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Don’t Make These Mistakes When Choosing a CMS

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When it comes to choosing the best CMS for your company, there’s more to it than just price. You also need to consider other factors like how it looks to your customers, whether it works across a range of devices, and if it offers you the freedom to build your brand in the way you imagined. 

We’ve outlined four common mistakes that businesses make when choosing a CMS. 

Forgetting to consider security measures

No matter what CMS you use, whether it’s Wordpress, Magento, or Contentstack, securing your site against cyber attacks is vital. Choosing a CMS that offers a broad suite of security options is a vital tool in keeping your site safe and secure.  

Hackers are becoming ever more sophisticated and can quickly identify vulnerabilities on ecommerce site security and take advantage of these. With research showing that 56% of consumers will stop buying from ecommerce brands or businesses that have been the victim of fraud, not securing your site correctly can have serious consequences. 

Look out for a CMS that offers security features including:

  • Two-factor authentication 
  • Data encryption 
  • Secure data transfer using HTTPS/SSL protocols
  • Storing your data on secure servers

Don’t forget the steps you can take to keep your site secure, like regularly updating your plugins and using a strong administration password. 

Choosing a CMS before you know what you need

Every CMS can sound great on paper, but it’s a good idea to evaluate whether it’s going to meet the current and future needs of your business before you spend any money. 

For example, if you’re aiming to reach a global audience, you need to make sure your CMS can localize your content for different markets. This involves much more than just an automatic translation, as these don’t consider cultural differences, local colloquialisms, color preferences, and more. 

Using a headless CMS will likely suit a brand with a global reach much better than a traditional monolithic CMS. A headless CMS allows you to publish content tailored to local audiences, helping build brand loyalty and reduce customer support costs. With 72% of consumers preferring to buy a product from a site with content in their native language, failing to localize your content can have serious consequences. 

Choosing a CMS based on price 

Yes, it can be tempting to choose the CMS with a low price, but you could end up spending more over the longer term. If you choose a basic CMS with limited features, then this might work well for a few years, but you could find the functionality severely limits your ability to expand in the future. 

With more and more consumers using their smartphones or other mobile devices to shop from, making sure your website is mobile responsive and is optimized for viewing on multiple types of devices can make a big difference. A budget CMS may not offer this functionality. With 69.4% of customers using their mobile devices to make purchases, you’re missing out on a huge section of the market if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.  

That’s not to say that you should blow your budget when it comes to your CMS. There’s plenty of options out there that combine functionality and a great price point. But you need to make sure they can meet your needs before you shell out any money. 

Not knowing if you need convenience or customization 

A CMS that uses templates is a great way to get your site up and running quickly, but as your business grows, they may not offer the level of customization you’re looking for. When you choose your CMS, you can pick between those that use pre-existing templates or those that allow you to create your site from scratch. 

They both have their own advantages and disadvantages, and what might suit one business perfectly will end up being the wrong decision for another. Knowing whether you prefer the ease, flexibility, and lower cost of a template CMS over the functionality, unique design possibilities, and responsive design of a custom CMS is important to think about before you take the plunge and buy one or the other. 

Choose the right CMS and enjoy the advantages

If you’re currently researching the best CMS for your business, don’t fall into the trap of making the mistakes we’ve outlined above! And if you’re already in business and finding your CMS doesn’t fulfill your needs, take action and consider upgrading to a different CMS that suits you better. Whichever category you fall into, there’s no time like the present. 

Published: August 23, 2021
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stephanie trovato

Stephanie Trovato

Stephanie Trovato fills her days with content creation and marketing strategy for publications like Business Insider, Investopedia, Huffington Post, and more. She also works marketing strategy as a freelancer with Optimist, while balancing duties as a DotDash editor. She is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and is based in New York. Check out more of her work at BigHContent.com.

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