Having a good foundation is key to a successful website. Your CMS (Content Management System) is the foundation for all of your website’s content. From WordPress to Wix, there are many options available on the web, and it can be difficult to choose a CMS. In this video, I’ll share what to look for when choosing a CMS for your business.
A good CMS is good for your business! You need to be able to have control over your website’s content and its optimization. You’ll know you’ve found a good CMS when you get the following benefits.
Video Transcript
Hey, what’s going on everybody and welcome to Hack My Growth. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to choose the best CMS for your next website. Let’s go.
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Alright so let’s get into the subject today, choosing the right CMS. So CMS stands for content management system, and this is really where your website will be housed, this is where your content’s going to live. And being able to access that content and make updates, will allow you as a business owner or a marketer to take advantage of digital marketing as a whole.
When you’re locked down to a hard to use CMS or maybe you’re building a static site using HTML, without any knowledge of code it can be really hard to make these updates and to make these updates quick, and making them when you need to make them without having to wait for somebody to go and help you make those changes.
So choosing the right CMS allows you to engage with your site’s content easily and that’s the first thing you need to have when choosing the right content management system. Allowing yourself to update blogs, posts, and to add different content to the pages, to add different images, and to change the different elements inside of that page will allow you to have a lot more flexibility to do the things that you want to do when you want to do them.
Another thing that a good CMS will do is protect against unauthorized codes or maybe making coding mistakes and not having a backup of your website. So a good CMS will back your website up, but it’ll also allow you to have restrictions to allow certain people to have certain levels of access to content, and then to allow you to kind of version control your website. So maybe you made an update to a page, and you didn’t want that update to go live, you’re allowed to roll that back with certain CMSs. And so that’s one thing you want to consider when choosing a content management system for your website and your business.
You also want to make sure that the CMS doesn’t make your website too heavy. Bloated websites with too much going on in the background can slow them down. Now the average user is going to make their decision about whether or not to engage with your content very quickly. And Google wants your site to load in about two seconds, so that’s pretty quick. Having a very large CMS can slow your website down. So making sure that you have a content management system that does all the things you need it to do, but also isn’t super heavy which allows you to be a lot more flexible and allows your site to be faster. This allows you to build that relationship with a user quicker.
Now a good CMS can also help you drive more organic traffic. How so? Well a good CMS is going to allow you to make on-page SEO optimizations, it’s going to allow you to change your title tags, your meta descriptions, your image alt tags. It’s going to allow you to optimize your URL links. It will allow you to have those changes available to your marketing team, to you as a business owner, to where you can drive more targeted traffic to your website.
So there’s a lot of content management systems out there, some of them are expensive but are really well worth the money, like maybe if you’re a HubSpot user. HubSpot has a great CMS, and it’s got some of the top of the line caching tools and a number of other functionalities in the site that make it really really great, whether it be content staging or permissions or updates, security, search engine optimization. But there are other platforms as well; maybe you’re not ready to make that leap into a high-level CMS, well there are other options available.
And the most powerful and popular of these CMS is WordPress. Right now more than 25% of the world’s websites are running on WordPress. WordPress is an open-source content management system, which means that it’s free to use and it’s open to a community. Now we have a number of developers constantly changing and updating the platform, but we also have a lot of plugins which allow us to do amazingly cool things with very low code knowledge. So WordPress can be a great system, and it’s become the number one CMS in the world because it’s been so easy to use. It’s very flexible. It’s very scalable for small businesses, so maybe you’re getting started, and you can build your site on WordPress, and you can actually grow that site and stay on the same platform and just continue to grow your functionality.
So not only are small business users using WordPress, large sites are as well, like BBC, the New Yorker, CNN.com. I mean a lot of huge websites use WordPress as their content management system. Now when you’re using WordPress, you do need to make sure that, just like any other content management system, to have security in place to make sure that your content is secure, that your website’s secure, that your databases are secure. Anything can get hacked in today’s world so making sure that you have your WordPress site locked down and that you have good protection around it, you can do a lot within the WordPress community. There’s a lot of great developers, a lot of great people inside of this open-source community that will help you get started, and help you really find the answers to your questions. And the best part is it’s very easy to use, so anybody on your team can use it, and there are some really great search plugins that you can use as well to help optimize your site for search.
Taking advantage of that great community is probably the biggest advantage of WordPress as a whole. It’s a great system, but when you have people to help and support you within that community, to help you take it to the next level, it’s really one of those things that you don’t get with some of the other smaller, lesser-known content management platforms.
So we talked a little bit about the value of having a good CMS. It needs to be easy to use, but it also can return a ton of benefit to your company. If you’re getting started out, I highly recommend that you go to WordPress, that you don’t do one of these one click wonders. There’s a lot of them out there. WordPress is going to give you a lot more flexibility than a Wix, it’s going to give you a lot more flexibility than even Squarespace, and it’s going to be able to do that for free. And you’re going to be able to grow your site much faster, it will be a much more scalable approach, and you’re not going to be confined to a one-click website building template platform.
So those are some things that you want to consider when finding a CMS for your website. If you’ve got any questions comment below, we’d love to continue the conversation. And again if you want to learn more about what we do, check out some more of our videos, hit the subscribe button below. Thanks a lot for connecting and we’ll see you next week on Hack My Growth.
