We often heard about the overall benefits of using content management system. In reality, no system is perfect and by understanding the drawback of CMS, we will be able to take the necessary steps. Here are some drawbacks of CMS that we should consider:
1) It contains hundreds of files:
CMS is a fully-featured platform and it needs hundreds, if not thousands of different files. However, it also means that a CMS could have some errors. These errors can be caused by users, such as inserting very large or incompatible files. When a CMS-based websites work improperly or stops working, it could take hours to identify the real cause of the errors. This could result in a great deal of frustration, because the website will be offline when the CMS is fixed. When it happens, we will lose many customers, because they won’t be patient enough to wait for our website to become operational again.
2) Limited design flexibility:
It is commonly believed that CMS has excellent design flexibility, but only at certain extent. Not many themes have innovative layouts. Many CMS themes are based on common multiple columns layout. It means that website owners are forced to stay withing the specific confine of their templates. There’s limited uniqueness and flexibility in design.
3) SEO limitations:
It is true that CMS has powerful capabilities, but there are also some limitations that we need to consider. CMS is a server-based platform and many webpages are generated dynamically. It means that some of the content elements could change frequently. Also, some content management systems don’t have SEO-friendly permalinks.
It will be difficult for search engine bots to crawl URLs that contain long strings of symbols, numbers and words. Due to the use of specific CSS methods, duplicate content issues could happen on some or even most pages. This will have an effect on the SEO performance, because search engines may think that we duplicate a single piece of content on all of our pages.
4) Problematic SEO maintenance:
A standard CMS website could contain hundreds of webpages and it could be quite difficult to optimize them. Often, we need to refine keywords and keyphrases in an individual webpage. This will be a tedious and time-consuming process.
5) Slow performance:
Some content management systems are praised for their excellent performance, but a CMS-based website can also be quite slow. This happens because web browser needs to wait for the server to process the webpage and send specific codes that can be rendered properly. If the server needs to handle hundreds of webpage requests at the same time, the website will perform slowly. This could happen if there’s no proper caching method.
6) High maintenance costs:
Not many website owners or even web administrators know what they should do if a CMS website suddenly produces catastrophic errors. Constant backup process is needed in case the entire website goes down. It means that we need to hire a proper professional.