You want to build a website for your company but confused between CMS vs HTML? One reason why it is difficult to choose one between HTML and CMS is that you can get what you want no matter which option you choose.

In my experience so far, a CMS is better than HTML to build a website in most cases. It has several advantages over regular HTML websites and you can make the best use of your website if it has a CMS.

The biggest advantage of HTML is the high extreme customizability or personalization which may not possible in a CMS. However, choosing the right CMS can help you there. Moreover, it is not a difficult job for an experienced developer to change the template files of theme and customize it the way we want and so in CMS. You can do everything you can do in HTML plus you get many other luxuries of using CMS platforms. There are many other reasons why you should use a CMS instead of hand-coding a website.

Please take a look at the table below to understand why CMS is better than HTML. You can find the more and detailed information after the table.

Quick Setup

CMSs help you to have your website online in less than 10 minutes. Most of the popular hosting providers offer one-click installation of all major CMSs. First, you have to choose a domain name, a hosting plan and make the payment. Then you can click the button to install the CMS. All you need to provide some details and credentials. Your website is online.

Then you can open the dashboard of your CMS, install a theme matching to your business and that is it. Most of the CMS has a user-friendly interface to customize the design of the theme and modify the content. You can install add-ons to the website using this interface which would add additional functionalities to the website.

Within 10 minutes you can build a website with demo content and in another one hour, you can modify the content and design. The best part of this is that you don’t need a developer or any technical knowledge to build a website this way.

User-friendly Dashboard

The best feature of a CMS is its dashboard. It helps the admins of the website to access the back end and manage the website in a user-friendly interface. You don’t have to dig into the code to make changes to the website. You can add, remove and modify contents just like the way you would use a web app like Facebook.

You can also change themes/templates and change the appearance of the website altogether. This allows you to build and manage your website easily.

Readymade Themes/Templates

There are readymade templates or themes for the CMS websites which can be used to instantly build a website with demo content. All of the major CMS have thousands of themes and you can find a perfect theme that would be perfect for your website.

Almost all templates or themes for the CMSs are responsive which make helps you to get a website that would render well on all devices. Moreover, most of these resources are very beautiful and rich with functionalities.

Less Chance for Error Codes

CMSs are highly sophisticated and the chances of errors are less compared to hand-coding. In regular HTML websites, you may make some mistakes and you would spend a lot of time figuring it out. Moreover, while modifying the website, the different lines of code may clash and cause error sometimes.

Multiple Admin Accounts

In large websites, you may need to have multiple admins to manage the website content. You can provide them the access to do only what they are supposed to do.

CMS allows you to create multiple accounts for different admins with different levels of accessibility. While someone is designated to the design of the website, some others are authorized to publish new posts on the blog. You can also allow some admins to manage only the SEO activities.

This feature has several benefits. You can prevent others from the full access to the website and also to not confuse the less techy admins with lots of options. You can also collaborate with others to create and publish contents on your website.

Easy to Customize

You can customize the themes/templates and add-ons in the CMS dashboard which make it easier for website owners to modify the design without any technical knowledge.

While WordPress limits the user from making extreme changes to the website using the dashboard, Drupal and Joomla provide much more flexibility. WordPress is intended for beginners without technical knowledge and therefore it doesn’t allow its users to take full control to prevent them from messing up the website when they don’t have the skills to fix them.

If you want a CMS with high customizability, you can choose Drupal. It is much more flexible and you can design the website any way you want. However, it is much more complex than other CMS which make it difficult for the beginners.

Easy to Add New Functionalities

You can incorporate new functionalities like sliders, gallery, and testimonial etc. to the website by installing add-ons and customizing it in the dashboard. In regular HTML site, this would be a tedious process. CMS makes it easier to add and remove any functionality and feature from websites easily.

You may find it difficult to write or find the perfect JavaScript or PHP codes for your website when you are building a website using HTML but there are thousands of free add-ons for most CMSs and it makes it easier to find out the best matching add-ons.

It is very easy to add forums and blogs to a CMS website. Moreover, it also makes managing them a lot easier. Joomla is great for building social networking websites.

Integrate E-commerce

You can integrate e-commerce functionality to your existing website easily if you have a CMS website. It is easier to build and manage e-commerce stores in all major CMSs. You can use WooCommerce plugin for building small to medium e-commerce websites in WordPress CMS.

You can build complex and sophisticated large e-commerce websites using Magento and Joomla CMSs. It is very easy to set up and. Website owners can easily manage the products in the store even if they don’t have technical knowledge.

The dashboards of the CMSs are very user-friendly and they are designed to help anyone build and manage any kind of websites.

