The overarching goal of any content management system (CMS) is to make using your website easy – easy to manage content and information, easy to change and edit your design elements, and easy to produce the work you want and get it in front of your customers.
But as clients often discover, many of the ‘standard’ features of popular CMSes that are key to making things easy are not actually core features – they’re plugins.
And while this might not seem particularly important, relying on plugins apart from the core CMS adds another layer of complexity to managing your website.
Additionally, adding on numerous plugins can have an impact on your site speed and in turn how effective your website is.
Here’s a quick rundown of a few standard CMS features that do not in fact come as standard.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Getting your website to rank in Google is absolutely essential to your site’s success. Everyone from tiny design shops to IBM rely on Google to connect them to their customers with organic search.
However, most content management systems don’t include SEO best practices or tools as standard. That is, all the small, technical details that make your website easy for Google’s algorithms to read and thus, easy to rank in Google.
This includes things like:
- Automatically creating and updating XML sitemaps and submitting them to Google
- Automated keyword linking
- The ability to customize page metadata
- Follow/nofollow links where appropriate
- The ability to easily prevent pages from being indexed
- Managing and tweaking your keyword choices
Without some (or all) of these tasks being completed, your website could be languishing on page 3 of Google’s search results, which can have a profound impact on your bottom line.
Social Sharing Buttons
Those handy social sharing icons that you see on most websites come in many different shapes and styles, but in most cases, they don’t come standard with a CMS.
Depending on which services you want buttons for, and how you want them to appear and function, sharing buttons can take some extra configuration for your site and its design.
Web caching
People leave slow websites. We know this.
If a site doesn’t load in the first two seconds, you can wave goodbye to a big chunk of visitors.
Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy way for you to get around this problem: caching.
Caching is one way to speed up your site by cutting down the amount of communication that goes on between the server and the end computer. Each communication takes time, so caching reduces the number of communications, which increases the speed.
This should be a pretty standard practice – however, many content management systems rely on plugins to do this job for them.
CDN access
Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are similar to caching but work in a slightly different way.
Instead of reducing the number of communications between the end user and the server, they work to reduce the distance the communication has to travel by storing common files on various servers all over the world (there’s a more in-depth review of CDNs and how they work here).
This shared system is fantastic for getting the files people want to them quickly and cost-effectively since it costs more and takes longer the further the connection had to go.
And since speed is so critical to a website, you would assume that technical backend things like a CDN would be looked after by your CMS. However, this isn’t the case.
Many popular CMSes do not include this as a core feature and, again, rely on plugins to close the gap.
Security
Website security is one of the most important core requirements for a CMS, right after the ability to publish online at all.
Whatever your business, when you engage with customers online, they expect their data, transactions, and information to be safe. They’re putting their information in your hands as an act of trust.
If your website is not secure or is hacked, and customer information is leaked, not only will you be on the hook to cover it financially, but you’ll also be looking at some serious loss of faith in your brand. This sort of trust violation can take years for a brand to recover from, if at all.
And once again, security is something you would expect to be covered by your CMS but often is woefully lacking.
There are a few problems with using plugins for your web security.
First, there’s a risk that it won’t actually work. Plugins are individual bits of software and every time you add a new one you run the risk that something else will break. If you’re running your web security through a plugin, you might very well be exposed and not know it.
Alternatively, your security plugin might work, but impact another plugin’s ability to do its job; for example, your site might be secure but no longer able to able to be indexed by Google.
Second, support for community plugins is generally lacklustre. While there are robust and detailed support forums for WordPress, there’s not nearly the same level of support for plugins.
And because your website environment will be slightly different from everyone else’s out there (since there is a nearly infinite combination of themes and plugins), solving a specific, gritty problem when things go wrong can be a daunting challenge.
Wrap up
The modularity of plugins is wonderful. It means that non-coding web owners can customise their site to solve specific problems or create specific experiences.
However, most web owners want a solid core service provided by their CMS, and unfortunately, those core requirements like speed, security, and SEO are often not provided by the CMS itself but are outsourced to handy plugins.
When selecting a CMS, we recommend looking carefully at what’s provided as a core feature and what’s supplied by plugins, so it’s clear what you’re buying, and so you can get the right solution for your needs.
