CMS stands for Content Management System. Quite directly, a CMS allows you to create, organize, publish and delete content from your site. In this article, you will understand how and why to use a CMS in your digital strategy.
The world has never been so connected. Today’s consumer landscape involves handsets of all kinds, a strong and comprehensive Internet connection, and innovative companies willing to make the most of it.
We are talking about a number of features that enable you to leverage business, generate more sales consistently and deliver more options to consumers. All these while companies offer a better shopping experience.
But still, many businesses still do not have a website or achieve significant results.
And perhaps their main reason for their lack of success with the Internet as a channel for customer acquisition and customer loyalty is their lack of technical knowledge to create and manage their pages and content.
This is where CMS comes in as the ultimate solution to this problem. And it’s okay if you have no idea what it is.
We created this very complete article on the topic to teach you everything you need to know about it. In it, we will talk about the following subjects:
- What is a CMS?
- How does Content Management System work?
- What are the main features of a CMS?
- What are the benefits of CMS?
- How to choose a CMS?
- How to migrate your CMS?
- How to evaluate the best hosting for CMS?
- What are the differences between CMS, WCM, ECM, DAM and DXP?
- What is the best CMS on the market?
- Why should companies adopt this content management system?
Are you ready for this gigantic dose of knowledge? So come on!
What is a CMS?
The term CMS comes from the English Content Management System, which means Content Management System. In short, it is an online system that lets you get your site up and running quickly and easily.
But of course, that’s not all, because you can do the same task with almost no technical knowledge.
The great advantage of CMS, as its name implies, is the ability to manage dynamic content in a simple way, ie maintain a blog, web store or another type of site that needs to be updated constantly.
Imagine having to do weekly or even daily updates manually. It would not work.
So CMS is the ideal solution for everyone who needs a website that is not 100% static and momentary (made to go online for a short time).
How does Content Management System work?
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Imagine that you work in a newspaper or magazine.
Your audience is always looking for new news and topics, so you and your team need to produce new texts every day.
But this creation process is complex, and for each new content, you need to create the entire technical structure of the page. To make matters worse, each update has to be done manually.
In such a scenario, can you imagine how expensive and time consuming this work would be? It would make it impossible, in terms of time and money, for the vehicle to continue to exist.
In addition, assuming you could keep the project up and running, the need for highly skilled professionals with the necessary expertise could also greatly limit the emergence of new business.
Fortunately, our reality is quite different. To solve this kind of structural and operational problem came the CMS.
The concept of CMS most often represents free software, created and disseminated by programmers around the world, where a person can create their website, blog and other options, with extreme ease.
And when we use the phrase “most of the time” it is because while the main market options (which we’ll talk about later) are free, there are also paid options.
One of the greatest strengths of CMS is its simplicity of use that allows it to focus more on strategy and less on operational aspects.
The user need not worry about the technical part of the creation. He just needs to feed a database with the content he wants to present, simply and quickly.
All content is efficiently managed and designed to ensure better page performance, good user experience and the ability to scale the site smoothly in the future.
What are the main features of a CMS?
It may not seem so, but there is a lot involved in producing and publishing simple content or page on a website. And each of these elements must have CMS support to appear.
This becomes clear when we look at some of the key features of this type of system, including:
- creation and publication of pages;
- site text and code editing;
- moderation of comments;
- inventory control and sales system (if it is e-commerce );
- installation of plugins and extensions to increase site functions;
- media library, to upload images and videos that will be used on the site;
- and much more.
What are the benefits of CMS? Meet 7 of them
CMS has several benefits for entrepreneurs who want to create their web pages, meet 7 of them!
1. Ease of creation and maintenance
It may be that the main advantage of using CMS software is the great ease it offers to anyone who wants to develop a page and keep it up to date.
Work access is directly from the browser, meaning you don’t have to download any specific and complex systems. No taking up space on your computer or phone
This allows you to build your pages quickly and take better advantage of market opportunities by delivering higher quality content to users.
2. Ease of Use
Anyone who has a website knows that you need to pay constant attention to the news and trends that appear in the market.
Given this, your pages need to be flexible to take advantage of these new possibilities and use innovative features to their full potential.
With a good content management system, as well as the ease we mentioned, anyone on your team can help maintain your digital strategy.
This includes creating company website pages, adding images, videos, customer testimonials, and more.
All of this can be done extremely easily and quickly without the need for in-depth knowledge of programming logic, design or diagramming.
What’s more, one of the key features of CMS is, as the name implies, its ability to manage content rather than just creating it.
