5 Golden Rules When Selecting a Content Management System

Whether you are a first-time CMS buyer or someone who’s planning to switch to a new platform, you have to be crystal clear about your CMS requirement. A wrong choice can lead to re-building the entire website from scratch.

The bottom line is, you cannot hop from one CMS platform to another in a jiffy, making the right choice is all the more important.

In this post, we take you through the 5 golden rules to follow when selecting a CMS.

1. Go for usage, not features:

Buying too many features that are not put into actual usage leads to large, unbudgeted expenses. Moreover, an overflow of features increases the learning curve, making it difficult for teams to adopt the new platform.

To make financially sound decisions, analyze your usage against platform features. Remember, the aim is to select a CMS that offers the most value for money. Luckily, many CMS vendors offer free trials. This can help you assess which features work and which do not. Find out if you can customize the CMS suite based on your usage.

2. Look for compatibility with channels used by your audience:

The audience can choose any channel to consume content. If your CMS doesn’t support that channel, the platform is as good as useless.

Think about your own behavior when you consume content. Time consuming activities like online shopping, data analysis, and writing long-form content immediately make you grab your laptop. On the other hand, you use mobile for quick searches for specific information.

The same applies to your audience. They may attempt to land on your mobile website to skim through your company, but since your CMS is not mobile responsive, they won’t be able to proceed ahead. In fact, 40% of visitors would happily visit your competitor’s website instead.

Pimcore’s easy-to-use CMS platform helps you create a rich user experience on the web, mobile, apps, social platforms, and even print and digital signage — all at once.

3. Check for pre-built integrations:

Pre-built integrations are developed in-house by CMS vendors. They have added functionalities built into the one platform, enabling you to do more: track website traffic, manage customer data, maintain product data, and more.

Basically, all your content will be available on a single place, ensuring teams do not have to keep switching between multiple systems. This avoids the possibility of data silos and encourages better team collaboration. The reason you should focus on pre-built integrations is that it requires very less effort to implement while bringing better content efficiency.

4. Support availability?

A sloppy customer service by your CMS vendor will affect your content performance, leading to a bunch of unsatisfied customers.

Say, your CMS crashes, forcing you to put your product page down. Now, the technical support service rep gives you a waiting time of two hours. During this moment, a customer comes to your page looking for add-ons for a product they already bought. Unfortunately, the customer has to share the same waiting time to access your product page.

Poor experience will lead customers to churn. Make it a point to see if the customer support provided by the CMS vendor is at par with your expectations; whether to take a 24/7 support, pay more to have an exclusive support manager, or implement multichannel support services.

5. Dig deeper into their security features:

A content management system is always a sweet target for hackers. It’s a company-owned platform which is accessible to internal stakeholders as well as external ones — freelancers and guest post contributors.

Up to 43% of data breaches are caused by insiders and giving access to folks who are outside of your company network is a big security risk in itself. However, for efficient content output, you have no choice but to share access with these users.

To protect the integrity of your content, do a thorough check on the control and flexibility offered to website administrators for managing user access.

Winding up:

If your CMS is not ready for the overwhelming number of content projects that involve different styles and authors, your entire content marketing will crash and burn. To avoid this, choose a CMS that can scale with your rising content demands.

Find out the roadblocks that can hamper scalability like limited capacity in terms of web servers supported, the cap on file size, or whether an additional software is required. Ultimately, if your CMS cannot scale, you would have to switch to another platform, making you repeat the entire process.

Author bio:

Niraj is the founder of Hiver, a powerful email management and collaboration tool. When not working at Hiver on programming or customer support, Niraj likes to play guitar. Niraj can be reached on Twitter @nirajr.