often a sensible choice. But “cheap forever” doesn’t exist here: a subscription every year, paid plans for a shop and integrations, prices the service can change.

The main risk of a builder is moving away. Wix states plainly in its help centre that a site has to run on its servers and external hosting isn’t supported. Webflow lets you export the code, but according to its help centre, CMS content (collections, articles, products) isn’t included in the code export, it’s exported separately as spreadsheets. So you can leave, but you get the layout as static pages: the blog, catalogue and forms will have to be rebuilt on the new platform, and the data moved over by hand.

Before choosing a builder, ask yourself one question: if in three years the service doubles its price or leaves my country, what can I take with me? The Weebly story above shows the question isn’t theoretical.

Headless and static sites

Headless is an approach where the CMS is only responsible for content (texts, products, photos), while the site the visitor sees is built separately by a developer and pulls data from the CMS through an API. A static site is built in advance into ready HTML pages that the server simply delivers. Both options are usually fast, have fewer attack points and give complete design freedom.

You pay for it with dependence on the team. Every new feature is development, not a five-minute plugin. This approach makes sense when you have a permanent developer or a contractor on a support contract, high speed requirements and a non standard design. For a cosmetics brand with no programmer on staff, headless would be a beautiful car with no spare parts at the nearest garage.

Here’s an order of steps that helps you choose a platform without arguing about taste.

1. Fill in the criteria table from the section above. One or two sentences per row. This is your brief for the conversation with a developer.
2. Weed out the obvious. No shop, no need for Magento. No programmer and there won’t be one, be careful with headless and Drupal. Owning your data and being able to move matter to you, weigh the risks of builders.
3. Calculate the cost over three years, not just the launch. Development plus hosting or a subscription, plus paid plugins or apps, plus fees, plus monthly upkeep and updates.
4. Ask the developer three things. Who will install updates and how often? How do we export all products, pages and orders if we leave? In whose name will the domain, hosting and accounts be registered?
5. Ask to see the admin of a live site, not a presentation. Let the person who will update the site try adding a product and changing a text themselves.

For our example brand, after these steps two options usually remain in the final: WordPress with WooCommerce and monthly upkeep, or Shopify with a third-party payment provider and tested delivery modules. Both work. Choosing between them is choosing between ownership and freedom on one side and fewer technical worries on the other.

The platform is inseparable from hosting: which server WordPress or Magento lives on affects both speed and security. More on that in a separate article, “How to choose web hosting”. And to keep the platform from becoming a hostage of your contractor, check before you start what stays with you if they disappear: “Contractor disappeared. What’s left of your website?”.

There is no best platform for everyone. WordPress gives freedom and a big ecosystem, but needs someone to look after it. Drupal and Magento are strong in complex scenarios and expensive to maintain. Joomla is alive, but its niche has narrowed. Weebly showed that even a convenient service can leave your country. Shopify and builders take the technical hassle off your hands, but make you dependent on the service’s rules.

Choose the platform starting from the task: who will update the site, what it sells, how many languages, which integrations, how much you’re willing to pay for upkeep every month and whether you can leave with your data. If you have honest answers to these questions, the choice usually narrows to one or two options on its own.

If you’d like to check your answers with someone who has seen different platforms from the inside, write to us. We’ll help you weigh the options for your task and, if needed, build the site or shop: more on the website and online store development page.