To define all the components of a CMS, first of all, we hope you agree with the ”content management system” is much more than just managing a website. Overall SEO friendliness for your site is a big component of a CMS, with the sitemap generation being a key benefit. Without a CMS, you either have to write your own sitemap manually which most people wouldn’t even know how to do or you just wait for Google to (eventually) figure out that page exists, which can hurt your ranking opportunity on search engines.
Therefore, it’s much more efficient to just have your CMS create a sitemap for you because Google will read the sitemap every time it crawls, and if it sees a new page, it’ll know it needs to crawl that page and figure out what it contains.
However, if the sitemap is not there to guide the crawlers, it may or may not find the page eventually. While there are ways around it (like having a link to that page from another article, allowing Google to follow through and find a new page), it’s a lot faster to have the CMS generate a sitemap.
Basically, a CMS handles things like:
- Creating and managing content
- Being able to have multiple users
- Assigning different levels of permissions to each user (i.e. some users can only edit blog articles, some can edit everything, etc.)
- Managing some sort of media library (just images, images, and videos, etc.)
- Being able to edit and create content through some sort of easy way like (“what you see is what you get”) or a quick edit tool
- Being able to automatically form clean URLs based on what Google would want
- Automatically generating a sitemap for you when adding content so that Google can just read that and you don’t have to manually create it
Usually, the cms will take care of things like menu systems, too: if you have a primary menu at the top of your page, when you create a new page, you can create a menu item for it and it will automatically highlight it when you’re on that page.
Without a CMS, there’s a bunch of coding you’d have to do to figure out which URL is tied to which page, identify the associated top menu item, then manually link the two to display correctly together. Back in the day, we developers would have to manually do that, and it was a pain in the ass.
A CMS also helps build some of the UI because you’re not starting from scratch anymore you don’t have to write anything with a database; instead, it creates tables for you when you create a new type of content.
For instance, if you create a blog article and you say, “Hello, a blog article always has a title, body, etc.” and you create those fields, the CMS goes in the database and creates a table, columns, and stuff like that so you don’t have to write any of that code yourself.
As for whether you need to have any coding knowledge to use a CMS, it really depends on what you want to do, how the website was coded, and how the CMS was enhanced. Typically, you shouldn’t have to have any coding knowledge, especially for updating content through the CMS as a user.
Conclusion:
We hope this article helped you. If you have any questions regarding this article please comment below and message us anytime.