Which Content Management System (CMS) should I use?
What makes a good Content Management System?
Speed
How fast your website loads will not only affect your SEO rankings, but will also affect how likely a user is to engage with you. There is a 32% increase in bounce rate between a 1 second load time and a 3 second one. Two seconds is all it can take to lose a potential customer.
The lighter and less bloated the CMS, the faster your website will be.
Easy to use
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of CMS: Developer centered, and user centered.
A developer centered CMS will be incredibly easy for a specialist developer to use by making the process of building the website as easy as possible. Unfortunately, these websites often do not take into account the end user who is responsible for maintaining the content of the website.
A user centered website starts with the basics of what a CMS is there to do: help the user manage content. A user centered CMS will have an intuitive user interface and will make it impossible for the user to break the website. A CMS like this also forces the developer to work properly and does not allow for cutting corners.
Live preview
Along with being easy to use, a great CMS will allow you to view and edit a live preview of your website. This way you can see exactly what content you are changing and how it will look when it is live.
Flexibility
You do not want your website to be limited to the functionality of your CMS. Basic CMS systems like Squarespace and Wix will lock you in to a certain aesthetic and functionality that may not be right for your brand.
Other CMS systems like Wordpress or Joomla require a large number of third party plugins to gain missing functionality. This makes your website akin to a Frankenstein's monster.
The best CMS systems on the market will come with flexible functionality built in.
Security
If security is not your number one requirement when choosing a CMS, then you need to rethink your project. Every organisation has a legal obligation to ensure the protection of client data. The failure to do this can not only lead to prosecution, but can cause irreparable damage to reputation.
30,000 websites are hacked every day. Hackers are no longer computer geeks sitting in their bedrooms smashing away at a keyboard. The truth is, hackers are highly organised criminal gangs using automated software that crawls the internet looking for known vulnerabilities in popular plugins or old versions of a Content Management System.
The most popular CMS in the world is Wordpress. There are over 455 million wordpress websites with more than 55 thousand plugins installed. The average wordpress website has 20 - 30 plugins installed. This represents a wide net that hackers are able to cast with relative ease. In fact, about 90% of all websites that were hacked in one 2018 study were built with wordpress.
It takes on average 280 days for a small business to identify a hack. That’s 280 days of hackers stealing business critical and customer data or installing malicious software that spreads viruses from your website.
Ensuring your CMS is secure and reliable should be the number one priority.
What makes a bad Content Management System
Free
The old adage of you get what you pay for is increasingly true in the tech world. We have been used to ad supported or freemium models for quite some time and it often rings true that when you pay a fee you get quality.
Generally, any CMS that charges a license fee will be among the most powerful and the safest.
Lack of support
Ongoing support should always be on your list when selecting a CMS. The more plugins that your website uses, the more updates and support you will need. Let these slip for even a week or two and your website becomes vulnerable to malicious attack.
An open source CMS like Wordpress or Drupal relies on a community of developers to update and maintain plugins. Sometimes a business critical free plugin can go unsupported for years, simply because the developer has no time to update it.
Which Content Management System is the best?
What makes a CMS the best is subjective. We can only answer this question from our own experience and what we know works best for our clients. After years of building websites, we decided that we could only use a CMS that we believed in. We believe in Craft CMS.
Security
Because Craft CMS charges a licence fee ($299 upfront then $59 a year), security updates are included. We are yet to have a Craft website experience critical failure or be hacked. The biggest test of Craft for us was when we made a website for a political party. We were able to watch hackers attempt and fail to gain access.
Speed
Craft CMS is fast because it isn’t bloated. Craft will only ever load the features it needs to serve your website to your customers.
It is easier to explain the difference between Craft and something like Wordpress with a metaphor. When you make a cup of tea at home, you boil the kettle with the water you need, pop a tea bag in your cup, pour, brew, then drink. This process is Craft CMS.
If wordpress was to make a cup of tea, it would fill the kettle to the top, get out all the cups, make 20 different versions of tea, then only give you the version that you wanted anyway. All the other cups of tea go to waste, because you didn't want them in the first place.
Easy to use
As a user centered CMS, craft is incredibly friendly to use. It’s primary aim is to make managing content easy and stress free. Users need not worry about making mistakes as it is almost impossible for a user to break a Craft website.
Flexible
With flexibility at its core, Craft CMS can be used for a wide range of applications. Our client list is a shining example of it’s agility. From simple brochure websites and creative portfolios to complex event booking systems and multisite ecommerce, Craft CMS has handled them all.