Top 14 PHP CMS Platforms For Businesses Website Development

PHP, a server-side scripting language, is renowned for its significant role in web development, powering a substantial portion of the internet. The adoption of PHP CMS platforms brings a multitude of benefits to businesses. These platforms offer a perfect amalgamation of cost-efficiency, extensive support communities, flexibility, and a wide array of features that cater to various business needs, from eCommerce solutions to interactive and engaging corporate websites.

Moreover, the open-source nature of many CMS frameworks in PHP fosters innovation and continuous improvement, ensuring businesses can leverage the latest technological advancements to stay ahead in their digital endeavors.

The Best PHP CMS platforms For Developing Business Websites

The strategic selection of a PHP CMS Platform can have a profound impact on a business’s growth. As we delve into the top PHP CMS platforms for business website development, it is crucial to recognize the pivotal role these systems play in creating, managing, and optimizing web presence with ease and efficiency.

WordPress

Launched in 2003, WordPress evolved from a simple blogging platform into a comprehensive, multifaceted tool for creating various websites. Renowned for its user-friendliness, flexibility, and extensive feature set, WordPress has become the go-to choice for individuals, businesses, and organizations looking to establish a compelling online presence.

Widespread Use: WordPress is utilized by over 810 million websites, accounting for 43.2% of all live websites on the internet.

Market Growth: WordPress has seen a nearly 4% increase in the number of powered sites over the last year, showcasing its expanding dominance in the CMS market.

CMS Market Share: WordPress has a massive 63.3% market share within the CMS industry, making it the most popular CMS by a wide margin.

Plugins and Themes: There are over 59,483 free WordPress plugins and 8,874 free themes available, offering extensive customization options for users.

Drupal

Drupal is a robust, open-source CMS (CMS) that stands out for its flexibility and extensive customization capabilities. It caters to a wide range of users, from individuals and small businesses to large corporations and government institutions. Drupal’s architecture is highly scalable, making it an ideal choice for websites with complex content structures or those expecting high traffic volumes.

Market Position: Drupal is currently positioned 6th in the CMS market, with a 1.2% usage on all sites with a known CMS, translating to a 1.8% market share.

Usage Among Top Sites: Despite its overall market position, Drupal boasts a significant presence among high-traffic sites. It’s used on 3.1% of the top million sites and impressively on 7.5% of the top 1,000 sites worldwide.

Enterprise-Level CMS: Drupal is particularly favored for more complex, large-scale projects due to its powerful capabilities, reflecting its positioning as a leading enterprise CMS in PHP.

SEO Capability: Drupal is recognized for its strong SEO tools, which include advanced features for metadata and taxonomy management, helping websites to perform better in search engine rankings.

API Extensibility: The platform is known for its extensive API support, including RESTful Web Services and JSON:API in Drupal 8 and 9, enhancing its integration capabilities with various web services and applications.

Magento

Magento, now known as Adobe Commerce, is a leading open-source eCommerce platform that offers unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and customization options for online store owners. It caters to a broad spectrum of businesses, from small startups to large enterprises. Magento is one of the best eCommerce CMS in PHP and includes powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.

Usage and Popularity: Magento powers over 239,000 live websites, showcasing its widespread adoption and trust among eCommerce businesses.

Growth: The platform has seen significant growth, with a quarterly growth of 6.4% in the number of Magento stores in the third quarter of 2023, and an impressive 33% annual growth.

Community and Contributors: The official Adobe Magento community forum boasts over 470,000 members, and the Magento 2 GitHub repository has 1,533 active contributors, highlighting a rich and active community.

Business Growth: Businesses that use Magento are found to grow three times faster on average, showcasing the platform’s effectiveness in supporting business expansion.

Joomla

Joomla is a powerful, open-source CMS recognized for its flexibility and extensive functionality. It offers a middle ground between the user-friendliness of WordPress and the complexity of Drupal, making it suitable for a wide range of websites, including eCommerce, blogs, and governmental sites. Joomla’s extensive range of extensions and templates allows users to customize their sites to fit their specific needs, while its active community provides valuable support and resources.

Market Share and Usage: Joomla is used on 1.6% of all live websites, making it the fifth most used CMS platform.

User Base: There are an estimated 1,144,205 live websites that use Joomla, highlighting its significant adoption across the globe for various types of projects.

Popularity Among Top Sites: It is used by 1.34% of the top 1 million sites, 1.88% of the top 100 thousand websites, and 1.74% of the top 10 thousand sites.

