A content management system (CMS) enables you to control your site’s content, appearance, and functionality without changing any underlying code, whether you’re building a business website, an online store, or a blog.
Many content management systems are available, each with specialized features for various company needs. Make sure the features of the CMS you choose for your company meet your needs and objectives.
Let’s take the example of optimizing your content for search engines. Then you might want to choose a platform that has SEO tools integrated into it. For instance, CMS Hub offers on-page SEO guidance right where you’re writing blog posts, landing pages, and other content.
Table of Contents
Key CMS Features
Simple Dashboard
The admin dashboard is the heart of every CMS. Every CMS should let you manage every step of creating and distributing content from your dashboard. Among other duties, these activities include scheduling content, keeping an eye on threats, observing user activity, installing modules and plugins, and checking performance analytics.
Adaptive Themes
The variety of themes any CMS platform offers should be taken into consideration while comparing them. Themes are crucial for creating a unified aesthetic for your entire website.
If you manage an online store, for instance, you might want a theme that features:
- A sidebar area with drop-down navigation is supported
- grid layout with movable content sections
- Customizable comment section
You can either create one yourself or download or buy one, depending on your CMS. You might purchase the Kingdom theme from Shopify’s official marketplace if you developed your store using Shopify.
Strong Tools for Content Editing and Publishing
The easier it is for you to contribute material to your website, the more effort you can devote to producing high-quality content. In order to make sure you can simply develop and publish various sorts of content, from blog articles with unique layouts to landing pages with embedded resources, you need a strong content editor.
The publishing interface should ideally allow you to add and rearrange items such as photos, videos, CTAs, forms, and more. Additionally, you must have the option to preview the page before publishing.
A WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor is available on many CMS platforms, allowing you to update a page without writing HTML code and to view changes as they happen.
Additionally, you should make sure that the CMS makes it as simple as necessary to schedule, publish, update, and manage content in various ways. To avoid unfinished content accidentally being published, this interface needs to be simple to use.
Backups and Version Control
Think about content management systems with tools for tracking and saving your work as you go, in addition to editing and publishing options. It’s a great touch when a CMS makes it simple for you to go back to an earlier version of your material if you find yourself in that circumstance.
How does the CMS manage backups, too?
Do you have to construct these manually, or have they been generated automatically? Is the ability to create backups a built-in feature or do you need to add an extension? A backup copy of your website should always be kept on hand in case of data loss, a broken website, or a hack. It is better to learn this now rather than later.
Creation of Content in Multiple Languages
You require a CMS with multi-language content options if you want to reach customers in other nations. You may quickly and easily translate your pages into multiple languages as a result.
You can test multi-language versions of a particular page using CMS Hub in addition to creating them. To help you manage your multilingual material as you scale, these variants are automatically grouped together. In order to enable users to switch between translated versions of pages within the same multi-language group, you can then add a language switcher module to your page template.
Publishing Limits
No matter how big or small your company is, more than one individual will probably contribute to your website’s content. It is possible to assign authors the only task of producing draughts, editors the task of reviewing those draughts, and administrators the task of scheduling and publishing them.
Because of this, publishing restrictions are crucial to any CMS. You may create a workflow for developing, approving, and releasing various creative materials by allocating various roles and levels of access within your CMS. Additionally, they stop users from doing things on your website that they shouldn’t be doing. For instance, you probably wouldn’t want a novice freelance writer to publish their own article without your consent.
The five jobs available in WordPress are Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Each function requires a unique set of skills. For instance, contributors are only able to create posts; they cannot publish them. Editors can publish and manage other people’s posts, whereas authors can only publish and control their own.
Dependable Integrations
There is no one CMS that can manage all of the requirements for your company website. Instead, you should use your CMS’s integration tools to incorporate outside software into your workflow. In this manner, your CMS data can move easily across programs to assist you in distributing and examining the information on your website.
When choosing a CMS, you should look for the following integrations:
Social media: A CMS should include built-in social capabilities to increase referral traffic to your website. Can you post to social media using it? Can you make sharing buttons for your posts on social media? Do you have social media statistics on your dashboard?
Automation in marketing There may be some marketing automation tools integrated into some content management systems, but you could choose to interface with a third-party automation service.
Marketing automation: Some content management systems may come with some built-in functionality for marketing automation, but if you want to increase conversions, you might opt to integrate with a third-party automation service.
CRM: A CRM integration helps gather leads and sort them into a manageable system; for example, you can link WordPress with HubSpot using the WordPress Plugin from HubSpot.
Integrations typically take the form of “plugins” or “extensions” for a certain CRM that are purchased from an online store. With more than 50,000 free plugins listed in its plugin directory, WordPress offers one of the largest collections of extensions, but WordPress rivals also have a strong offering. For instance, the module directory of Drupal contains around 44,000 highly flexible modules.
Conclusion
Even though each CMS is different, you should consider a few fundamental qualities before choosing a platform for your company. You can create and expand a website that draws in, engages, and delights your visitors with the help of a platform that combines a user-friendly dashboard with integrated SEO tools and sophisticated security measures, among other essential features. To make sure you’re on the right track, it’s a good idea to analyze every aspect of your company, including competitors and potential threats, and then utilize startup consultants to assist with the strategic approach.
