The ever evolving world of blog platforms can be confusing so we try to help our clients understand the basic differences between the options they are considering.  Much of the discussion regarding platform benefits is often slanted from a developers point of view, making it a bit frustrating and hard to understand for someone who isn’t living in the coding world. Therefore, we created this quick and easy overview to help our non-techy friends grasp the “so what” of both platforms. We would love to hear from you on what we need to add or simplify even further.

Functionality & Control

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. WordPress is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. WordPress can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control.  Wordpress is hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization. We are actually switching many corporate sites done in asp or html to WordPress so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for the marcom or IT department to update site pages for them. WordPress has the advantage of being installed on your own server.

Tumblr cannot be installed on your server… a site is hosted on the Tumblr platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr. For some reasons why we love Tumblr, read this older post called, aptly, Why Tumblr? that Kristi we published some months ago.

Cost and Usability

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike.  Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device.

WordPress also offers a fairly simple to use back-end and supports multiple media formats. The cost of the WordPress platform is free, but custom design and hosting is not. (You can use wordpress.com for free, I think, but your functionality and design choices are much more limited.)

Design, Customization and Integration

With WordPress you can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage.  Tumblr on the other hand is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied on every page on the site, and the url’s for those pages are really ugly – this is the one for “About Kristi“ from her personal site.) WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding vs. Tumblr that must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality. WordPress allows you to include native calendars and contact pages which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end. Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding.

Search Engine Optimization, Ads and Performance

WordPress is very friendly with the search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end. WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on different pages as you choose.  Wordpress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance providing a better user experience.

Tumblr and SEO is not something we know how to optimize at present. We are researching it. There are some trick coding ways you can do ads, but nothing straightforward.

Bottom line: we recommend WordPress to some clients, and Tumblr to others. It depends on what you want to do, who your audience is, what your technical threshold is for learning, and who is going to be using the site to write content. Both are great platforms in their own right, and we will continue to provide services for both. What do you use for your sites or blog? Tell us in the comments!