Community and Extensions: Joomla boasts a vast library of extensions and templates, backed by a strong community of developers and users.

Learning Curve: Compared to other CMS platforms, Joomla presents a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features and customization options.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop has grown to be a prominent choice among eCommerce platforms due to its user-friendly interface, customizable nature, and rich feature set. Written in PHP and requiring a MySQL database to operate, PrestaShop is designed to cater to businesses of all sizes.

Adoption and Use: PrestaShop powers over 250,000 online stores worldwide, demonstrating its widespread acceptance and reliability as an eCommerce platform.

Community and Support: The platform boasts a vibrant community of over 470,000 members and 1,533 active contributors on its GitHub repository, offering extensive support and resources to users.

SEO Optimization: PrestaShop provides users with tools and modules to optimize their online store for search engines, enhancing visibility and potentially driving more traffic to their site.

ECommerce Specialization: Compared to other CMS platforms like Joomla, Magento, and WordPress, PrestaShop stands out with its eCommerce specialization, offering tailored tools for online store creation and management.

OctoberCMS

OctoberCMS is built on the Laravel framework and is a dynamic PHP CMS for enterprise. Its simplicity and adaptability have earned it the trust of enterprises worldwide. With the wide variety of plugins and themes available, businesses have the ability to design visually appealing, retina-ready apps and websites.

User Base: As of now, OctoberCMS has a significant and growing user base, with over 93,000 customers globally.

Market Share: OctoberCMS has a 0.2% market share among all CMSes.

Security and Reliability: OctoberCMS is often compared favorably to other CMS platforms like WordPress in terms of security and reliability, thanks to its modern architecture.

OpenCart

OpenCart is known for its user-friendly interface, straightforward setup process, and extensive features that cater to both newcomers and experienced developers as an eCommerce CMS in PHP. It offers a wide range of customization options through themes and modules, enabling users to tailor their online stores to their specific needs and preferences.

Popularity in eCommerce: Despite the competitive landscape of eCommerce platforms, OpenCart maintains its position with a stable user base, thanks to its open-source nature and extensive customization capabilities.

Community and Contributions: Being an open-source solution, OpenCart’s development and maintenance are driven by a community of developers.

Global Reach and Multilingual Support: OpenCart supports numerous languages and currencies, facilitating businesses to expand their reach globally without significant barriers.

Economic and Accessible: As a free-to-use platform, OpenCart presents an economically viable option for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to venture into online retail without incurring substantial initial costs.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce allows users to turn their WordPress sites into fully functional online stores, offering a wide range of features and extensive flexibility to sell both physical and digital goods. Its integration with WordPress makes it a powerful tool for content management alongside eCommerce, providing users with a comprehensive platform to manage their online presence. It is the best eCommerce PHP CMS in this list.

Market Dominance: WooCommerce powers over 28% of all online stores, making it one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the internet.

Active Installations: There are over 5 million active installations of WooCommerce, a testament to its reliability and efficiency as an eCommerce solution.

Community and Support: Being an open-source platform, WooCommerce benefits from a large community contributing plugins with the plugin repository boasting over 6,000 WooCommerce-specific plugins.

SEO Advantage: By inheriting WordPress’ strong SEO capabilities, WooCommerce stores have a competitive edge in search engine rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find them online.

CraftCMS

Craft is a relatively new CMS built on PHP with an emphasis on making development easier. It may not have the largest user base, but it stands out thanks to its developer-friendly approach and runs 33,000+ websites. The editor-friendly backend interface makes content management a breeze, allowing for frequent content publishing.

Developer Community: Craft CMS has cultivated a vibrant developer community, with 212 partners and over 5,000 Discord accounts actively using or discussing the CMS.

Global Brands Trust: Renowned companies such as Netflix, Adidas, and IKEA trust Craft CMS for their websites, which speaks volumes about its capabilities.

Security and Reliability: Craft CMS is positioned as a more secure and reliable alternative to WordPress, with fewer vulnerabilities due to its architecture and the lesser reliance on third-party plugins.

HubSpot CMS

HubSpot CMS is designed as an integrated CMS that aligns closely with inbound marketing strategies. The platform stands out for its ease of use, with features like a drag-and-drop editor and a rich theme library. At the same time, it offers enough depth and flexibility for developers through features like the CMS Developer Sandbox, HubDB, and access to APIs for custom integrations.

