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When undergoing a new website development project, one of the first and often key decisions that you’ll make is, which content management system (CMS) is best for your business and its needs for your new website. If you’re struggling to choose one for your business, you can find some of our top tips for selecting a new CMS here.

However, once you’ve chosen one that works well for you, you want to ensure that you manage it effectively in order to achieve your desired results, goals and KPIs.

To help you get the most out of your investment, we’ve collated some of our top tips for CMS success.

Utilise key layouts, sections and applications

A majority of the mainstream CMS systems are designed with key layouts, applications and sections for elements of your website that are available out of the box. These can often include things such as your blog, headers, footers, top-level navigation pages and sometimes even simple contact forms and the ability to schedule and share your social media messaging without the need of a separate platform.

By utilising these elements, you and your team will be able to share content and receive data and enquiries exactly as you wish. As well as ensuring that your website theme performs at its best.

Enterprise systems such as Sitecore often come out of the box with key layouts such as blog pages and top-level pages in order to make the development stage as smooth as possible, as well as being mobile friendly for the members of your audience who are on the go.

Keep the system updated

Each CMS provider will periodically release updates to keep your system in the best shape possible, often including important security patches and sometimes even new features and applications for you to use and implement on your website.

Staying up to date with these patches and upgrades ensures that your system is performing at its best, is utilising the most up to date features and is protected from any hackers or viruses that may be out to cause your brand harm.

SEO Support

With increased efforts across the digital landscape to ensure that your website is ranking in the relevant search engines, it’s important to ensure that your system helps to enhance your efforts.

Key features of a CMS that we’d recommend to support your SEO efforts include ensuring that your content is delivered quickly to avoid page speed penalties, allowing you to register custom sitemaps to the major search engines and supporting SEO tags and scripts, amongst other capabilities.

Systems such as Umbraco and Sitecore help enhance your SEO efforts by ensuring the developer experience is as user-friendly as possible, allowing you to make the most of the system and staying assured that you’re meeting all of your SEO requirements.

Set designated levels of permission

We have no doubt that the members of your team who work on your website are experts at what they do, however, without a complete understanding of how your entire website works as a whole – it can be easy for something to go wrong.

A large portion of the available CMS systems are designed with various permission levels included, and sometimes even come with the ability to create custom permissions in order to make the maintenance of the system as easy as possible. Solutions such as Sitecore and Umbraco also have designated levels of permissions for content creators, marketing specialists and even your web developers, to ensure that everyone has all of the tools they need.

Utilise these permission levels to ensure that those who absolutely need access to everything from the code to publishing content are separate from those who only need to do the more simple tasks.

Integrate your CMS with your CRM

With many content management systems, they often have the ability to integrate with your internal customer relationship management system (CRM) to ensure that you have a more complete view of your online activities.

By taking the time to complete this extra step, some systems will allow you to track your potential leads via email conversations, how they interact with your website and also help you create a more well-rounded image of your user base.

Here at Codeminers, we have a range of highly skilled and specialised web developers to help you get the most out of your chosen CMS for your website project, as well as help maintain them for future developments.

Find out more about how we can help you with your upcoming project by talking to a member of our team.