Power Up Your Website: 10 Must-Have CMS Features

There are many CMS options out there in the market making choosing one over another a difficult and lengthy process. But, building your website using the wrong CMS can prove to be a very expensive mistake.

So, which content management system should you choose for your business? The answer depends entirely on 2 important aspects:

1. The current status of your digital experience maturity and marketing: Do you heavily depend on content marketing? Are you using account-based marketing based on data collection? Do you have persona-defined user journeys mapped out?

2. Your plans for the future: Do you have plans to scale and grow your digital experience? Will there be more technologies and tools integrated with your website? If you have a clear idea of where you are going... you will be able to easily identify and align your technical requirements with the objectives of your digital strategy.

Regardless of how complex your CMS should be, we have curated the must-have features that users (internal and customers) expect to see in a digital experience.

Here Are 10 CMS Features That You Will Need:

1. Easier Content Creation

By definition, a content management system is a tool that is supposed to enable you to create, edit, and publish content on your website.

That content can range from a marketing asset such as downloadable resources (i.e. ebooks, tools, reports, etc.), a blog article, or an entirely new landing page.

Whether your content creation team is restricted to one person or comprised of tens of team members, your CMS of choice should have a user-friendly backend and tools to enable your non-technical content creators to publish content easier and faster.

2. Seamless Content Creation Workflows

Typically, enterprise-level organizations have a large team from across various departments involved in content creation and publishing.

An enterprise-grade CMS like Varbase features a content publishing and management workflow that supports the requirements of enterprise-level content marketing strategies. The CMS will enable your team to track and monitor the content creation process,  from authoring, editing, and approval to publication, promotion, and reporting, in a seamless manner.

Moderating the content creation process will be a critical asset for larger enterprises that rely upon content-heavy marketing communications.

Out of the box, Varbase Workflow offers two workflows for content moderation:

1. Simple workflow: Draft, Published, and Archived / Unpublished Useful for any website, and offers the ability to make a draft of a live version of the content without unpublishing the whole content.

2. Editorial workflow: Draft, In review, Published, and Archived / Unpublished Useful for a website with editorial or moderation staff. You can create as many additional states as you like and define transitions between them to suit your organization's needs.

If you often make urgent updates to your content, look for a CMS with strong organizational functionality, like link management, so that your content is automatically accessible even as it moves around or changes on your site.

3. User Permissions and Role-Based Administration

Having control over who can access content and features will help you prevent mistakes. This is especially helpful if you have multiple teams using the CMS - which is typically the case for large enterprises or websites that rely heavily on content marketing.

If that is your case, you should choose a CMS that provides you with the flexibility to create a smooth process based on customizable user management.

For example, Varbase (Drupal 9 CMS) comes with preconfigured default roles tailored for sites with hierarchical content management permissions.

The default roles that come preinstalled with Varbase are:

• Editor User: Can edit all content on the website but can't publish any content.
• Content Admin: Can edit all content and publish it but can't edit anything not related to the content roles.
• SEO Admin: Can edit items that are related to SEO, Meta tags, and Google Analytics.
• Site Admin: Can edit, delete, and publish all content on the site.
• Super Admin: Can edit everything in content and configurations for the site.

Designed to support enterprise-level teams and enable scalability, Varbase CMS allows you to create new users, define their roles, and edit their permissions.

4. Superior Security

Cyber attacks and high-profile data breaches are all too common these days and now will continue to bring an evolving threat in an increasingly digital world.

Maximizing security will shield your business reputation by helping you to avoid the devastating consequences of any exploitation that your website users may suffer due to a security breach.

If you lack the expertise or resources required to build an enterprise-level digital experience, we strongly recommend choosing a CMS that bundles all the latest and best security modules.

When evaluating your CMS options, here are a few security-related questions that you should ask:

• Does it come with a content delivery network (CDN) to help prevent DDoS attacks?
• Is SSL included or do you have to purchase an SSL certificate separately?
• Does it have a Web Application Firewall to prevent hackers from accessing your site?
• Does it have a security team? If it does, is this team made up of community members or employees?
• How often are static code analysis and vulnerability scans run?
• How difficult is it to update the software when a security patch has been released?

