Lately, we have scoped more than a few projects where the client has a hard-coded custom website. This holds their marketing team hostage to the development team. If they want to quickly spin up a landing page or alter the image on the home page it can take days or weeks. We put together 3 reasons why we think brands are still underestimating the value of a Content Management System (CMS).

1. No coding required - This is clearly the number one benefit. Giving access to the business without requiring coding and development skills. Want to add a webpage, swap an image, update some copy? This can all be done with a modern CMS. Trust me and every developer that you have worked with there are more complex problems they would like to be working on than updating some copy on the homepage. So this is mutually beneficial for both the marketing team and developers. 
2. SEO Benefits - With a CMS you can update title tags, meta descriptions, etc… these all help tell search engines more about your site. SEO often needs to be tweaked or optimized based on keyword research. You will often need to set up a 301 redirect or make updates to the sitemap. This can all be accomplished with a CMS. Being able to quickly make updates will help improve inbound traffic to the site from higher search engine rankings. 
3. Responsive Templates - Having a structure or framework within a template to work with helps make everything easier including responsive design. It provides guideposts when it comes to updating blocks of content or adding pages. This helps improve the overall experience of the site as things are connected with a common look and feel. This may not be the case if a site is custom-built as different developers approach things slightly differently.  

Thinking about these 3 advantages (and there are more) you can start to build an ROI for your project. Yes, your conversion rate improvements will improve your business case, but don’t forget the time savings. Put a dollar amount to your IT team or development agency doing this work and you will quickly see that updating to a modern CMS framework will dramatically improve the ROI on your internal resources as well as the conversion rate of your website.

ZiftrShop has both a modern CMS as well as full eCommerce capabilities. This makes the business administration and marketing features much easier to deploy, but also gives you a powerful checkout experience that will help scale your business. Find out more about if it’s time to change your commerce platform.