It has become practically essential for a company to have its own website in 2023.

This allows you to make yourself known, to develop your online presence and your business.

However, creating and developing your site over time is a real challenge for some companies, especially when they don't have web development skills.

Fortunately, CMS ("Content Management System" or in French "Content Management System") exist to simplify the management of websites.

A CMS is software for creating, modifying, deleting and then publishing content online.

The CMS allows you to easily store and organize the content of your site, without requiring any programming knowledge.

Many CMS are now known to the general public, such as Wordpress which alone represented 43.2% of websites in 2022!

Some CMS also allow natively to create and manage e-commerce stores, this is the case in particular of Shopify, Prestashop or Big Commerce.

Here are some of the many advantages of using a CMS for your website:

• Ease of use: someone who knows nothing about web development can quickly write articles, invite other writers to interact, create drafts, publish their articles.

• Personalization: a CMS does not only allow you to modify textual content, and some CMS offer themes that allow a non-designer or non-web developer to modify the design of the website.

• Flexibility: CMS often work in a logic of "plug and play", and it is easy to add plugins or extensions to allow the site to benefit from new functionalities (for example an online quote creation module, a widget showing the courses of bitcoin or ethereum on its site, a module facilitating the improvement of the SEO referencing of the site, etc.)

• Optimization for search engines: SEO is a major challenge for websites, and a successful site does not stop at its visual appearance or the quality of the source code that allows the site to exist. CMS have therefore evolved to allow better consideration of natural referencing criteria and many plugins exist to optimize its SEO (image compression, suggestions, modification of tags, etc.) and thus attract more people to its site. .

• Security: if CMS are regularly the target of hackers, security represents a real challenge for CMS publishers, which is why they regularly offer new versions to resolve vulnerabilities and security flaws.

• Cost: CMS are well suited for small structures that cannot invest too large amounts in the creation of a 100% tailor-made showcase site.

Starting from a CMS with the use of a theme, you can put a site online fairly quickly and for an attractive price... but this way of working will not allow you to have something 100% customizable (the themes are not made to be easily modified as soon as you want to get out of the framework they offer) and optimized in terms of performance, unlike a site designed and developed 100% custom.

As we have seen, CMS are an interesting solution for managing the content of your site without having technical skills.

The use of themes is also an interesting choice for companies that cannot afford to invest in a 100% bespoke website.

For others, it is possible to combine the best of both worlds with a custom designed and developed site, to which we will add a so-called "headless" CMS such as Strapi to manage the content from a back office.

Are you still hesitating between opting for a traditional CMS with the use of a theme or creating a tailor-made site and managing its content with a Headless CMS?

Read our article on the subject: https://www.blacksmith.studio/blog/traditional-vs-headless-CMS