A content management system is the part of a website your own team touches. If it is awkward to use, the site goes out of date, however well it was built.

What a CMS does

It stores the content, gives editors a screen for changing it without code, and controls who may publish. Design and speed belong to the website built around it.

Option one: a traditional CMS

WordPress and systems like it keep content and pages in one place. Themes set the design and plugins add features. Editors see roughly what visitors will see, and there is a large pool of people who know the system.

The cost is upkeep. The core, the theme and every plugin need updating, and neglected plugins are a common source of security problems and slow pages. The design is also limited by the theme unless one is built for you.

It suits content-led sites, small business sites, and teams that want to make changes themselves.

Option two: a headless CMS

A headless CMS, such as Contentful, Sanity or Strapi, holds the content and offers editing screens, and nothing else. The website fetches the content and presents it. So can a mobile app, or anything else.

  • Any design is possible, and the pages can be very fast.
  • One source of content can serve the site and the app.
  • The editing system is not the public website, which leaves less exposed to attack.

In return, developers have to build and maintain the website itself. Previews and page building take setup, and editors work with structured fields unless visual editing is configured.

Option three: no CMS

The content lives in the code or in simple files, and a developer makes each change. For a brochure site that changes a few times a year this is the cheapest option to run and the fastest to load.

It stops being right as soon as someone non-technical needs to publish every week.

The questions that settle it

  • Who will edit the site, and how often?
  • Does the same content need to appear somewhere else, such as an app?
  • How far does the design need to depart from a template?
  • Who will apply updates and security patches?
  • Does the site need more than one language?

Moving later

Content can be exported from one system and imported into another. It is real work, and it is routine work. Keep the page addresses the same, or redirect the old ones, so search rankings survive the move.

Choose for the next two or three years. The choice does not have to last longer than that.

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