Tips to Choose a Perfect CMS for Your Website

A CMS is a Content Management Program. It is a tool that writes web code for you. The most common CMS at the moment is one that writes HTML code (primarily). You can create a website of your own, even if you have no web design or programming experience at all. There are quite a few online that will allow you to build a blog, and a few that allow you to build a website. Most of the ones that allow you to build a blog may be modified so that you may create a website with them.

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A lot of website builders are free; however, not everyone is going to be ideal for your purposes. There is a lot of choice, which means you must be more careful in your choice. Consider the tips below when you are picking yours.

Image Credit: William Brawley

Make sure it does not lock you into its system
There are some CMS platforms that allow you to use them for free, but will then lock you into their system so that you cannot use another CMS tool to build or develop your website. There are few that will hold onto your domain name indefinitely, but some of them may make it a long and difficult process for getting your website off of their system. So, you really should check beforehand about how easily you are able to leave the CMS whilst keeping the website design that you created with it.

Are you allowed to remove your domain straight away?
This ties in with the point above. Some of them will allow you to build your website with another CMS, but they will hold onto your domain name, so that if you try to publish with a different CMS then it will look like you have duplicated your URLs. You need to check to see if the CMS is going to retain any control over your domain if you decide to stop using the CMS.

Is the CMS secure enough for your purposes?
The CMS needs to be secure if you are going to be publishing and updating your website with it. You do not want a non-secure one, or people may be able to gain access to your files and control of your website through it. Instead of hacking the server, as person may hack the CMS, giving them (possibly) full control over your website.

Does the CMS crash or freeze up upon occasion?
Not every CMS is perfect, in-fact a lot of the browser based CMS tools are quite skittish. They will sometimes freeze up and you have to re-load the page. Other times they will crash completely and you have to restart your browser. On other occasions it will not let you complete a task because a certain element of the tool has frozen so you have to re-load the page and try again.

How many bugs does the CMS have?
They are not going to advertise this for you, so it may take a bit of research. But, you will find that most CMS programs have a bug or two, but you need to figure out how bad the problem is. If there are people online who are posting comments saying that they are at their wits end with the CMS, then you should consider giving it a miss.

Are there hidden charges with the use of your CMS?
The CMS may seem cheap, or may even be free, but there are often hidden charges or unexpected charges. For example, with Magento you are able to use their free CMS, but if you want to add things such as a payment page or shopping cart, then you need to buy a Magento plugin in order to do it.

Does it create HTML code that is search engine friendly?
This is a very important factor because the way the code is written is going to have an effect on the search engine friendliness of the site. The code needs to be clean and free from errors. IF the CMS creates bloated or dirty code, then it is going to affect your search engine friendliness and there is nothing you can do about it (except change CMS provider).

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