Why is this important? It matters because using a more popular platform can provide access to more tools, skilled exponents, experience, and integrated plugins and functions.

AXLR8 have provided may web integrations for 20 years. We have moved from HTML through Dreamweaver into Joomla, Drupal and latterly WordPress. Likewise for e-commerce platforms and many other functions we have moved with the times (but staying a little behind to trade reliability and ecosystem for new whizzy shiny things. This has given us a “hinterland” and the experience and skills to deal with any integration whilst moving to the platforms as their popularity grows and wanes

Our latest web plugins (for example in Job advertising Boards as part of our ATS) are now all built around WordPress. This CMS has a dominant market share now. We recently were asked to help with a Drupal project and have some integrations with Joomla. I always perceived these CMS platforms as very good but lost in history. So what are the market shares in CMS and who is growing and falling?

The request to help a team plug our API into a new Drupal basee public dislosure log for FOI queries for a local authority yesterday sent me off researching market footprint and also cross checked against  this table for CMS usage. Both independent sources seem to confirm the dominance of WordPress.

W3Techs

This link shows WordPress with about two thirds of the market. The rest range down from about 5%. There were suprises for me and I consider myself quite plugged in to this market. For example, Ithought WordPress must be 80% but is falling (65.5% to 63.3% in the last year from March 2022 to March 2023). Wix, Squarespace and Joomla are growing slightly. Drupal and Shopify are falling. The latter really shocked me as I see it everywhere nowadays.

WPBeginner

This reference has some interesting stats. For example, they estimate 34,896,678 live websites using WordPress. The tiny fall in WordPress website marketshare mentioned above may just be a momentary slowing of the overall growth reported from 55.3%-64.2% between 2011 and 2022.

Choosing WordPress

WordPress websites will continue to be the most common platform for AXLR8 to work with this year and next. However, like all giants, it has its critics – especially for security.  I think this reputation is largely down to three things.

1. The popularity attracts hackers like it attracts users, developers, etc. to, say Microsoft desktop products and servers.
2. Its users are notorious for setting insecure passwords. Please use a complex three word password over 12 characters including numbers, upper and lowercase and symbols.
3. People do not invest time or money in updating the free plugins with new security patches. As an example, you can probably get domain registration, hosting and support for £30/year or less for a WordPress site. If your support company does the security updates, you may need to budget £50/month.

Be realistic about #2 and #3 above and you will have all the benefits of WordPress and peace of mind on the security front. Do not be taken in by developers offering proprietary solutions promising they are more secure.

If you need any smart data systems behind your Website site, please call AXLR8 on 01344 776500 to speak to one of our consultants.

AXLR8 are delighted to have achieved Cyber Essential Plus again this year. The standard has risen due to an increased international growth in cyber threats. So AXLR8 have also had to work even harder to meet the challenge.

Thanks once again to our team at Right Cue who have advised us and helped us raise our game and improve internal processes and systems to be better prepared.

We have just passed our Cyber Essentials audit for this year. This year’s assessment was much tougher than last year but we were given notice about that by our assessor 12 months ago and have upgraded many of our resources to overtake the evolving threats.

Thanks as ever to the clear guidance and explanations from RightCue.

Next we have Pen Testing and following that in Late December, we start our Cyber Essentials Plus preparatory scans and physical audit. If you have not been through this process with your company, please think about it. The cyber threats are real and we highly recommend Cyber Essentials for cyber peace of mind and now use it for the more stringent Cyber Essentials Plus exercise each year.

If you need to know who did what and when on the AXLR8 system, you can refer to the comprehensive audit data that is recorded as your users work.

This article from our public sector website demonstrates an example from workflow in a business area with very strict compliance compliance requirements. There are examples from our finance and staffing clients, as you can imagine.

However, the monitoring is mostly used not for compliance or establishing who was responsible for a change or for “Big Brother” staff monitoring. It is mostly used on a day-to-day basis for training and occasionally for diagnostics.

Audit trail data is also used for KPIs examples we have put into AXLR8 Reports (also spreadsheets, pivot tables and Power BI models) recently, include:

• recruitment applicant tracking progress (time in different job application stages from application to interview, to hiring, etc.
• sales KPIs – client contact activity rates, follow ups, etc.

Please let us know if there are audit data you need and your AXLR8 consultant will assist you to find an existing report or create a new report using AXLR8 RB.

In recent article, we looked at what checklist items you should look for in a SaaS supplier for your business critical applications. We included security accreditations and a solid reliable support team and a long track record of client retention.

One of the most important factors now is financial stability of your critical suppliers. If your supplier goes bust, the outcome for your business is unpredictable. A key part of many crashes over the last two hundred years is the domino effect of good businesses being taken down by bad businesses.

Due to the pandemic, we have lived through challenging times. Like many historical downturns, it will be followed by more economic turbulence. This time it looks like the war in Ukraine will have many side effects. In previous crashes and recessions and macro economic financial upheavals, more businesses failed after the recession than on entry or during the down times. So now is the key time to check out your SaaS supplier.

At AXLR8, we did this market analysis recently. AXLR8 have a strong balance sheet and have never borrowed money. This careful financial approach has meant personal sacrifice but has left us financially much stronger than our competitors. Losses in the down times are covered by hard earned reserves. This is important because our clients rely upon us for their operational systems – now and in the future.

We recently benchmarked our balance sheet against competitors. Like us they must pay wages and keep servers running in the cloud. Both are expensive with unpredictable costs – especially for security enhancements to counter ever increasing threats. One way they may be saving money that is invisible in customer service, is to skimp on expensive security upgrades. This is the equivalent for your business, of an airline not bothering with maintenance and pre flight safety checks on their aircraft.

With a simple Companies House check, we discovered that we have been competing in most of our core markets with our own positive balance sheet but this is not the rule. There are companies with one employee who have been steadily drifting more and more negative for years. What will his clients do if his wife tells him to go and get a proper job? Worse, there are two companies with fantastic websites and a few good references who are £250k underwater and one has not published their accounts for two years! They should swallow their pride and merge or sell out because they are risking huge damage for their clients.

So, take five minutes to check out your SaaS supplier and assess the consequences of their failure. If you are about to buy a system, again, check their finances not just how nice their website and screens look.