A content management system enables you to control your site’s content, appearance, and operation without changing any underlying code, whether you’re building a business website, an e-commerce site, or a blog.
There are a large number of content management systems 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.
These are some of the key features you might consider in a CMS that can help you create and run a site.
1. Content creation and editing.
Your CMS must, at the very least, make it simple for you to add, edit, and publish material. To make sure you can quickly 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 features like Call to Actions, forms, and videos. Additionally, you must have the option to preview the page before publishing.
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. The easier it is to use, the more time you’ll have to concentrate on your strategy.
2. Security.
Imagine that you have put a lot of effort into perfecting your digital strategy and creating individualized connections with your clients, only to wake up one day and learn there has been a security breach. Maintaining customer confidence in the services and goods you provide will help you protect your data and the data of your clients. To improve security and stop unauthorized access to sensitive data, several CMSs integrate with robust authentication procedures.
Increasing the security on your website safeguards not only your data but also the reputation of your brand and the visitors to it. Ensure that your CMS is easy to integrate with the enterprise security provider or third-party authentication solutions of your choice.
When comparing various content management systems, take into account the platform’s built-in capabilities and how difficult it will be for your team to meet your security standards.
When assessing a platform’s security, you can consider asking the following questions:
- Is there a content delivery network included to help stop DDoS attacks?
- Is SSL pre-installed, or must you get an SSL certificate separately?
- Is there a Web Application Firewall in place to guard against hackers accessing your website?
- How challenging is it to update software after a security patch is published?
3. Content and commerce integration.
Nowadays, it’s practically impossible to do online business without tying it to engaging content since consumers want more from their online experiences. There is a whole subset of specific capabilities to look for if you require a CMS for both digital marketing and e-commerce. The ability of your CMS to integrate third-party software into your workflow should be relied upon. 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 integrated social features 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 of marketing Although certain content management systems may come with some built-in marketing automation tools, if you want to increase conversions, you might opt to integrate with a third-party automation service.
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. This makes it possible for website owners with some web programming expertise to keep fine-grained control over the functionality of their sites.
4. Built in SEO tools.
You can use these tools to better your chances of ranking on search engine results pages by optimizing your content for search.
To start, make sure the platform is search engine optimization (SEO) friendly: Is the HTML markup correct? SEO-friendly permalinks? aspects of responsive design? All of your pages should adhere to these key principles to maintain a positive reputation with search engines.
Check the CMS’s enhanced SEO options after that. As you develop content, the CMS hub delivers SEO tips. Below are suggestions for using two subtopics, a meta description, and the keyword phrase in the title. All of these recommendations are made to make it easier for users and search engines to understand the content of the page, which enhances your capacity to rank.
You can also establish subject clusters in CMS Hub that automatically link supplementary information to essential “pillar” pages. By using this content approach, you can make sure that search engines can quickly crawl your website and identify your subject matter expertise.
5. Multilingual content capabilities.
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.
Prior to the digital revolution, marketers had difficulty reaching a wide audience. You may easily grow your consumer base and cross borders with digital marketing. But no matter how compelling your message is or how simply you can convey it, if you don’t speak your audience’s language in its entirety, you won’t be able to connect with them. Choose a CMS that offers multilingual editing tools and simple translation workflows if you already serve an international audience or anticipate doing so soon. You should search for a CMS with information governance measures that adhere to local laws where your clients live because laws governing digital information and privacy differ from one country to the next.
6. Personalization and analytics.
Building tailored, meaningful experiences for your customers, regardless of how they choose to interact with you, is where digital marketing is headed. To accomplish this, you require a CMS that can gather and analyze interaction data in real time and assist you in interpreting that data to comprehend where your clients are in the purchasing process. With that knowledge, you can then present them with content that is tailored to their circumstances.
It’s crucial to have a CMS that functions as a component of a larger, centralized digital experience platform since you’ll also need to ensure that you’re documenting their whole experience across all of your channels. Your content strategy must be improved based on information about your target personas’ locations, the devices they use, how they interact with content on those devices, and which types of content are most popular.
The ideal CMS would include built-in analytics that would allow you to monitor these performance metrics directly from your dashboard. If it doesn’t, it ought to include a Google Analytics or other well-known analytics tool integration.
7. User and role-based administration.
Having control over who can access content and features will help you prevent mistakes. Choose a CMS with customizable user administration, including room to expand as your needs change. Ensuring your chosen solution allows for role-based rights will help you scale as you grow, as it enables you to manage access for groups of people instead of individuals.
No matter the size of your business, it’s likely that more than one person will be publishing content on your site. You might have authors responsible solely for creating drafts, editors for reviewing those drafts, and administrators for 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 visitors from doing things on your website that they shouldn’t be doing. For instance, you definitely wouldn’t want a novice freelance writer to publish their own article without your consent.
The five roles 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.
Selecting a CMS that meets your demands as a business.
Even though each CMS is different, there are a few fundamental qualities you should consider 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.