In other words, it is no use having many possibilities and making use of the system simply without always following the progress of the results.
And once again a quality CMS makes this part of the job easier. After all, everything can be tested and optimized to give better and faster results.
3. A huge amount of additional features
Market-leading CMS have a wide range of additional features. These can be included on the site with a few clicks to create the best customer experience possible and make management more efficient.
Here is just a warning, which we will delve into below: It is worth noting the features of the software chosen to make sure they meet all your needs.
If you notice any important missing elements, look for additional plugins and tools. If you really can’t find one, you might want to look for another CMS.
4. Possibility of optimization for organic search
Every entrepreneur who seeks to establish their site as a reference in the online marketplace knows (if not, should know!) That they need to know and apply optimization techniques for organic search, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO work aims to increase the chances that your site pages will be found by search engines such as Google.
And the more people find your site organically (without ads), the better for your customer acquisition process, as long as you have a solid content strategy and proper marketing plan.
You can use different techniques, such as:
- link building to increase authority and improve rankings;
- image optimization so that your content is also found by visual searches;
- strategic use of keywords, especially long-tail;
- and structuring the content in a readable way to increase reader retention time.
It is very important for each page of the website to receive this work with close attention.
If your site is complex, made with specific software, it can be quite difficult to maintain this optimization properly, especially as your site scales.
With CMS this can be done very simply and practically. A few well-worked minutes a day can be enough to make your pages appear in the top positions of organic search without investing 1 cent in sponsored links.
5. Versatility for projects of all types and sizes.
No matter what you want your site to be, you are likely to be able to do it smoothly with a good CMS.
Want to create a blog to post relevant content every week? All well. Need to create a multi-feature integrated webshop? No problem!
And those are just some of the possibilities. You can create member areas, landing pages and even create a type of social network, depending on your goal.
This is another CMS asset: it can handle different projects of various sizes with the same structure and internal operation.
All you have to do is tailor the features offered by the platform of your choice to the needs of the project.
6. Good loading speed
Another great benefit of having a CMS solution is that it usually contributes to increasing page loading speed.
This element is crucial to delivering good customer experience, not to mention a factor in SEO ranking!
The longer pages take longer to load – and we’re talking about second differences – the more likely the potential customer is to close the window and look for another option on the Internet.
Therefore, it is very important that you always monitor the load time of your pages, seeking to optimize them.
This is even more important on mobile devices, which have been receiving special attention from Google with the new ranking model.
Known as the Mobile-First Index, it prioritizes pages that load quickly on mobile devices. Fortunately, high-end CMS already fully supports Mobile-First sites.
7. Low upgrade and maintenance cost
Last but not least, we cannot forget about maintenance costs.
Imagine that you build your site with a specific programmer, in a complex language that few professionals dominate throughout the market.
Can you see how this can make it more expensive to keep the structure up and running and always up to date? After all, the scarcity of the professional will allow him to charge more for the service.
Already with CMS, everything is cheaper, from deployment to upgrade and maintenance.
The software used is generally free because most content management systems are created by collaborative developers around the world.
Of course, you can still hire a developer or designer to tailor the desired site to your interests and needs. But this is no different from creating a 100% custom website.
In fact, even changes to a CMS are usually more affordable than creating from scratch.
So the difference in values is up to date and maintainable, making CMS a much more financially beneficial option.
How to choose a CMS?
The task of choosing a CMS can be a little clouded by the number of options available on the market, and the similarity between what they offer.
When you look at 10 options and all promise similar things, which one to choose? The truth is that you need a few elements to make your decision.
The choice is very important, we are not saying otherwise. But instead of spending a lot of time in doubt, follow these practical recommendations:
- what is the history of the system? Find out if the user community is large and active, the system has a good reputation and technical support is praised;
- what is the basic purpose of the system? If the central focus of the CMS in question is very different from what you seek, move on to another. (example: you want a blog and find an e-commerce CMS);
- How is the user experience? It’s no use having the best CMS in theory, but not liking the everyday experience. Test and see what works for your business.
We here at Rock have a favourite CMS: WordPress. It is the most widely used in the world and has solutions for all kinds of projects.
But that should not stop you from researching other options and choosing the one you think is best.
How to migrate your CMS?
And what to do if you already have a CMS in use but realize that it makes more sense to use another solution? The answer is: migrate to the new CMS.
And if you are wondering how to do this, let’s not take a step by step, because we can’t do it here.
The number of CMS options is huge, making it impossible to know which one you use today and which one you want to migrate to.
