Things To Look For When Choosing A CMS

We get approached for site migrations constantly, moving a company’s website from one CMS or another to the WordPress CMS. Why? It usually all boils down to the same few things.

1. They have little to no control over the CMS.
2. The CMS is difficult to use.
3. The CMS is no longer supported.
4. The CMS isn’t scalable, and doesn’t grow with the business. 
5. The CMS is expensive.

Let’s take a look at these in a bit more detail.

1 – Control

This one is usually due to locked down, custom CMS solutions. Often sold as exclusive, complete packages, or specially created for a particular industry, custom CMSs come with a lot of drawbacks. 

There are a few good ones out there, but generally they take all control out of the hands of the website owner, mean paying the CMS developer to make even the smallest of edits and changes, marketing professionals can’t access what they need, and the site can’t be supported or managed by another company should the relationship with the developer sour, or they go out of business. This has been quite apparent with Covid.

Sadly, custom CMSs are often sold to tie businesses into long, unfulfilling contracts with the developers, as nobody else can manage, support or update them.

Just today I was speaking to someone who does SEO for a marketing agency. They had a client who needed a minor change to their site for performance reasons. This change amounted to just copying a small snippet of code and moving it somewhere else. This was something the SEO could have done themselves, but due to the custom CMS, they had no access to make changes and the website agency who built the site wanted £500 to do it. On a day to day basis, the SEO can’t even do some of the very basic tasks involved in their role, such as implementing redirects, due to this custom CMS.  

We’ve encountered the same. Companies come to us when they reach the end of their tether. They are sold a custom solution as the answer to all of their problems, only to find they have no control over their own website, and making any changes becomes a slow and expensive task. 

Bakels came to us for migration to WordPress, due to the lack of control and the outdated nature of the custom CMS they were on.

2 – Difficult to use 

This is often the case with the custom CMSs we’ve just spoken about, but also true of many of the options available on the market.

Whilst a CMS might be simple for an experienced developer to work with, when it comes to day-to-day use for a website owner, or a marketing team, many can be awkward and not remotely intuitive to use. If simple tasks like adding content or creating a landing page are difficult, they end up just not getting done. A stagnant website is not a good thing.

3 – Unsupported 

Some CMSs just cease to be supported, or newer versions will come out so older ones will cease receiving support. This would be ok if moving to the next version was simple, but sometimes it will require redevelopment or a lot of additional cost.

For example Morleys came to us to migrate to WordPress, when Magento 1 was losing support. Their’s was a large multisite project, and migrating to WooCommerce was more cost effective than moving to Magento 2.

4 – Doesn’t Scale

A website is a big investment, and a good website should scale with your business. Whether your list of services grows, your product catalogue expands, or you branch out into more locations, your website should be flexible enough to scale up with ease.

If growth or expansion are among your business goals, then make sure to investigate whether the CMS you choose will scale with you, and whether in development, future proofing will be included, so that you can easily scale your site when the time comes. 

5 – Expensive CMSs

Whilst some CMSs are free to use (aside from hosting and development costs) many come with fees and licencing. These can vary greatly in price, with certain platforms costing thousands just to use. 

Make sure you are aware of any upfront and ongoing costs associated with the CMS. IS it a one off cost, or do you have to pay a monthly or annual subscription? Have you accounted for these costs in your website budget, alongside development, hosting and support costs?

What to look out for when choosing a CMS & Development partner

Here’s a short list of things to look for and questions to ask when being pitched a CMS:

Who can make edits? – can your team easily access the site and make content, image, and page edits? Or are you going to have to as the developer to make the smallest of changes? 

Is there ongoing support? – will the company building your site support it long term? Will the CMS be supported by its creators for a long time, and if not, will it be simple to move to a new version?

Who else can support me if you can’t? – if the company building the site can’t support it long term, can another company? Is it a platform commonly supported? 

How easy is it to use? – how is the usability for the average user who isn’t a developer? The core purpose of a CMS is to make it simple for non technical users to manage a website. Unfortunately many fall down at this first hurdle. Will your marketing team be able to use it with ease day-to-day to add content and create new pages. Will the backend of your website be intuitive, easy to navigate, and will adding different types of content be straightforward?

What is the community like? – is there a strong community for the CMS, where you can go for advice if having issues, or for ideas and inspiration?

One of the many reasons WordPress is so popular is that it has a very large and active community, working to get the very best out of it, and who spot and report bugs. Many of these people directly contribute to the code base, as well as indirectly through reporting. This means that WordPress has a global voluntary QA team of an enormous size. Not many platforms can boast that.

Other platforms do not necessarily have the same community, so investigate what is out there for the CMS you are looking into.

How easy is it to move? – will it be easy to change hosting, move to a new support agency, or even move/update to a new version?

If you’re currently looking for a new CMS for your website, check out our Why WordPress page, to see why we choose to be a WordPress only agency.