How To Choose The Right CMS For Your Business Website

In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for any business. A well-designed and user-friendly website can attract potential customers and help establish your brand. 

However, managing and maintaining a website can be a daunting task if you are not a developer. This is where a Content Management System (CMS) comes in.

A CMS is a software platform that allows you to easily create, manage, and publish digital content without the need for extensive technical knowledge.

With so many CMS options available, it can be overwhelming to choose the right one for your business. In this article, we will discuss how to go about selecting the right CMS for your business website.

Define Your Needs And Goals

Before you start researching CMS options, it’s important to define your needs and goals. Consider what features and functionalities are essential for your website.

Do you need a blog, e-commerce capabilities, or a booking management system? Also, think about your long-term goals and how your website may need to evolve in the future. This will help you narrow down your options and choose a CMS that can grow with your business.

Consider Your Budget

CMS solutions can range from free open-source platforms to expensive enterprise-level systems. It’s important to consider your budget and choose a CMS that fits within it.

Keep in mind that if you’re not building your own website, there will be additional costs for design, development, plugins, customisation, and hosting. It’s also worth considering the long-term costs of maintaining and updating your website on the chosen CMS.

What To Look For From A CMS

We get approached for website migrations regularly. Companies wishing to migrate or replatform their website from its current CMS to the WordPress CMS.

Why?

It usually boils down to the same few factors.

1. They have little to no control over their content.
2. Their current CMS is difficult or awkward to use.
3. Their CMS is no longer supported.
4. Their CMS isn’t scalable or adaptable, and doesn’t grow with their business. 
5. They find their CMS is expensive to licence or update.

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

1. Control

This one is usually due to heavily locked down, custom CMS solutions. These are often sold as exclusive, complete packages, or claim to have been specially created for a particular industry. These custom CMS platforms come with a lot of drawbacks in most cases. 

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 developer of the custom CMS to make even the smallest of edits and changes.

Marketing teams find that they 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 often leads to websites that stagnate and deprecate.

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

An Example

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 Group 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 platforms we’ve just discussed, but is also true of many of the other 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 and a business can lose their competitive edge without the agility to add new content quickly.

3. Unsupported 

Some CMS platforms just cease to be supported. Either from going out of business, the developer losing interest, or newer versions being released, so that older versions cease to receive support and important security updates. This would be ok if moving to the next version was simple, but with many high profile CMS solutions, moving to the latest version can be costly, requiring redevelopment.

An Example

For example, Morleys came to us to migrate their websites 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. Lack Of Scaleability

A website is a big investment, and a good website should scale and grow 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 adapt 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.

Many brands, especially those using pre-made themes or templates from across the spectrum of CMS options, find that these off-the-shelf solutions tend to become limiting and inflexible with growth.

An Example

Don’t Buy Her Flowers came to us when they found that they had outgrown the pre-made WordPress theme they were using. They experienced significant growth and found it was pushing the website beyond its limits.

We created a bespoke WordPress & WooCommerce website for them, which will enable continued growth and adapt with change.

5 – Expensive CMS Licensing

Whilst some CMS platforms are free to use (aside from hosting and development costs) many come with fees and licensing. These can vary greatly in price, with certain platforms costing thousands just to use the out-of-the-box version. 

Make sure you’re aware of any upfront and ongoing costs associated with the CMS you choose. 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?

A license free CMS like WordPress could free up additional budget for development and quality hosting.

What To Look For When Selecting A CMS And A Website 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 ask the developer to make the smallest of changes and will this incur a cost? 

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 or is it too niche to easily find alternative development and support partners? 

How easy is it to use?

How is the usability for the average person 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?

Does the CMS have a strong community online, 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. They’re all working to get the very best out of it, and 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’re looking into.

How easy is it to move?

Will it be easy to change hosting provider, or move to a new WordPress Support Agency? Will it be simple to move or update to a new version of the CMS?

We hope these questions help in finding the right CMS and development partner for your website.

If you’re currently looking for a new CMS for your website and are considering WordPress or WooCommerce feel free to get in touch for a chat about whether it could be a good fit for your requirements.