СMS Customization Guideline & Best Practices

Preliminary considerations

Before diving into the CMS customizing process, it’s crucial clearly understand your business needs and goals. This may sound like something obvious. Yet, this simple rule is overlooked unfairly often. 

Customizing a CMS isn’t just a trick with tweaking features. Your strategic task is to align the system with business objectives and flows. This will be your homework after reading this article. Now, let’s focus on what content management system customization normally entails.

Customization potential and your key needs 

In a way, there’s no limit to customization. Whether you choose one of the top .NET CMS for your business or decide to work with another tech stack, almost any adjustment you can think of can be implemented. Only the complexity and required resources will vary. 

We’ve gathered the most common and general use cases that call for content management system customizing as an example. 

You may need to rework everything mentioned above or only focus on a few aspects. To eliminate unnecessary tasks, formulate a clear understanding of your business requirements. Identify: 

• The goals you will pursue and aim to achieve.

• The target audience you want to reach.

• The expectations towards your CMS and its role. 

This will hint at what functionalities you’ll need to handle these aspects. 

Future growth and scalability

How to build your own CMS ready to embrace the upcoming trends? Think about where your business is heading. Customizing your CMS should not only solve today’s problems but accommodate future growth as well. 

Consider increased traffic, additional content, new functionality, and other scenarios related to business expansion. You need to understand what your CMS can potentially face in the future and how it’s going to respond. 

Right talent and financial resources

Successful CMS customization requires both financial and human resources:

• Financial resources to cover the costs of development, hosting, maintenance, licensing, etc.

• Human resources to plan, design, develop, manage the project at all stages, and provide ongoing post-launch support.

Custom CMS requires upfront investments. There will also be additional expenses for maintenance and updates. Understanding the total cost of ownership helps ensure you’re financially prepared for the investment and decide how much to customize at the moment.

Ensuring you have the right team in place is also critical. It can be an in-house team or a qualified external partner. Just make sure to find the people with the right expertise and share your business values. Relying on community knowledge from open sources isn’t enough for proper support.

Best practices for CMS customization

The core part of CMS customization is altering the features of the base platform. As you already know, altering any features intuitively isn’t the best strategic move. A custom CMS should be set up in a way that helps you enhance user experience, support your SEO strategy, and integrate seamlessly with other tools. 

Below, we’ll share five tips, or rather five common practices, that can help you create a CMS customization plan and set up the ideal platform.

Prioritize user experience

Prioritizing user experience can mean different things for businesses. We’d suggest starting with personalization. A recent study shows that 54% of marketers worldwide have experienced better brand engagement thanks to personalization strategies. 

Brands investing in personalization are 71% to improve customer loyalty and 48% more likely to exceed their revenue goals. Around 80% of consumers confirm they are more likely to interact with a brand that offers personalized experiences.

In practice, prioritizing user experience comes in four steps: 

1. Gather insights into your target audience’s preferences, behaviors, and wishes.

2. Adjust your template to detail user flows according to your specific logic. 

3. Design a clean and intuitive theme with an interface layout that is easy to navigate.

4. Optimize your website for mobile, making it available from various smartphones.

5. Test your website and improve it based on the team’s and user feedback.

What’s the role of CMS in this? A content management system is an engine powering your website. Without proper tools on the Admin’s side, personalization will be impossible or too limited. 

Optimize for SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for making your website visible. SEO strategy is one of the key reasons behind attracting organic traffic. Thus, make sure to pay attention to this aspect when customizing your CMS. 

A customized CMS can offer advanced SEO settings and seamless integration with the needed tools. 

As you have access to all of that, you can (and should): 

• Use custom URLs that are clean and descriptive, with relevant keywords featured.

• Optimize meta tags, adding descriptive and compelling meta titles and descriptions for each page.

• Optimize images by compressing large files and using good alt text for images.

• Improve page load speed by minimizing page weight and other methods. 

“A well-customized CMS can be a game-changer for SEO,” explains Daria, our  Marketing Manager. “Custom URL structures, meta tags, and mobile responsiveness help search engines understand and rank your content better. It recognizes your site as user-friendly and helpful, and prioritizes it in the search results.”

Enhance security

Security is a top priority when customizing a CMS. Customization makes your website less attractive for hackers than a standard popular CMS with a large user base. It also gives you more flexibility. However, it also means you are the one in full charge of cyber security management. 

“Security should be built into the very fabric of your CMS,” advises Serhiy Sydorchuk, CTO at Bits Orchestra. “Customize your safety protocols along with your CMS and conduct regular audits. Otherwise, you neglect the potential that customization offers and leave your website even more vulnerable than an off-the-shelf solution.”

The essential security list for your customized CMS should feature the following practices: 

• Timely updates of your platform and its plugins.

• Strong passwords with complex password rules.

• Two-factor authentication for an extra layer of protection.

