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This article explains what a CMS is and outlines important things to consider when choosing the right CMS to build your website with. You can also learn which CMS we recommend starting your business website with.
What is a CMS?
So you want to build a new website and you’re unsure where to start. The first thing you need to do is decide on a Content Management System (CMS). The name itself describes what a CMS is. It is the system (or software) that manages the content for your website. If you have a lot of written content or galleries of images, there is a CMS for that.
There are a variety of CMSs available, like, WordPress, Drupal, Moodle, Prestashop, Joomla!, etc. In fact, if you look at the Softaculous list of installable software, you will see over a hundred of them. How do you know which one is right for you? Continue reading through the next section to learn things to consider when choosing a CMS to create your business website with.
Things to Consider
You may or may not have an idea of what kind of website you will be building. The various popular CMSs generally focus on one specific type of content. For instance, WordPress and Joomla! were designed for blog content, Moodle was developed for educational content and Prestashop is useful to manage a storefront. When considering your options for managing your website’s content, you will want to keep three (3) things in mind:
- Ease of use
- Scalability
- Speed
Ease of use can depend on several factors; how familiar you are with the CMS, how quickly you can learn common tasks using the CMS, and how simple the CMS is to use. It is pertinent that you choose a CMS that is fully supported. Thorough documentation and community support are a couple of examples of effective tools that can help you learn more, therefore improve ease of use.
Scalability provides an opportunity to manage various content if you are building a complex website. When choosing a CMS to work with, you should consider the options available to expand the functionality of your website. Although you may not see a need now, the success of your website may require functionality that is not built-in. Therefore, choose a CMS that will allow you to scale up your website as you grow.
Speed is important to consider because it improves your user experience. This has a direct impact on traffic and can help you succeed with your business. Some CMSs can be optimized by improving things at the server level. You may be able to tweak the CMS’s settings to optimize your website’s speed as well.
Which CMS is Recommended?
The short answer is WordPress. If you consider the factors mentioned above, WordPress easily proves to be the best solution.
For example, WordPress support includes extensive documentation as well as a community forum. If you can’t find what you are looking for in their documentation, then you may be able to find it in the community forum. The community forum encourages WordPress developers and users to share their knowledge of troubleshooting issues and performing common tasks. Additionally, the InMotion Hosting Support Center’s WordPress Education Channel is one of many external websites from which you can find helpful articles and guides. These support solutions help you to rapidly improve your experience using WordPress.
WordPress maintains a repository of over fifty-thousand plugins that can expand the functionality of your website. As your business and website evolve these plugins will come in handy to add features to your website you may not have considered a need for when you first built it. For this reason, WordPress outshines many other CMSs in regards to scalability.
Because optimization is vital to the success of your website, InMotion Hosting has developed a server environment that is optimized for hosting WordPress websites. Our exclusive WordPress Hosting Stack was developed to take the stress out of configuring your server, so you can focus on the success of your business website. We know you have more important things to worry about; which is why we offer to automatically install WordPress when you purchase a WordPress Hosting subscription.
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