What CMS is best for your enterprise website?

Launching and growing a website for an enterprise-level organisation is a fluid and ever-evolving process. Your website should never be viewed as the finished product – you should always be iterating and improving to better meet your needs and the needs of your customers.

Having the right processes and approach in place is at the centre of this – but so is having the right platform. 

Your content management system (CMS) dictates how you as an organisation are able to harness your website – from creating new content to integrating with core business systems. Picking the right one for your requirements is vital to setting yourself up for success – it’s possible, but not ideal, to change systems further down the line.

So which CMS is best for your enterprise website?

Factors to consider when choosing an enterprise CMS

When website project briefs come into us, sometimes the client will have a specific CMS platform in mind, or sometimes they’ll be open to a recommendation. Whichever state of mind they’re in, we always sense-check their assumptions and ensure we recommend the best solution. Here are some things we’ll consider, in collaboration with our clients.

Goals & purpose

On a fundamental level, what does the website need to help you achieve as a business? As a tool in your wider digital strategy, what does your website need to be able to do and support in order to help you reach business objectives? For example, do you need to be able to support a lot of content to build authority and awareness? Offer an elevated experience via an integrated customer portal to improve service levels? Having a high-level idea of your website goals helps begin to guide the decision around which platform will best support you.

Customisation & flexiblity

How customisable and flexible you need your website and the overarching infrastructure to be will influence the selection of the right CMS platform. A CMS like WordPress is open-source, meaning it is highly customisable and flexible. Other solutions are more “out-of-the-box”, which can offer some benefits, but it’s important to consider the “last 10% trap”. This refers to the first 90% of functionality being handled by an out-of-the-box solution, but achieving that last 10% takes twice as long as the first 90. Having a more custom and flexible solution from the outset saves you time, money and energy down the line.

Scalability

An enterprise website will need to deal with large amounts of content, spikes in traffic and in some cases a global audience. Additionally, as you grow, your needs and the needs of your customers will naturally evolve. You might need to launch new digital services or products, integrate with new processes, or target different countries. Having a CMS platform in place that can scale effortlessly will be a massive help as your business grows.

Content management needs

This is related to customisation and flexibility, but the content that you need to manage on your website tells us which kind of platform would be best to use. Are you managing a lot of specialist data for entities like products, properties, users? Is there, or will there be, a need for an e-commerce component? If you’re operating in multiple countries or across multiple brands, do you need to support a multi-site? Different CMS platforms are better at supporting different types of content management and overarching setups. Again, your needs around content management will guide us to the best solution.

Ongoing development & support

In an ideal world, we form a long-term partnership where we continue to support you with development and improvement of your website(s). But we’re realists, and we know that circumstances change and you might want to take development in-house. Having a CMS platform you can pick up and run with should you need to, is important – and your partner can help you select one that will be easy to hand over should we need to.

the importance of having the right partner to help you choose

As we’ve already mentioned a few times, when we’re working on a new website project, we’ll carefully consider the options to recommend the best platform to our client based on their needs. There are a number of reasons why we take time during this process even when the client already has a CMS platform in mind.

If you’ve only ever worked with a certain system, or you have preconceived ideas of what a particular CMS platform can offer, you might become fixated on or dismiss a particular solution. A partner like Adaptable can bring invaluable outside perspective to the table in terms of recommending the right platform – we’re able to use our expertise to assess all of the options objectively based on your requirements.

Examples of enterprise CMS platforms

We probably don’t need to tell you that there is endless choice out there in terms of CMS platforms. Some are tailored to specific industries or use cases, some are more broad in terms of their application. Some are more suited to smaller projects and don’t support enterprise-level projects. So it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive list, but here are a couple of examples of CMS platforms we use to deliver enterprise websites.

Enterprise WordPress

As we’ve alluded to, there is a misconception that WordPress is not a suitable platform for enterprise – probably due to its roots as a blogging platform. But WordPress has evolved into an incredibly flexible and powerful solution that can more than handle enterprise-level projects. 28% of the world’s top 1 million websites use WordPress – this includes sites like Bloomberg, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor. Due to its customisability and flexibility, the core platform can be enhanced to create an incredibly stable, secure and powerful environment to manage a wide range of content, data and integrations.

Sanity CMS

Sanity is one of several headless CMS platforms (we’ll get to headless in a moment) that offer a highly customisable content environment. The customisable nature of Sanity’s content models makes it easier to handle more types of complex data. For example, for a project we worked on with US home builder Davidson Homes, we identified that in order to integrate with the multiple listing services that drive the US real estate market, we needed a backend infrastructure that could handle complex relationships. We found that Sanity allowed us to create custom data structures and could handle a vast amount of data without compromising the front-end experience.

Headless or not?

A headless CMS is a way of setting up a website that separates or decouples the frontend from the backend content management. Some CMS platforms can be set up in a “traditional” way or in a headless environment – like WordPress. Some are natively headless and don’t have a front end at all – like Sanity. Whether or not your website needs to be set up with headless architecture depends on your requirements – headless has its benefits, but projects are slightly more complex to deliver, so if your site doesn’t need to be headless, we won’t recommend that it should be. You could read more about headless here, but here are a few reasons you might opt for headless:

• Super-fast content delivery speed is a critical priority
• You need to be able to deliver content across multiple frontends managed in the same place
• You’re working with significantly large volumes of complex data
• Scalability and flexibility are critical priorities
• You have the budget and timeframes required to deliver a headless project

Key takeaways

• Choosing the right CMS is crucial for the ongoing success of your enterprise website.
• It’s important to have an experienced partner in place who can offer expertise and objectivity in selecting the right platform.
• Key factors you and your chosen website partner should consider:
  • Goals and objectives
  • Scalability requirements
  • Content management needs
  • Ongoing development and support
• Examples of enterprise CMS platforms include WordPress and Sanity.
• Headless is a suitable way of approaching some – but not all – enterprise website projects.

Looking to start a website project and need some guidance on choosing the right platform? Get in touch and we’ll help you set off on the right path.