This article is part of our series on Visor. For the full picture, start with The choice behind every website.
When organisations compare website platforms, they usually compare what it costs to get started: the licence, the build, and the time to launch. Those numbers are easy to find and easy to compare. They are also a small part of what a website costs over its life.
A website runs for years after launch. In that time it has to be patched, watched, backed up, changed, and kept online through its busiest days. That work is where most of the cost sits, and it looks different depending on which kind of CMS you chose.
On a free CMS, the cost is keeping it safe
A free CMS such as WordPress costs nothing to download. The cost is the work of keeping it safe. Each page is built when someone asks for it, by code running on a public server that usually hosts the staff login page too. Most features come from plugins written by separate developers, and every plugin adds code that has to be kept up to date.
That turns into a standing list of jobs:
- Updating the core software, the theme, and every plugin as fixes come out
- Testing each update, because one plugin's update can break another
- Paying for security plugins, a firewall, monitoring, backups, and better hosting
- Watching for newly found flaws and applying urgent fixes, often out of hours
None of these jobs ends. Each needs someone with the right skills, every month the site is live. When one slips, the damage reaches past the budget. A defaced homepage or a data leak costs the organisation the trust of the people who use its site.
On an enterprise CMS, the cost is running it
An enterprise CMS answers many of those problems with structure: approval steps, permissions, and support from the vendor. It brings running costs of its own. The platform usually needs separate systems for editing content and for serving pages, along with servers, databases, and search, all kept running and in step with each other.
After launch, the costs that keep coming are:
- Licence fees that often rise with each new website or user
- Developers trained in the vendor's own tools, usually hired through an outside firm
- Upgrades to new versions that turn into projects of their own
- Small layout changes that wait for a developer and a formal release
Over time, more of the budget goes to keeping the platform running, and less goes to improving the websites on it.
Every new website adds to the bill
Both kinds of CMS share one more cost: it grows with each site. A second website means a second set of plugins to patch, or a second set of servers and licences to pay for. An organisation with sites for departments, brands, campaigns, and regions pays these running costs once for every site it runs.
AI makes this grow faster. When a team can produce a new website in an afternoon, it tends to produce more of them, and each one is another site to secure, update, and keep online.
Questions to ask before you choose
The price of getting started tells you little about these costs. These questions tell you more:
- Who keeps the site patched, and how much of that work does the platform do itself?
- What runs on the public server when a visitor opens a page?
- What does a layout change involve after launch?
- What does the tenth website cost compared with the first?
- What happens to the site on the day visitor numbers jump?
How Visor deals with these costs
Visor was designed around these running costs from the start. Pages are prepared in advance and served as finished files, so no plugin code or database answers a visitor's request, and there is far less to patch.
The platform patches and maintains the infrastructure, manages SSL certificates, and runs CMS upgrades on a standby copy first, so a failed upgrade rolls back simply. New websites join the same platform and can be cloned from an existing site, so the tenth site does not need its own setup.
In short
A free CMS costs little to start and a lot to keep safe. An enterprise CMS keeps control and costs a lot to run. Both costs arrive after launch, and both grow with every website. Ask about year two and site twenty before you choose.
Read more: The choice behind every website, Why pages built in advance are safer and stay up, and Running fifty websites like one.