5. Multilingual Capabilities

Staying on the topic of personalization - speak your audience's language.

If you currently serve an international audience or expect to soon, make sure you choose a CMS that supports multilingual editing tools and intuitive translation workflows, as your marketing team will be needing to publish content and reach out with marketing messages personalized to each audience segment's language.

Hence, the need to build a multilingual website.

Using the ideal technology to build your digital experiences can enable your marketing team to create multilingual websites from the same Drupal CMS. Each language can be quickly translated and optimized for SEO at the same time.

Note: Laws surrounding digital information and privacy vary from country to country, so you’ll want to look for a CMS with information governance controls that comply with local regulations where your customers live.

6. Flexible Page Layout Building

Personalizing user experiences based on meaningful user journey mapping is often the key differentiator between a corporate website and an impactful digital experience.

This means that you need a CMS with features that allow for easier and quick creation of personalized landing pages. Drupal 9's Layout Builder is such a feature.

Keep in mind though, enterprises often communicate with their diverse and global audiences in a localized manner; which means that your landing pages must also consider language differences -  Layout Builder in Varbase allows content editors and site builders to easily and quickly create visual layouts to display content in all languages (LTR and RTL).

Users can customize how content is arranged on a single page, or across types of content, or even create custom landing pages with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

7. Ongoing Support and Seamless Integrations

The CMS you invest in should provide your team with the flexibility required to integrate with any tool or technology that will be critical to your business and marketing needs.

Make sure your CMS is scalable enough to grow with your business. Some CMSs offer more flexibility than others, supporting an extensible range of APIs and integrations.

This flexibility is a result of constant updates and continuous delivery provided by the support team behind the CMS you choose.

Is the CMS you are considering enjoying constant and uninterrupted support? Does it have a reliable dedicated community of developers and software engineers upgrading it with the best and the latest modules you will need?

If that is not the case, that particular CMS is no longer a viable option because it doesn't align with your business priorities. The last thing you need is to rebuild your entire website or IT infrastructure because a disruptive technology or solution that can impact your business cannot be integrated with your CMS. 

Your CMS is a long-term investment, so don't make the mistake of thinking that the need for ongoing support and maintenance is an optional luxury.

8. Built-in SEO Tools

It can be difficult to keep up with Google's constant algorithm changes and updates that can directly impact your ranking on search engine result pages.

That is why we strongly recommend that you choose a CMS with built-in SEO tools that will give your content the best chance possible to rank higher.

Drupal-powered websites have consistently demonstrated superior on-site SEO performance because Drupal is a technology that prioritizes user experience first and foremost.

For example, Drupal 9 CMS Varbase features SEO tools such as real-time SEO analysis, content search engine optimization, automatic generation of a search engine, and user-friendly URLs.

Content creators will never forget to add page titles, and alt tags, avoid duplicate content and will have seamless integration with popular SEO-related tools such as Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics.

9. Advanced Analytics

Tracking your website traffic using tools such as Google Analytics has become standard practice for any business with an in-house digital marketing team. However, many businesses still don't act upon insights into their user's behaviors.

The key to successfully engaging your customers and website visitors is your ability to create content that is relevant and meaningful enough to make your brand and website relatable.

Your CMS should offer built-in analytics or integrate with popular analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. You want the ability to track these performance indicators directly from your dashboard.

Convenient access to such real-time user behavior enables your organization to engage in account-based marketing where your content creators can create messages and campaigns based on the actions and behavior of your website visitors.

10. Multisite Scalability

Major enterprises have numerous domains or microsites dedicated to a particular audience or product.

Drupal allows you to support and manage multiple websites in the most basic form - which is websites that look similar with simple variations in the content - to websites that are so different from each other that you wouldn’t know they are based on and the same CMS, just by looking at them.

With Drupal, you no longer need to spend extra to scale and grow your digital presence as the need arises. All those sites can be an interconnected web with seamless integrations from the same centralized CMS - sharing all best practices, security, and UX features.

This is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building an engaging and open digital experience for an enterprise-grade business in today's digital world.