But there are only 2 golden rules for CMS migration:
- Back up your information and databases: If all goes wrong, you will still be able to restore your site to the old CMS with 100% preserved databases.
- Look for new CMS support: In general, the high-end CMS documentation is very good, as is the member community. This can give you the direction you need to migrate smoothly.
How to evaluate the best hosting for CMS?
Of course, CMS is not the only important element in maintaining your site.
The accommodation has an important role in it too because if the host does not support the CMS you want to use, nothing was done.
And once again we get into the question of how many options are available. You can’t go through this article one by one, but it can give you a simple step-by-step guide to your choice:
- first, decide which type of hosting you want. There are 4: shared, cloud, VPS and dedicated server;
- narrow the list of options for the top-rated companies in the industry that support the CMS you are looking for;
- compare features, service and pricing among the “finalists” of your selection.
What are the differences between CMS, WCM, ECM, DAM and DXP?
CMS is a system that encompasses many types of software and each one is designed to meet different needs.
Therefore, we will show below some of these subcategories and their differences.
WCM – Web Content Management
WCM is software used to create, manage, store and display content on web pages.
It has the ability to design and organize websites so that content is always up to date and easy to access at any time.
It also allows the control and preparation of content for publication, allowing evaluation and approval before disclosure.
WCM also enables content automation for publishing for better performance.
ECM – Enterprise Content Management
ECM is the technology behind capturing, managing, preserving, and distributing business process-related content and documents.
ECM tools and strategies allow you to structure information for organizations as long as they exist.
These tools include WCM, which we just saw, and DAM, which we will know next.
DAM – Digital Asset Management
DAM, or Digital Asset Management, is a very similar concept to ECM, shown above.
The main difference is that the DAM has the most specialized focus and is mainly used for managing rich media such as videos, audio, images, among others.
Meanwhile, ECM works on file management in general. So if you need a solution that concentrates multimedia files effectively, DAM is relevant.
DXP – Digital Experience Platform
With the growing number of customer access channels, building integration strategies among them to enhance the shopping experience is no longer an option.
The DXP system makes this a reality and makes the same sensation be experienced at any point of interaction with the company, which strengthens the brand identity.
We are talking about a platform designed to create and deliver integrated and optimized user experiences.
This should happen across multiple channels and always take into account not only customer preferences but their entire life cycle as well.
What is the best CMS’s on the market?
Now that you know what a content management system is, let’s show you what are the main options in the market. As I said, let’s start with our recommendation, WordPress:
WordPress
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WordPress is the CMS platform most used worldwide. But that’s not just why we like him so much. For starters, this is a free option used for blogs, online stores and many other projects.
There are several additional features, such as plugins and templates already assembled, so that users can customize the solution to suit their business needs and strategies.
One of the great advantages of WordPress is its active community. There are thousands of programmers who have the knowledge to keep the system up to date, adding improvements.
Nevertheless, never fail to pay attention to safety. Because it is an open-source solution, malicious people can look for system gaps to attack sensitive information.
It is recommended to have extra features to ensure system reliability.
Joomla
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Another great option for a content management system is Joomla, used by large companies and brands. Among them is the acclaimed Harvard University of the United States.
Like WordPress, it is a free, PHP-based system that has numerous additional features.
Although the community and support are not as massive as the most famous option, Joomla is a robust and reliable CMS alternative.
Drupal
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What about a CMS that is used by the United States government? That’s right, the US government has chosen Drupal as its content platform.
The platform works in modules that interact with each other, which allows a high power of system customization.
One of the advantages of WordPress (large community of system-aware programmers) also applies with Drupal.
TextPattern
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Anyone thinking of creating simple pages and searching for high loading speeds should certainly consider TextPattern as one of the top options.
It loses a bit to the options shown earlier in the range of ready-made templates, but still has several extra features available.
Radiant
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Finally, let’s not forget about Radiant, a Ruby-based content and permissions management system that is best suited for smaller projects.
It has its own language, very close to HTML, and offers good plugins options.
Why should companies adopt a content management system?
The virtual environment is hotly contested, with fierce competition between companies.
Entrepreneurs and organizations should always look for new ways to improve the user experience on their sites and provide new features while maintaining good stock management.
These goals are most easily achieved through the use of a content management system. However, in the market, there are several options.
But do not think that the choice of a system by the organization can be made anyway.
The big challenge for companies is aligning the need with the available resources. There is no better platform for general use. What should be noted is the company’s need to serve its audience and offer the right solutions.
Then, you should analyze which CMS has such assignments, more accurately to your business.