What makes a good CMS, a great CMS?

What makes a good CMS, a great CMS? While the answer to this question depends entirely on your preferences, your budget and your requirements, when it comes to creating engaging and impactful content that drives awareness, demand and loyalty, there are some CMSes that stand above the rest. But what do these platforms have that others don’t have?

I’ve outlined a few of the key features of a great CMS below.

It is customisable

Let’s face it, there are some CMS features that you’ll use more than others and there are some that you’ll never use. Given this reality, it’s important that you can customise your CMS based on your preferences and your needs. This is one of the things we love about Umbraco, they provide the foundations – complete with neat and clean code – which gives you the ideal starting point to create a website that looks and feels the way you want it to.

It is scalable

It’s also important that your CMS is scalable so that it can support your company’s growth. When choosing a CMS, make sure that it can handle huge spikes in traffic and that it can quickly grow and scale as and when you need it to.

It is innovative

More and more, CMS service providers are leveraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate content creation. In action, an AI-enabled CMS can do everything from analyse a piece of content to identify its sentiment and overall tone to freeing up your content workers’ time by tagging images automatically and it can even be used to create content, as we’ve seen in recent weeks with all the hype around generative AI and ChatGPT. Optimizely has been named as a leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for both their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Content Marketing Platform (CMP). They’ve integrated AI capabilities throughout their CMS to generate unique text and images for target personas. Pretty cool, right?

It is affordable

This might sound obvious, but when it comes to a CMS, it is critical to consider value over price. One must consider hidden costs around customisations, maintenance and security updates, for example. In addition, some product extensions may come at an additional cost. If a platform offers flexibility around choosing features, be sure to check if there are any charges related to these add-ons so that you don’t end up spending more than you’d like to.

It is quick and easy to use

User-friendliness is a non-negotiable if your team is working on a CMS most of the day, every day. Your CMS must be developer friendly and must also make is quick and easy for users to design and build more complex and integrated websites. Installing multiple applications or additional plug-ins shouldn’t affect page speeds. Using chosen CMS shouldn’t require additional training internal resources; particularly when it comes using more advanced features.

It meets your needs

It’s important to remember that there is no perfect CMS and no solution can do everything for everyone. Ultimately, whatever CMS you choose must meet your needs. If you’re looking for the full set of functionality – including everything needed to manage a user experience across all aspects of channel journeys – a digital experience platform (DXP) might be a better investment.

We use both Umbraco and Optimizely to deliver a great CMS experience to our clients. In fact, we’re Africa’s first Umbraco Gold Partner and we are also an Optimizely Silver Solution Partner. If you’re unsure what the right CMS is for your business, we’d love to help. Get in touch, here.