Choosing the right CMS for your team

The best CMS is the one your team will actually use. Match editing habits, technical comfort and publishing volume before falling for feature lists.

CMS debates often turn into platform religion. WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Shopify sections, Webflow — each can be the right answer depending on who edits, how often content changes and what the front end needs to do.

Start with the editors, not the developers. A marketing team publishing weekly campaigns has different needs from a founder updating three pages a quarter. If the CMS feels intimidating, content goes stale and the shiny new site ages fast.

Consider workflow, not just fields. Draft and preview, scheduled publishing, role permissions, reusable blocks, localisation, asset management and how painful it is to spin up a landing page at 4pm on a Wednesday.

Watch hidden costs. Licensing, plugin maintenance, custom field complexity, migration effort and whether your agency or in-house team can support it in two years. A free CMS with six brittle plugins is not free.

We usually recommend boring reliability over novelty. The CMS should disappear into the background so the team focuses on messaging, offers and campaigns. If updating the site feels like a project every time, the stack is wrong.