• Repeated audits to react to potential issues proactively. 

• Regular backups of your website and database to protect against data loss.

Role-based access controls, ongoing updates, and encrypted data storage will also help you keep the website secure. Custom solutions should integrate additional security layers beyond what standard CMS platforms offer, allowing you to address specific vulnerabilities. 

Integrate third-party tools

Integrating third-party tools with your CMS will also enhance its functionality. In particular, you’ll be able to set up tailored marketing campaigns with detailed segmentation. Moreover, you’ll get valuable insights into your website’s technical and business performance. 

The top-priority tools our marketing team recommended connecting are:

• CRM to manage customer relationships and track interactions.

• Marketing automation solutions to automate campaigns and repetitive tasks

• Analytics to gain insights into website traffic, user behavior, and performance.

There are many more extensions and applications able to streamline your workflows, whatever it means for you at the moment. Overall, you’ll get a robust set to improve data analysis and enhance website management.

Customize the backend

The final touch is tailoring the backend interface of your CMS to your team’s convenience. It will certainly improve content management workflows and user accessibility. 

Design and set up the admin interface to ease content creation, editing, and publishing. Features like drag-and-drop editors, a clear access system, and good UX will facilitate daily tasks for the team and accelerate the work. 

Backend customization can also include: 

• Custom user roles allowing to assign different permissions to team members. 

• Customized dashboard displaying relevant information and tools.

• Custom fields to store specific data and streamline content management.

• Clear workflow system to create, moderate, approve and publish content.

“A well-designed backend makes a HUGE difference in how your team works,” notes Ostap Hetman, our Lead Developer. “It affects the efficiency directly. Customizing the backend to fit your workflow needs ensures that your team can focus on creating great content rather than struggling with a clunky interface.”

Overcoming common challenges

Content management system customization is a double-edged sword. The good news is that the benefits outnumber the challenges. There are three main concerts we’d suggest to remember about. 

Avoiding over-customization 

Excessive modifications can make your website more complex to maintain. It, in turn, can lead to performance issues and a less user-friendly experience. Our software engineers admit that over-customization makes a website more difficult to update. Long story short, it impacts all parties negatively.

We asked our lead designer to sum up her ideas on ways to balance functionality and usability. Here’s what she said:

• Focus on customizing features that directly contribute to your business goals.

• Avoid excessive modifications that could make your website more complex.

• Regularly test your website to ensure good performance and user experience.

• Get direct feedback from your team when planning for new functionalities, updates, or improvements. 

Adding every possible feature to your ideal CMS may be tempting. But customizations should streamline workflows and enhance usability without creating unnecessary complexity.

Maintaining website performance 

Customizations can sometimes impact website speed and overall performance. Due to this, you need to design and develop new features with performance in mind. Just like over-customization, slow performance will affect the experience for all parties. 

You can keep a customized CMS effective and fast through: 

• Writing clean and efficient code to minimize performance overhead.

• Caching mechanisms to store frequently accessed content and reduce server load.

• Minimizing image sizes to reduce file size and load times.

• Selecting well-maintained, reliable plugins to power up your platform.

Performance should be a key consideration from day one. There’s no need to search for fresh data to know how users feel about slow websites. 

Managing updates and maintenance

It won’t be true to say that customizing CMS is a never-ending process. But its maintenance is. It comes with a need for long-term support, which is often challenging for small teams. It doesn’t mean you should reconsider your plans for customization. It’s rather about finding a good partner to back you up with at least several hours of involvement per month. 

The main tips for managing updates and long-term maintenance include the following: 

• Establish a routine for ongoing maintenance.

• Develop a plan for regular updates, backups, bug fixes, and security checks.

• Document all customizations to facilitate future support.

• Keep informed about the latest CMS updates and security practices.

• Consider outsourcing hosting and maintenance tasks to a professional provider.

As Serhiy Sydorchuk, CTO at Bits Orchestra noticed, “Whether we’re discussing a desire to migrate to Kentico MVC or designing a custom platform, long-term maintenance is often overlooked. But it’s critical for the health of your CMS. Developing a clear plan for updates and ongoing support is as important as coding the features you needed.”

The company’s experience

At Bits Orchestra, we’ve had the opportunity to assist many businesses with CMS customization. We’ve also seen struggles due to the wrong CMS choice, frustration with over-customization, and inability to adjust performance to the growing functionality. 

You can see how it works in practice in our case studies, featuring examples of customizing CMS, among other projects. As the experience shows, a robust backend system can drive a significant reduction in operating costs, a 23% increase in traffic, and a 34% increase in conversion rates.

Regardless of the case, our team aims to make the most of CMS customizing efforts. Customization is only effective when it’s aligned with the business goals. That’s what we help clients to achieve.

Regardless of the case, our team aims to make the most of CMS customizing efforts. Customization is only effective when it’s aligned with the business goals. That’s what we help clients to achieve.