Top 5 Reasons To Use A CMS System For Your Website

Since the beginning of the World Wide Web with Tim Berners Lee’s proposal at CERN in 1990, the technologies used to create websites have changed drastically. Initially, rudimentary websites were being created in HTML and then CSS and then Flash came along but now content management systems (CMS) have taken precedence over other means. There are many reasons for using a CMS system which we will discuss below:

1)  CMS is Easy to Use & Free
Most CMS systems are free and they let non-technical manage their websites. Since you don’t have to do any complex programming or HTML code, you get the job done way faster. Before you needed to have development knowledge to make changes to a site but now that has completely changed.

2)  CMS Allows Multiple Users
With CMS based websites, multiple employees of a business can contribute content to the website. Multiple users can be given user ids which they can use to access the CMS and post content onto the website. In addition, you can allow or block any parts of your CMS system that you want employees to have access to or not.

3)   CMS Allows Ease of Maintenance
Making site-wide changes or maintenance changes becomes easier when your website is built using a CMS system. You can update the CMS software or add functionality and so on without worrying about breaking the site.

4)  CMS Makes Design Changes Easy
If you want to update the look of the website with a CMS-built website it’s very easy. Since a CMS keeps the content separate from the design, making changes to the design does not bring down the website. Also, you can make global changes to the website by making a change just in the administrative dashboard of the CMS. With the growing number of smartphone users, a CMS-based website makes it easy to have a mobile-version of your website. You also have the flexibility to purchase themes and change the design of your website without any headaches.

5)   Many Other Benefits
The benefits of a CMS are far more than five. With a modern CMS, you will find it easy to implement an online marketing strategy as the CMS will offer SEO tools, email marketing, Social Media marketing, blogging tools and more. To survive the stiff competition in the modern business world, these are essential characteristics of a robust CMS.

With an E-commerce site, there may be a need for publishing as well as un-publishing content. You may have a Mother’s Day special or Valentine’s Day special offer for a certain duration but then might wish to remove all content related to that offer once the time period of the offer expires. This is where a CMS comes in handy — all you have to do is unpublished the content, the menus and links will update themselves automatically.

SEO-Friendly CMS
Since applying SEO techniques to a website after it is built can be cumbersome, it’s better to keep SEO in mind while choosing your CMS. Make sure that the CMS lets you set and modify meta tags such as descriptions, Meta robots index/noindex, follow/nofollow, and so on. The CMS should optimize page loading speed since this is important from an SEO perspective. This can be done by making sure that the pages do not contain unnecessary or hidden content and HTTP-requests should be kept to the minimum.In a similar vein, CSS scripts should be at the top of the page while JavaScripts should be at the bottom of the page. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) should be used if required and no Flash or iFrames should be used.

Since duplicate content can damage a website’s search rank, the CMS should avoid publishing such duplicate content. Sitemaps guide search engines to all the pages of a website. Hence, the CMS should automatically generate and update an XML sitemap. The CMS should generate a meaningful 404 error page when someone tries to access a non-existent URL and the website’s HTML, JavaScript and CSS should be W3C compatible. The CMS should generate SEO-friendly URLs that should be readable, unique for every page and static. The URLs should avoid capital letters and special characters while the spaces between words in the URL should be separated by hyphens.

The CMS should also allow the use of breadcrumbs and provide keyword suggestions. It is a great help from an SEO perspective if the CMS is able to generate an overview of back links and also offers an opportunity to manage those back links. Lastly, the CMS should support responsive design and have mobile/tablet-specific templates that are optimized for speed. These are just majority of the aspects that should be kept in mind when choosing a CMS system that makes sense for you.

Top CMS Platforms
Once you’ve decided that you should go for a CMS, you have to make a choice of which one to choose? Below, we will discuss three CMS systems that are widely used across the World Wide Web today:

WordPress
It is the most popular CMS platform on the Internet today by a long shot with over 60 million websites built using it. It has enough themes, plugins and add-ons for you to choose from as you seek to make your website unique. You do not need to be a technical wizard to use WordPress to create your own website. CNN and Sony are but a couple of famous brands that have websites powered by WordPress. WordPress is absolutely free, has a great support community, is SEO friendly, and has a lot of great functionality.

Drupal
Drupal is a fully open source CMS and quite popular. Drupal can be used for simple blogs as well as extensive content portals of large corporations. It doesn’t hog quite as much resources as WordPress does as it is the most technically advanced among the three CMS systems in our list. Drupal tends to give a website improved performance such as quicker loading of pages and faster response times compared to WordPress or Joomla. It is highly customizable with a plethora of plugins, themes and other configurable options. The White House website is one among many famous websites built using Drupal. It is a good option if you are larger business looking for a secure, reliable, SEO friendly and robust CMS system.

Joomla
Joomla is another great option as a free open-source CMS with a comprehensive extension library. Joomla is used by E-commerce websites, corporate and non-profit websites, social networking websites and others. Joomla templates have CSS3 animation and also let you customize the typography included the fact that it’s easy to embed Social Media buttons such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Among the numerous users across the globe, Harvard University uses it as their CMS system of choice. Lastly, Joomla is also SEO friendly.

Conclusion
A CMS system is the smart choice for your small or large business. There are many options when it comes to a CMS system so do your research and see what’s available in the marketplace. Gone are the days where you need to be a developer to change or manage your website due to the ease of use that has been provided by using a CMS system. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you need any type of customizations that are not available within a CMS system, you can always get the help of a development expert to assist you. If you need any help or assistance with any CMS system or just general advice, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.