Typo3 or WordPress

Typo3 or WordPress: Which CMS should you choose for your project?

In the CMS market, there is WordPress, which accounts for 65% of the world’s traffic, and the others, including Typo3 with 1% of the traffic. From the outset, you could say “I trust the market leader!”, but it can really be worth comparing the two platforms.

The versions analyzed

WordPress V5

WordPress version 5 launch — December 2018.
WordPress release 5.4.1 — April 2020.
Each update is free, but you have to install it if you have enough development skills, or have it done by your agency, which logically charges for it and makes sure that the features still work.

Typo3 V10

Release of Typo3 V10 — April 21, 2020.
Release of Typo3 10.4.3 LTS — May 19, 2020.
You will have noticed the “LTS” associated with the version, which stands for long-term support. Support is included until April 2023, allowing security updates and browser compatibility…. After that, you have to buy the support extension “ELTS”, which costs between 2000€ and 15000€, depending on the case.

Regardless of the platform, you can be reassured because there are regular updates, but whatever happens, it has its price.

The functions of WordPress & Typo3

To make a choice, it is important to check the features of the two CMS to make sure you start with the system that best suits your needs.

WordPress: Easy to get started

Wordpress allows you to create pages easily using the block editor.

It allows us to generate hierarchical content at multiple levels (pages) and content (articles) that can be more flexible (i.e. they can be grouped by categories, tags, etc., which can be extremely handy if an article can be assigned to multiple classifications).

Example: “a recipe for spinach quiche” can be assigned to the category “quiche” and the tags “vegetarian” and “main dish”.
Articles allow visitors to leave comments.

On the access rights page, there are 5 roles that can be used to enrich the page with content (super admin / administrator / editor / author / contributor).
https://wordpress.org/support/article/roles-and-capabilities

That’s pretty much it, after that you’ll need to install plugins for the rest, but we’ll get to that later.

Typo3: take your time to learn the ropes.

Basically, Typo3 is a bit more complicated to learn and the backend is sober. But once you get past this familiarization phase, you realize that the CMS lets you create many page templates (especially a contact form) and that it’s quite easy to save your own templates in advance and then reuse them directly in the backend.

The contact form allows collecting emails (in compliance with legal requirements) and sending them.

Multilingualism is managed by default and generates hreflang tags, as it should be (this is a real SEO plus).

Here is the case of tuicars.com. The hreflang tags are generated correctly for all three target languages.

The user management is very fine, you can create groups that can publish only in certain parts of the site, you can forbid/allow the placement of external links, …

Finally, the backend (backoffice) and the frontend are separated, which makes updates very easy. (Developers will appreciate that!).

WordPress or Typo3 — which is better for search engine optimization?

WordPress: Endless customization possibilities.

WordPress is an excellent, easy-to-learn CMS that allows you to create any kind of website (media, corporate presentation, recipe site, small e-commerce, … ), provided you choose a suitable template. (Don’t hesitate to spend some hours to choose it properly and pay for it, as free templates are usually feature-poor).

For the SEO aspect, you need to add plugins (extensions) to :

Manage meta: title, description (Yoast SEO extension works well for this).
Manage semantic markup (Schema.org, JSON-LD) …
Avoid broken internal links.
Manage redirects
Manage multilingualism
…
And make sure they still work when updated.

Typo 3: Interesting native features

Typo3 is more complicated to learn, but this CMS is tailored to structures that have a large number of contributors.

For the SEO aspect :

The solution manages multilingualism by default (hreflang).
Creates redirects by default when a content changes its name.
Checks for broken links by default
Displays images in lazy loading by default.
But some extensions (plugins) remain indispensable to :

Then WordPress will certainly serve its purpose.

Another important point, as Typo3 is less used. (The community is very developed in Germany, Switzerland and the Nordic countries), but since it requires more technical skills, the specialized agencies are often of high quality.

To put it simply:
Anyone can create a WordPress website, but there are not only good ones and only a few are able to create a Typo3, but the quality is right.

WordPress Resources :
WordPress 5.8: https://wordpress.org/support/wordpress-version/version-5-8/
wp plugins: https://wordpress.org/plugins/
Use blocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfrzGeB5_g

Typo3 resources:
Typo3: https://typo3.org/
General functions: https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/tutorial-getting-started/master/en-us/GeneralPrinciples/Index.html
User management: https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/tutorial-getting-started/master/enus/UserManagement/Index.html
Typo3 extensions: https://extensions.typo3.org/