Easy Website Management

Custom websites are difficult to manage. Imagine a website 20+ pages. It would be really difficult to manage such websites. There are websites with several hundred pages and the developers are never going to manage the website properly.

This is where CMS becomes truly helpful. It doesn’t need much effort or skills to make changes to the CMS website and therefore you can avoid paying the developers each time you want to make a website. You can easily manage websites with thousands of pages inside a CMS dashboard very easily. Moreover, it also saves a lot of your time.

Economical in the Long Run

Since it CMS websites are easier build and manage, it will save you a lot in the long run. You won’t have to hire a web developer to make small changes on the website each time. If we take a CMS website and an HTML with same features, we can see that CMS websites are a lot easier to manage.

Moreover, the time and effort are also less to build and manage a CMS website. This will save a lot of money in the long run.

Easy to Implement SEO

You have plugins or add-ons in the CMSs to manage the SEO of the website. Yoast SEO is a popular tool available for WordPress and Drupal and it would guide the website admins to optimize the website for Google properly. This tool is very user-friendly and anyone can learn it in a couple of hours. You can add the meta-title, meta-description and generate XML maps very easily. These tools give you scores for the meta- title and meta-description as you type based on the primary keyword you have given. This makes it a lot easier to do the on-page SEO.

Some tools also help you to see the internal links and give recommendations to improve the search engine ranking. They can also manage different kinds of error pages.

SEO plugins also help the admin to manage the 301 redirects and canonical links. All this can be done easily in an easy to use interface. Doing all these things in regular HTML websites takes much time and need technical skills. Moreover, when it is done manually, the chances of making mistakes are high but when it comes to the CMS, these tools would give warnings if you have made any mistakes.

You can find similar tools to manage the SEO which makes the need for hiring an SEO analyst if you are in a less competitive market.

Managing the SEO of HTML websites requires technical skills and it is also difficult. The tools in the CMS would give instructions and alerts to best optimize the website which is very useful.

Easy to Improve Performance Optimization

There are also many other tools in CMSs to help you optimize the performance of the website. This is an important factor in the SEO. In WordPress, we have many plugins to minify CSS, JS and HTML documents and compress the images and documents.

• WP Smush It can compress the images without losing the quality and strip the meta-data from the images which are important for fast loading and better ranking.
• W3 Total Cache helps to create the static version of the web pages and deliver it to the browsers instead of dynamically creating pages each time.
• Fast Velocity Minify minifies different documents and reduces the size. It also merges different documents and reduces the number of HTTP requests.

You can see there are many tools to help the website admins to optimize the CMS websites very easily. All these processes would be a herculean task for large HTML websites. Essentially, CMS makes the job a lot of easier when it comes to the SEO.

Security

Most of the CMS are vigilant to the security loopholes and take immediate measures to patch any. CMSs won’t allow suspicious scripts on the server to keep your website safe. Moreover, they provide two-factor authentication and many more security features for the CMS dashboards. Although this improves the security of your website, hackers still access the CMS websites sometimes.

WordPress is most commonly heard as being hacked but it is not because it is less secure. WordPress is popular and therefore hackers target it often. Other CMSs are less heard of being hacked.

You can use Shopify CMS for e-commerce websites. This CMS offers paid service and have a dedicated team to ensure the safety of websites and provide dedicated support.

Top CMSs for Websites

There are many content management systems out there and you would have to choose one based on your requirements. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, and Magento are the most commonly used CMS. Each one has their own strengths and weaknesses. Among these everything except Shopify is open-source projects.

• WordPress is the most popular CMS and it got a huge community and supporters. There thousands of free themes and plugins which help you to get the most appropriate design and add any functionality to the website. This CMS is great for small to medium corporate websites, publishers, bloggers and small e-commerce stores.
• If you want better control over the customization, Drupal would be a better option. This is not as beginner-friendly as WordPress is because Drupal offer much more and so it might daunting to the beginners at first.
• Drupal doesn’t have as much resource as WordPress has but high customizability is helpful.
• Joomla is between Drupal and WordPress in terms of popularity, quantity of free resources, beginner-friendliness and customizability.
• Magento is an open source CMS which is dedicated to e-commerce websites. This is very popular among the developers due to the high customizability.
• Shopify is the only CMS that offers dedicated support. In WordPress also you can get support if you host your website on the wordpress.com.

Summing up

All these points prove why CMS is better than HTML to build a website. When the benefits of both methods are weighed, CMS is the winner.

Although CMS is recommended over HTML in most cases, it doesn’t mean building websites using HTML is wrong. Remember each method has its own benefits. Sometimes, you would have to sacrifice the many benefits of CMS in favor of a few benefits of HTML. That is depending on the particular requirements.