Does my website need a CMS to succeed?
What is a CMS and why would I want one?
CMS is an acronym for Content Management System, used by website owners irrespective of technical skills to easily publish content on their own websites.
A CMS minimises the dependency on developers, eliminating bottlenecks to save time in publishing content updates and significantly reducing ongoing support costs.
What’s the difference between a CMS and a website builder?
With a Website Builder you’re essentially managing each page independently, a CMS introduces order to the management of all website assets not just content.
Content can be modelled around your unique business requirements introducing uniformity to the management of your data and enabling content to be published dynamically.
Adding new content to your website will dynamically update navigation menus and automatically update sitemaps, additional features for improving search engine rankings.
Choosing the right CMS for your business
There are a growing number of hosted website builders such as Wix and Squarespace being great places to start with great online tutorials, which are great to get you off the ground. However, as your ambitions grow for your website you’ll soon start to find limitations and or require greater technical knowledge. Oh, and you’ll also need some design flare!
There are also hosting providers offering turnkey installations for Wordpress and other CMS tools, but you’ll be reliant on others to configure the system and manage the service. Unless you’re keen to start learning these technical aspects to ensure continual performance and security issues are regularly addressed, you’ll need to employ someone to do so.
We prefer to work with a SaaS based CMS, CreativeCMS, completely removing the need for any technical know-how with upgrades and bug fixes managed centrally. Not only that, you can work directly with the development team if you need anything bespoke built for your website, which is like having your own web department!
How will a CMS help your website’s performance?
Performance issues will arise and are now par for the course, so having access to all the website templates is essential for us, but CreativeCMS does an excellent job in optimising the core templates requiring less post production testing from us.
Clean SEO friendly URLs and dynamically generated sitemaps are essential features of a CMS, as they not only help users to find their way around the site more easily it also helps crawlers to have a better understanding of your website content.
Ultimately, a good CMS will standardise the formatting of your website’s HTML output to gain high performance results, allowing us to work more closely with our clients helping and advising on how best to utilise the CMS to maximise results.
Keeping your website content fresh and relevant, is important particularly when working in competitive markets, so choose your CMS wisely depending on your industry.
Why is website performance important?
Having managed a number of business critical websites with high performance being essential, it's something that’s become a passion of ours over the years, verging on obsession at times.
With Google making a significant change to their algorithm to include performance as a ranking factor this has became a necessity, validating our drive for achieving optimum performance by now having tools to score a website.
Check out our current PageSpeed Insights performance results for our SolvIt home page, with Mobile scoring 99 and Desktop 100.
With the right CMS you’ll have much greater control over customising every aspect of your website, which is imperative when tackling website performance issues. Working with CreativeCMS we’re currently scoring 96 Mobile and 100 Desktop across our portfolio.
With SEO becoming so technical in recent years having the right CMS is essential to us and we don’t believe we’d be able to maintain such a high website performance without one.
If you’re after a new CMS website and would like some advice we’d love to chat.
