Choosing a CMS for your business website is one of the essential factors you must consider for your company. It’s a part of building your brand on the back end and will serve your business for years. It must work, and it must work well.
Your website serves as the mirror of your business. It provides general information about your company, services, or products. You’ll likely want to add content to grow organic traffic. To obtain a successful website, you need a content management system to keep all that information organized.
A content management system is very crucial in building a website. The content management system is the framework of your content marketing strategies. The CMS makes all your website components work together and with functionality.
All your content is nothing if you can’t manage and serve it properly to the eager public. Even if you have great content on your website, it doesn’t impact if you use the wrong CMS.
What Is A Content Management System?
The content management system is often known as CMS. Content management systems are software systems that help users to create, upload, update, publish, and delete content. In short, it manages the content on a website.
When we hear the word website, what we think is that we need a programmer to build it. We believe that a website is all about coding. But, little did we know that there are many software systems we can use to build a website quickly.
A content management system is one of the best tools we can use to build a website more efficiently.
The CMS will handle all the basic infrastructure, like creating web pages, storing images, and other functions. So you can focus on the different concerns of your website.
Practically, there is no perfect CMS that meets every need perfectly. However, hundreds of options from different content management systems are in use today.
All of the options for available CMS have different pros and cons to their functionality. You may find the Hundreds of good features in CMS platforms nearly overwhelming, but you must choose what works best for your website plans.
Take time to research or ask someone who has a website similar to what you want to do. Marketing companies like Hyperwave Content also help because they know what’s working well in the industry better than most.
13 CMS Selection Considerations
To keep you away from weariness. Here are various tips to consider in choosing a CMS for your business.
- Easy of Use
- The Price
- Customizations
- Permissions
- Ease Of Maintenance
- Scalability
- Asset Management
- The Search Area
- User Interaction
- Security
- The CMS And Its Business Impact
- Social Media Marketing
- The Stability
Ease of Use
People tend to think only about editing and attaching photos, publishing, and managing posts when using a CMS. They depreciate the fundamental functionality of a CMS. Although it allows you to keep your posts, not all platforms will carry the same functionality.
Individual posts are primarily categorized based on date and time. However, you can adjust these parameters with most CMS to suit your specific needs. Therefore, consider ease-of-use in a content management system you want to choose to get the best results.
The Price
As with every other software on the internet, many content management systems are free but offer a premium version with higher functionality.
If you want total control, you have to pay for it. A premium CMS will cost you money. There are also other costs to consider, such as:
- Pay for a domain that you will use on your website.
- Pay for someone to design your brand and logo.
- Pay for site management unless you know how to manage your website; you need to make no payment except your time.
- Pay for premium content, unless you intend to do the content strategy and content marketing yourself.
If you’ve hired a web developer or designer, ensure you are working within your price range to avoid ending up on a website that doesn’t work before your budget runs out. If you’re looking for budget content writing solutions, other companies can help small startups meet their budget. Companies like our sister company, Farm 6 Media, specializing in helping grassroots budgets get off the ground with discount rates for small startups.
Customizations
Ensuring you control customization is vital if you have a specific design. Many CMS will flaunt their various features, but it isn’t easy to know for sure until you see what you’re seeking. Try testing out different CMS, themes, and builders before you decide to pay for one.
Permissions
As a website owner, you want to control who edits your content management system once there are various admins on onboard. For instance, a group of people assigned to post ads can’t add any other content to the website. This situation requires a content management system that allows you to set up permissions. Of course, the implementation of this process differs. Still, you can use permissions to define whether every user can edit the site or if certain users are allowed to perform each task.
Ease of Maintenance
In looking for a CMS for your websites, consider the one that has ease of maintenance. Features like automatic updates are great for ease of maintenance. Just make sure that they also allow an update rollback feature. If an update breaks your website, you can easily roll it back until a developer establishes a proper solution.
Scalability
Scalability should be on top of your features when choosing CMS for your website. If you’re building a website, you likely have the plan to grow it. Growth requires sustainable scalability. You don’t want your site to break down once you get some meat on its bones, so scalability is critical.
Consider these factors:
- Must-Haves – Essential features your organization can’t work without.
- Should-Haves – These are crucial must-haves but not as critical.
- Could-Haves – These are the desirable features but are not that crucial.
- Would-Haves – These features are the least vital and have the lowest payback.
Asset Management
Some content management systems poorly handle the management of images and files. A CMS with poor accessibility and usability damages the experience of the user. So, before spending money on any CMS, ensure all its assets management meets your demands.
The Search Area
Search is an essential factor in websites. So, the search feature should function according to its proper functionality.
- Site functionality should create a flowing user experience. If a user is looking for something in particular, you’ll want to offer them the ability to do that action. Therefore, your CMS must offer a search functionality you can set up for your users that is appropriate to your mission and brand.
User Interaction
Users’ feedback plays a vital role in your website. Therefore, your website should have a chat, forums, comments, and rating functionality. Consider how you want to manage your users and how all functionalities of a website’s features communicate with them. Remember, an engaging experience drives business. A boring non-engaging experience drives them away.
Security
Security is absolutely crucial in your website, especially since most websites connect to businesses. A hack can take a long time to reverse and repair. The loss of necessary data is also possible, as well as the publicity of sensitive information. So, make sure that the CMS you bought has high-security protection.
To keep your content management system highly secure, keep it up to date. Out-of-date CMSs are easy to hack. Below are the most common security threats to CMS:
- Data manipulation:
Data manipulation is a threat that changes unorganized data into readable ones to be easily read. One of its examples is sequencing data into alphabetical order so one can locate and reorganize the data, making it more accessible.
- Accessing data
Accessing data is retrieving data stored in a database. This threat is nearly the same in manipulation because it can manipulate stored data on hard drives or any external devices.
- Code Injection
This hack injects a coded threat that an application can interpret. This attack is the poor handling of untrusted data. It is typically due to the improper input of data, such as weak characters and data formats.
The CMS And Its Business Impact
Your choice has a significant impact when considering a content management system platform for your website. First, it is a real-deal decision because it will give you responsibilities. Second, in choosing CMS for your website, you can either do it independently and hire developers or choose a ready-made platform. But remember, if you decide to develop it yourself, it will cost you money and time. And it takes processes and functional requirements to build the platform.
There are various solution platforms in the market today, ready-made platforms that will provide no complexity and suit your business needs. Moreover, most of them are adaptable. Therefore, you can quickly adapt their uses and functionality to suit your model.
Need some help getting your business set up on the right CMS? We can help.
Social Media Marketing
Choosing a content management system for your websites requires being sociable. Since a website connects to your business, it must have social media marketing functionality. Social media holds a firm grasp of the market, with 37% of consumers using either Facebook or Instagram. So, in choosing a CMS for your website, consider this factor.
Stability
Stability means the system is not prone to crashes and hangs when in continuous use through various scenarios. Some content management systems might fail under heavy load. Ensure the CMS you choose has a track record of offering stable solutions. After all, it will be your online brand ambassador, and you can’t afford it to fail.
Final Thoughts
In choosing a content management system for your website, consideration of all the features is crucial. It is a fundamental part of your decision.
No software works perfectly for everyone. You can ensure that the CMS aligns with your website goals and test as many as you can before a final decision.
If you need help finding the perfect solution, contact us today, we’d love to help.