How Do I Choose the Best CMS Platform for My Website?
Content Management Systems (CMS) help easily create, modify, and remove content from websites. With so many options available, it can get tricky to pick the best CMS platform that will accommodate all your technical and creative needs and allow you to rank well with search engines. Unfortunately, most CMS platforms are not upfront enough about the features they do (or don’t) offer, and many people realize their websites cannot keep up with their business too far into the process.
No matter the size of your business website, scalable pages and fast page speed are crucial to its success. This becomes even more important when your company grows into a multi-location business and your website expands with it. If you built your website on a CMS that doesn’t support fast or easy scalability, you might find multi-location website management to be exhausting. The time it takes to update multi-location websites without a scalable CMS can force you to switch to another CMS platform later on, which can be even more tedious and sometimes even cause your business to lose traction. The best practice is to choose a CMS from the start that can accommodate your needs no matter how large your website becomes. Even if you think you don’t need a powerful CMS, you will be thanking yourself later when it saves you from starting over or giving up.
Published on October 6, 2022
Choosing the Right CMS
Templates Options
Remember to consider the template options when searching for the best CMS for you—and we don’t just mean to consider the design. Of course, consistent and thought-out layouts are essential, but there is more to website templates than appearance. One of the most crucial parts of picking a CMS that offers templates is checking the templates for technical problems, namely page speed performance issues and HTML validation issues. If you are not sure how to do this, and the CMS that you are considering does not boast about the quality of its templates, run for the hills. Using the wrong templates is one of the easiest ways to build a website that will go nowhere.
With that in mind, GLASS™ takes pride in its optimized templates. The GLASS™ team extensively tracks and reviews page speed performance on each of our pre-built templates, and we ensure that all HTML has been properly validated. Remember, even the most beautiful of templates can mask some serious technical errors that can hinder the success of your website. Choose a CMS that you can trust.
Easy to Use
Perhaps the reason you’re searching for the best CMS platform is that you’ve experienced layers upon layers of convoluted menus, plugins, external applications, and so many steps to publishing a page to the web that you forgot what you were even trying to do. When you finally get the page published, maybe you realized there was a mistake, and it took hours to go back and try to figure out how and where to fix it. This overwhelming, time-consuming confusion is enough to consider throwing in the towel.
GLASS™ is a centralized CMS, meaning you can take care of everything you need for your website from one location. No more plugins, no more hours of reading “how to” documentation that never seems to lead you to a real answer, and no more confusing menus with entirely too many vague options that you’re afraid to click. Take care of everything you need from a single CMS content editor.
GLASS™ is designed to be a robust, intuitive CMS that anyone can use regardless of experience.
Scalability
Scalability means a website can handle growth, adapt, and expand without issues. Website growth should never affect the end users negatively. Make sure the CMS you choose is scalable; otherwise, you risk falling behind the competition and spending an excessive amount of time trying to make small changes to your site. Not all content management systems are multiple location CMS.
GLASS™ supports scalable content and allows you to make changes to hundreds of pages at the click of a button. For example, save your website’s navigation bar as a global element, then instantly update anything in the menu across the entire website with just one click.
Responsive Design
Ensure your website is mobile-responsive. People want to locate information fast, and they will leave quickly if the website does not efficiently display content. No one wants to zoom in on their mobile devices to view a page that was intended for desktop.
Every template that GLASS™ offers is already built with a responsive design, saving you significant time designing and coding layouts yourself.
Frequently asked questions
What does CMS stand for?
CMS means Content Management System, a platform for creating, managing, and modifying website content. Simply put, it is a tool that makes managing a website easy—without having to write all the code from scratch.
GLASS™ is a robust CMS that can deliver exactly the functionality that you need to get started with your multi-location business.
What does a content management system do?
Content management systems simplify the web publishing experience by taking care of the more complex parts of producing websites behind the scenes. They help eliminate the burden of handwritten code and page optimization so that you can focus on producing well-written and valuable content.
What are the best CMS platforms?
Although there are many well-known content management systems, each follows different CMS best practices. The best CMS for you usually depends on your specific needs. GLASS™ specializes in page speed optimization, integrated SEO to assist with building SEO-friendly pages, scalability, pre-built web templates, tracking crucial metrics like Google Core Web Vitals, and much more.