Most CMS decisions are made by developers and paid for by editors. The platform is chosen for its API, its hosting model or the framework it pairs with, and the people who will use it every day meet it for the first time at handover training.
Six months later the marketing team is filing tickets to change a headline, and the site that launched fast starts slowing down under workarounds.
Start with the jobs, not the features
Before comparing platforms, list the five things editors will do most often. Typical examples: publish an article with images, update a pricing table, build a campaign landing page, translate a page, schedule a change for launch day. Then watch someone on the team do each one in the current system and note where they get stuck.
That list is your evaluation script. Every shortlisted CMS should be tested against it by an actual editor, in a sandbox, before anyone signs a contract.
Structured content beats page builders — mostly
Free-form page builders feel liberating in a demo and become a maintenance problem at scale. Every page ends up slightly different, design consistency erodes and content cannot be reused across channels.
Structured content — defined fields for a product, a case study, a team member — keeps the design system intact and lets the same content feed the website, an app or a partner feed. The trade-off is flexibility, so give editors a small library of approved sections they can arrange, rather than a blank canvas.
Check the boring parts
Preview is the feature editors miss most when it is absent. Make sure they can see exactly how a draft will look on the live site, including on mobile, before publishing.
Check roles and workflow: can you separate writers from approvers, and is there an audit trail? Check media handling: are images resized and served in modern formats automatically? Check localisation if you publish in more than one language, because retrofitting it later is painful.
Plan for the second year
Ask what happens when the original developers move on. Is the content model documented? Could a new team understand it in a day? Is there a straightforward export if you ever need to leave? A CMS that locks content into proprietary formats is a cost you pay later.
The right platform is rarely the most powerful one. It is the one your editors can use confidently on a Friday afternoon without calling a developer — and that your developers can still extend without breaking what the editors built.
