LEARN Highlights | How to Choose the Right CMS

On Wednesday the 5th of June, we were delighted to host our tenth #LEARNbyVERB on how to choose the right CMS for your brand. Director, Ben Askins, led the workshop at Gaucho with views overlooking Tower Bridge.

Attendees included the likes of Alexa Chung, Clive Christian, Corinthia Hotel and Temperley London. For those who sadly couldn’t attend, we’ve collated the key learnings from the day and we will also share the content through our YouTube channel.

What is a CMS?

A content management system (CMS) is a tool that allows a website editor/administrator to manage the content that is displayed. (Every Interaction, 2019).

What are the different types of CMS available?

There are currently 1.9 billion websites; that’s 1 website for every five people in the world. (Websetup, 2018). Of these, the sites with the highest amount of traffic include:

Broadly speaking, the CMS market share split looks a lot like this:

For the eCommerce landscape, this does look slightly different:

(Websetup, 2018)

Although both look vastly different, WordPress and Woocommerce significantly outweigh the rest of the competition. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the right choice for your brand. There are in fact, many factors to take into account. These include:

• Current traffic levels?
• Is it eCommerce and, if it is, how many products?
• Operational and Financial requirements/Integrations needed?
• Website functionality?
• Future functionality?

Once these have been identified, you can then weigh up which CMS is right for you by going through the advantages and disadvantages of each. For the purpose of the event, we went through our top three.

Shopify

Advantages:

• Apps for everything
• Will take care of all hosting, upgrades and payment gateways
• Quick and easy setup – a lot of themes to choose from
• 24/7 support
• Reliable and less likely to develop bugs
• Multi channel Support

Disadvantages:

• App costs
• Limited customisation and features for larger brands
• Limited for advanced SEO tactics
• Additional Transaction fee for external payment gateways

WordPress and WooCommerce

Advantages:

• Highly secure
• SEO friendly
• Customisable design
• Full content and template control
• Multilingual support
• Dropshipping

Disadvantages:

• Plugins
• Frequent security updates
• External hosting and updates
• Support

Magento

Advantages:

• Has the widest range of product related features
• Ability to host multiple websites on the backend
• Advanced SEO capabilities
• Advanced content management capabilities
• Full customisation around design
• Open source

Disadvantages:

• Cost
• Variety of developers and development styles
• Support isn’t as good as it should be
• Hosting
• Everything takes a lot longer to do and requires proper planning

The Future of Content Management Systems

The primary challenge of a CMS is to deliver the best digital experience platform with Omnichannel Delivery that is secure. A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device. There are two types: Decoupled and Headless CMS.

Conclusion

What with so many factors dependent and the variety of CMS’s available each with their own advantages and disadvantages, it really comes down to the specific needs of the brand. At Verb, we take a personal approach to every client we work with. If you would like help with deciding which CMS is right for you, please get in contact with us today.

The next LEARN event will cover how to master digital marketing for the Chinese Market. Please email us on [email protected] if you are interested in attending.

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