A near unanimity (93 percent) of enterprise IT and marketing decision makers in the US and UK believe that there are multiple benefits to having a secondary CMS. This is the outcome of an international study jointly commissioned by WP Engine and Manifesto and conducted by Vanson Bourne.
The ‘WordPress Success Among Enterprise CMSs’ study commissioned by WP Engine surveyed over 300 enterprise-level IT and marketing decision makers in the US and UK. The majority (61 percent) of the respondents worked for organizations with at least 3,000 employees and on average came from organizations whose global revenue totaled $3.2 billion.
The survey found WordPress is on par with Adobe Experience Manager as the most frequently used CMS in either a primary or secondary fashion. Further, WordPress was the leading secondary CMS due to the fact that it is open source software and consequently is better able to integrate and work well with other content management systems like Adobe and Sitecore.
Key findings of the Vanson Bourne CMS study include
- 53 percent of respondents said their organization uses two or more CMSs. Of those who are using more than one CMS, the decision maker is most often (46 percent) an executive in the company, proving it is a strategic decision for the enterprise.
- Adobe Experience Manager is the most commonly used CMS (60 percent), with WordPress a close second (57 percent). The next most popular CMS was Sitecore CMS coming in a distant third (22 percent).
- WordPress is the most likely used CMS across several verticals including both retail (73 percent) and business services/consulting (63 percent) organizations.
- WordPress is most likely to be used for an organization’s corporate website (64 percent), brand or product website (59 percent) and eCommerce (46 percent).
- Where WordPress is being used as a secondary CMS it would bring clear benefits to the enterprise consisting of better publishing capability (54 percent), agility (53 percent), experimentation (53 percent) and customization/personalization (51 percent).
- Respondents plan to use additional CMSs (41 percent); and for organizations not already using a CMS, more enterprises indicated they will select WordPress than any other system (22 percent).
- Marketing (71 percent) led the list of departments choosing to use WordPress as their CMS, followed by IT (61 percent) and Sales (44 percent).
WordPress as CMS
The benefits of having a secondary CMS include faster time to market, ease of use, agility and the ability to experiment and customize quickly. Among WordPress users, as either their primary or secondary CMS, the benefits of using WordPress ranged from scalability, a robust ecosystem, quicker time to market and better analytics and security to the increasing availability of skilled WordPress developers.
“Enterprise companies are seeing the intrinsic benefits of using multiple CMSs to help run their business,” said Mary Ellen Dugan, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at WP Engine. “The decision to go with more than one CMS is most often made at the executive level, proving the strategic value that multiple CMS deliver to an enterprise. The results showed that WordPress is already a top platform with clear benefits from both an integration and agility standpoint. In the future, the study shows WordPress expanding its market share to provide exceptional digital experiences with greater agility, with greater ease of use and faster time to market.”
The custom survey was designed collaboratively by WP Engine, Manifesto and Vanson Bourne. The study was administered in October 2017 to 300 enterprise-level IT and marketing decision makers in the U.S. and U.K. at companies with at least 1,000 employees and an average global revenue of $3.2 billion.
WP Engine’s WordPress hosting experts serve over 70,000 companies across 130 countries. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco, California; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; Limerick, Ireland, and Brisbane, Australia.