Its focus on inbound marketing is evident in its built-in tools for SEO, content strategy, and lead generation, making it a powerful option for businesses looking to attract, engage, and delight customers online.

Adoption and Usage: Approximately 145,370 websites utilize the HubSpot CMS, reflecting its popularity and trust among businesses for their online presence.

Comprehensive Integration: HubSpot CMS is fully integrated into HubSpot’s Customer Platform, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Ops Hub, and Commerce Hub, all connected to the HubSpot CRM platform.

Developer-Friendly Features: The platform is designed not only for marketers but also for developers, offering advanced customization options, access to APIs, and a developer sandbox for testing.

Ease of Use: The CMS offers a user-friendly system with a theme library and a drag-and-drop editor, making it easy for users to create and manage their websites without extensive technical expertise.

PyroCMS

PyroCMS is a Laravel-based CMS that emphasizes efficiency and flexibility in web development. It’s designed to assist developers in building Laravel websites and applications more efficiently, catering to businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

Customization and Flexibility: PyroCMS is highly customizable, providing extensive options for developers to tailor the CMS to their project’s requirements.

Developer-Friendly: It is designed with developers in mind, offering a fast learning curve, especially for those familiar with Laravel.

Time Efficiency: Users report significant time savings by utilizing PyroCMS’s pre-built features and templates, enabling the completion of projects in a week or less.

Seamless Blog Integration: The platform seamlessly integrates a blog plugin, eliminating the need for separate programs or plugins for blog functionality.

Professional Appearance: PyroCMS enables the creation of visually appealing websites with minimal effort, thanks to its range of out-of-the-box features.

ContaoCMS

A free and open-source CMS built on the PHP CMS platforms, Contao (formerly TYPOlight) is ideal for medium- to large-term websites. Contao streamlines the process of creating and designing websites with its pre-designed modules and separate multilingual backend.

Open Source and License: Contao is open-source software licensed under the LGPL-3.0, allowing free use even for commercial projects.

Community and Support: Contao boasts a strong community that provides support through forums and professional training.

Performance: Contao is designed to be performant even with large installations, supporting modern technologies like HTTP2, deferred image resizing, and compatibility with HTTP caches like Varnish.

Adoption and Usage: Contao has been used to create over 175,000 websites, ranging from landing pages and portals to eCommerce and enterprise sites.

NEOS CMS

Neos is another developer-focused open-source PHP CMS Platforms. It provides enterprises with full leeway to create dynamic designs according to their specific requirements. Connected to the robust PHP framework Flow, it goes beyond a typical CMS, with an emphasis on content extension and integration.

Inline Editing: NEOS provides a seamless inline editing experience, allowing editors to make changes directly on the webpage.

Multi-Language Support: With full Unicode support, NEOS enables content creation in any language, including the use of symbols and emojis.

Extensibility: Through its extension packages & plugins, NEOS can be easily updated and extended, offering custom solutions for unique business requirements.

TYPO3

With its adaptability and cross-platform compatibility, TYPO3 is an ideal CMS for eCommerce and enterprise-level applications. It meets global user demands with extensive community support and 50-language localization. The developer experience is improved by its ability to handle code and content separately.

Global Adoption: TYPO3 has a significant presence in the European market, particularly in Germany.

Security and Updates: The TYPO3 security team actively works to maintain the CMS’s integrity, regularly releasing security advisories and updates.

User Satisfaction: TYPO3 has received a ‘great’ User Satisfaction Rating of 87%, based on 179 user reviews across recognized software review sites which indicates it’s a very reliable CMS for website in PHP.

Conclusion

The selection of a PHP CMS for enterprise website should align with your business needs, technical requirements, and long-term digital strategy. Whether you’re looking for extensive customization options, multilingual support, security, or a vibrant developer community, the PHP ecosystem has a solution that can cater to your specific demands.

Each of these CMS options offers unique features and benefits, from TYPO3’s enterprise-level scalability and security to Craft CMS’s flexibility and ease of use, OctoberCMS’s developer-friendly environment, NEOS’s inline editing capabilities, Contao’s commitment to web standards and accessibility, and PyroCMS’s Laravel-based efficiency.

However, leveraging the full potential of these platforms requires expertise and experience. This is where professional development services come into play. Techcronus Business Solutions specializes in delivering bespoke PHP CMS Platforms website development solutions that are tailored to your business goals.

By partnering with Techcronus, you ensure that your business website is not just another URL on the internet but a dynamic, engaging, and secure digital experience that drives growth and success.