There are over 1,200 Content Management Systems available on the market today. Choosing the right one for your website can provide your business with significant advantages over traditional sites and in the process – save you lots of time and money. However, choosing the wrong CMS can leave you with a site that’s too complex and expensive to maintain.

As such, today’s post is about the things you need to consider when choosing the right CMS. Some of those things include:

Purpose

What’s the purpose of your website and how does a given CMS’ tools help you achieve that purpose? Is it to market products or services? Then you might want to choose one that’s based more on a blog – something like WordPress. If you’re looking to sell products, then you’ll want something that might be more e-commerce friendly. Knowing the purpose of your site is the #1 most important thing to know when choosing a CMS, so make sure you find the right solution for your site.

Usability

Who’s going to be maintaining your website and what are their skills? One of the best things about a CMS is not having to call a developer constantly to do updates. Still, there will be times when you have to, but that’s going to hinge largely on the capability of the person you’ve tapped to oversee the day-to-day maintenance for the site.

Performance

Websites behave differently according to the purpose that they’re being used for. You’ll want to consider what types of caching systems will be available, whether the CMS can support multiple servers and what kind of maintenance will need to be performed to keep the website healthy.

Security

Considering safety needs can save a lot of time and money. Security features can vary significantly from CMS to CMS so make sure you take the time to learn each feature and what it can offer. Also be sure to see what kinds of user capabilities the system has. As your site grows, you’ll need to deploy more people to help manage it. Being able to administer their functions specifically can help save a lot of security headaches that could potentially emerge.

Support and Community

Communities are an essential component of a good CMS. Every day, there are new plugins developed, new templates created and new ways of doing just about everything under the sun. That kind of a community can also help you build relationships and find inexpensive help in the event something goes wrong. And also, the more people talking about a CMS and working with it, the more likely it is to be a reputable, quality product.