What’s the best CMS platform for small business web design?

When embarking on the mission of designing a website, the first choice it will be necessary to make is which content management system (or CMS) to use. 

There are so many options out there that it can be confusing to decide which will be best; each has its own benefits, and one or another will stand out for individual reasons. 

This article gives the London-based Webheads team a chance to take a look at WordPress and why they consider it one of the best CMS options, suited to the needs of small businesses, with benefits such as SEO optimisation and easy customisation.

It’s easy to pick up

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress is that users can pick up the basics relatively easily. The dashboard is intuitively designed with limited jargon, allowing even someone who’s not tech-savvy to access its functions with relative ease. 

This means that with a little time and exploration, it may be possible to run a own website – a massive benefit for small businesses that may not have the resources to have a web designer on the payroll. Those can afford to hire someone to design the site initially will be able to update it easily themselves, adding content as appropriate.

It’s great for SEO

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is important for businesses of all sizes. While bigger businesses are often able to afford a significant budget for content creators and marketing strategists, small businesses will likely have to do a lot of this themselves. 

That’s where WordPress saves the day – it simplifies SEO significantly, allowing relative novices to get to grips with optimisation strategies quickly. Simple plug-ins allow users to get scores on their current SEO approach, offering ways to improve in easily actionable ways.

It’s customisable

While a business might be small now, there’s no saying how it could grow in the future. WordPress is impressively customisable, meaning that as a brand design is updated and the business is scaled, the owners can easily update the website to match. 

Being held back by limiting factors such as rigid themes can be incredibly frustrating, and could result in needing to completely rebuild a site. This shouldn’t be the case with WordPress – the themes it comes with are easily changeable, and a number of plug-ins further facilitate the customisation process making updates incredibly easy.

It’s affordable

As small businesses will likely be more budget-conscious than larger organisations, it’s important that they get the most bang for their buck. WordPress is good value, and has a lot of differently priced options, starting with a free base option. 

With that free option, users still have to pay for their domain and hosting elsewhere of course, but the tools they’ll get from WordPress to organise and design content are free. The non-paid-for option is limited, of course, but it’ll give a good idea of whether WordPress suits the company’s needs before it’s time to financially commit.

The editorial unit