Are you thinking of managing your website the old-fashioned way by creating a static website? It would be smart for you to reconsider.
CMS software is better than ever and is used by most websites on the internet. The industry is growing so fast that it’s expected to reach a market value of $123.5 million by 2026.
If you want to save time and get your website up and running quickly, investing in a web content management system is worth investigating. Keep reading to learn how a content management system website will help.
No Coding Required
One of the problems with starting a website from scratch is the requirement to know how to code. Without knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you won’t be able to get a website up and running. A web content management system changes the game.
Your content system won’t only allow you to manage your content but also allow you to install a website and get it up and running with no coding knowledge. Sure, you can still use coding knowledge to make customizations to your CMS software. However, that type of customization is for people who want to extend their site and customize it based on their needs.
Team Collaboration
If you run a large website, the chances are that you’ll have a team of people to make sure your content is continuously updated. With a hand-coded website, it’s tough to have people without programming knowledge stay on the same page to keep things updated.
The best content management system software will have user roles available to assign to your team. Give them an editor status, and they can log into your CMS to modify and create new content.
This feature gives you collaboration opportunities for your team. You can have specific team members go into the system to create drafts of content for your editors. This means you have one place to handle content creation, editing, and content posting.
Make Changes Quickly
It takes time to update a static website. You need to go into your website code to make changes, create new pages to add content and upload all your website changes to your web host. This process takes a lot of time for people without a ton of experience with website design.
With a content management system, you can avoid all this overhead. Since you make your website changes straight in your CMS system, your visitors can immediately see any changes you make.
This is true for both design and content changes. Most CMS packages provide configuration options for your design. Just click a few buttons, and your design change is complete.
For your blog posts, things go live as soon as you click the publish button. Your CMS is smart enough to create a URL for your post and make it available on your website.
Get Unique Designs
Content isn’t the only great thing a CMS allows you to manage. A reliable system also gives you the ability to manage your web design quickly and easily.
If you don’t have a design background, you can take advantage of theme marketplaces to give your site a great look. Popular CMS platforms have thousands of themes for you to take advantage of. You can go for free options or a more configurable paid option.
Once you have your theme, it’s only a matter of uploading it in your theme section. Once you activate your new website theme, the design changes are automatically applied to give you a freshly designed website.
Extend Website Functionality
Sometimes you need more than a simple blog for your website. Some people want to run eCommerce stores, and others want to add unique features to their websites. If you tried to add complex features yourself, you’d be out a lot of time and money because of development.
Modern CMS platforms have robust plugin systems that allow you to extend your website functionality. From contact forms to eCommerce functionality, you can extend your website as much as you like.
Plugins work like your website themes. You go to a plugin marketplace or website, download your plugin, and upload it to your plugin section. Once your plugin is activated, it’s added to your website and allows you to modify the settings in your administration section.
SEO Optimization
There is a lot of work that goes into handling SEO optimization for your website. It isn’t just adding a few meta-tags anymore. These days, technical SEO is just as crucial to maintaining your rankings on Google.
CMS systems provide SEO functionality to ensure your website has the best chance of ranking. Of course, they handle the basics of SEO. CMS plugins will give you options to add whatever meta-information you want to your individual pages.
On top of that, SEO plugins provide you the ability to make sitewide changes to your SEO. You can manage 301 redirects, set up canonical pages, deindex duplicate content, create sitemaps, and add breadcrumbs to your pages.
Search Functions
It isn’t always easy to find information on a website that has a lot of content. You need to sift through thousands of pages and still might not find what you need at the end of the day. This is a terrible experience for your visitors.
Since CMS software uses a database to store your content, it can provide simple search features to your visitors. All they need to do is type what they’re looking for in a search bar and get related content you post.
This saves time for your users and means you don’t need to build any custom functionality yourself. It also increases your visitor retention since people know they can come back to your site and easily find the information they need.
Speed Up Your Site
Over 50% of all website traffic happens on mobile today. That means you can’t rely on the bulk of your visitors to have fast internet connections. If you have a website with many images and bloat, you’ll provide a poor experience for people who don’t have a fast connection.
CMS systems have plugins that give you the ability to optimize your website performance. If you have an image-heavy site, you can add lazy-loading to your images. This means that your visitors only download images once they scroll down to them on your pages.
You can also add caching software to your website to speed things up. Caching software is a way to create static HTML files for your dynamic pages. If there aren’t regular updates to those pages, there’s no reason to generate them on the fly every time.
A static file means your site won’t need to make database calls to generate your web content. No database calls mean that your website response time will increase and load faster for your visitors.
Make Remote Modifications
It isn’t easy to make updates to a website when it’s static. You need a development environment, access to source files, and the ability to build the site. If you need to make a quick change, you might not be able to do it when your site is static.
A CMS program gives you the ability to change your site from anywhere in the world. CMS software provides you a login page to access your administration section from anywhere. As long as you have a reliable internet connection, you can make quick changes whenever and wherever you want.
Find Training
While some people can get up and running with a CMS quickly, some people might need some help to get up to speed. With the popularity of CMS software, there is plenty of training on the internet to get you up to speed quickly.
If you don’t have a large budget, there are plenty of free videos on platforms like YouTube to get you started. You can easily find a playlist that walks you through setting up your site on a CMS.
If you want a more structured course, there are paid options available. You can pay for a video course or work with an experienced CMS user to figure out how to get your site running.
You can also find best practices information, so you know how to get things running the right way. View this blog to learn more about CMS practices so that you can get started correctly.
Learning a Web Content Management System Is Worth the Time
You don’t have time to spend recreating your website pages every time you want to make an update to your site. Invest in a web content management system today so you can focus on creating content and let your content software handle all the hard work.
If you want more tips for operating your website, head back to our blog. You’ll find posts that will help you learn how to get more traffic and turn those people into customers.
