November 9, 2022
Whether you're creating a corporate website, an ecommerce store, or a blog, a content management system (CMS) enables you to control your site’s content, design, and functionality without touching any underlying code. There are hundreds of content management systems on the market, each offering unique functionality to fulfill different business purposes. To select the best CMS for your business, you need to ensure its features align with your needs and goals.
This is just one example of a feature that you might consider when selecting a platform for your business. Below, we’ll look at 14 key features in a CMS that can help you create and run a site. Then, you may want to use a platform with built-in SEO tools. With CMS Hub, for example, you’ll get on-page SEO advice in the same place you’re creating blog posts, landing pages, and other content. For instance, say you want to optimize your content for search engines.
While every CMS is unique, there are some core features that you should look for when selecting a platform for your business. A platform that combines a user-friendly dashboard with built-in SEO tools and advanced security configurations, among other key features, will enable you to build and grow a site that attracts, engages, and delights your visitors.
At the core of every CMS is the admin dashboard. Every CMS should enable you to manage all tasks involved in content production and distribution right from your dashboard.
These tasks include scheduling content, monitoring threats, tracking user activity, installing modules and plugins, and reviewing performance analytics, among other responsibilities.
When evaluating different CMS platforms, it's important to look at the selection of themes each one offers. Themes are important for establishing a consistent look and feel across your site. For example, if you run an e-commerce site, you might want a theme that includes:
The less work you have to do to add content to your website, the more work you can put into making that content high-quality. As such, you need a powerful content editor to ensure you can easily create and publish different types of content — from blog posts with custom layouts to landing pages with embedded resources.
Ideally, you should be able to add images, videos, CTAs, forms, and more, and rearrange these elements within the publishing interface.
In addition to editing and publishing features, consider content management systems that have a way to save and track your work as you go. You may find yourself in a situation where you need to revert to an old version of your content — it’s a nice touch when a CMS makes that easy.
Best to find this out now than wait for a case of data loss, a broken website, or a hack — in all of these cases, you’ll want an extra copy of your site on hand.
To expand your reach to customers in different countries, you need a CMS with multi-language content features. This will make it quick and easy for you to create different language variations of your pages. With CMS Hub, you'll be able to not only create multi-language variants of a specific page — you'll be able to test them. These variants are automatically associated in groups so you can continue to manage your multi-language content as you scale. You can then add a language switcher module to your page template, allowing visitors to switch between translated versions of pages within the same multi-language group
No matter the size of your business, it’s likely that more than one person will be publishing content on your site. You might have authors responsible solely for creating drafts, editors for reviewing those drafts, and administrators for scheduling and publishing them. That’s why publishing controls are important in any CMS. Assigning different roles and levels of access within your CMS helps you establish a workflow for creating, approving, and releasing different creative assets. They also prevent users from performing actions on your site that they shouldn’t be — you probably wouldn’t want a first-time freelance writer publishing their own post without your approval, for example.
A CMS with built-in SEO tools will help you optimize your content for search and improve your chances of ranking on search engine results pages.
First, you should check that the platform itself is SEO-friendly: Does it use proper HTML markup? These are all fundamental practices all your pages should follow to be in good standing with search engines.
No single CMS will handle everything your business website needs in-house. Instead, your CMS should rely on its integration capabilities to bring third-party software into your workflow. This way, your CMS data can flow freely between applications to help you distribute and analyze your site’s content. Here are some integrations you’ll want to check for when CMS-shopping:
Insights like where your target personas are based, what device they’re using, how they’re interacting with content on different devices, and which pieces of content are most popular are crucial to refining your content strategy. Ideally, your CMS will have built-in analytics for measuring these performance indicators right in your dashboard. If it doesn’t, then it should offer an integration with Google Analytics or another popular analytics tool.
When looking at a platform's selection of apps and integrations, check out what templates they offer as well. Because you can use a template rather than create a post or page from scratch every time you want to publish new content, these are key to simplifying your publishing process.
Once your site is live, it's unlikely it will look the same for long. Whether you're launching a new product or completely overhauling your site's design, there are many situations in which you'll need to make major changes to your site.
Maximizing the security on your site doesn’t just protect your data – it protects your visitors and your brand reputation. Personal data theft was the number one crime concern in the US in 2020, and it’s your responsibility to keep those worries from becoming a reality for customers. When evaluating different content management systems, consider what built-in features the platform offers and how much work it’s going to be for your team to achieve your security standards.
Most open-source platforms do not have customer service departments that you can call with a question. Instead, they provide extensive documentation and then rely on an engaged community of users to create and run wikis, forums, user groups, and events to fill in the gaps. Joomla, for example, has 700,000 community members who regularly engage with each other in the Joomla support forum to discuss the software.
You may be starting your website from scratch with your CMS of choice. Or, you may be importing large numbers of website files. In this case, consider content management systems with features to help with the process. Some even offer secure migration services if you’re moving from another CMS.
