You Probably Don’t Need a CMS for Your Website

Starting out, what is a Content Management System (CMS)? If you’ve ever paid to have a website built, one of the first questions you probably asked were “Will I be able to change things on the website myself if I want to?” The answer to that question is a CMS, which allows website administrators to change things about a website without necessarily needing to know or understand the code required to do so. WordPress is a prevalent example of a CMS that allows users to add pages, blog posts, change content, etc without needing to know how to code, as is Craft CMS, Drupal, even Shopify.

There are a lot of great CMSs to choose from, but let’s start at the beginning: Do you need a CMS at all? Or do you need to worry about which one is chosen? The quick answer is no. You may think it’s vital that you can change your website on a whim, but is that really all that important? The likelihood is you are paying someone to build and maintain your website, and it’s just as likely that while you have all the intentions in the world that you’ll get in there and write blogs and build new pages, the reality is those items tend to be delegated, either to your employees or to those who built the website, or whoever you hire to manage it.

Consider leaving the website to those you have entrusted to build it. If we’re given a website to build and free-run as to how it’s done, we will choose the system that works best for us, which means we can most efficiently serve you, whether that be through a CMS that we are experts with, an existing platform that speeds up the design and building process, or even an entirely hardcoded website that, while not user friendly to change and update, will be built to exact specifications and much faster.

Afterward, if updates are needed, it’s simple to jump into the code or use our baked-in team processes to take care of the need quickly and easily. It’s also better for the website when there are less hands on it, because much more can go wrong when multiple people are changing and updating pages on a site. Why not write the same content down in a word document and send it over to be added to the website, rather than struggling with an unfamiliar system in order to achieve the same results?