In our increasingly connected world, businesses need to have a strong online presence to reach consumers and sell more. But not everyone has the technical expertise to create and manage pages and content on the internet. This is where a CMS, short for Content Management System, can help many people and companies. Want to know how? Read on!
A content management system (CMS) is software that helps users create, manage, and modify content on a website without the need for technical knowledge. In other words, a CMS lets you build a website without needing to write code from scratch (or even know how to code at all).
Instead of building your own system for creating web pages, storing images, and other functions, the content management system handles all that basic infrastructure stuff for you so that you can focus on more forward-facing parts of your website. Beyond websites, you can also find content management systems for other functions – like document management.
To give you an idea of how a content management system works, we’re going to take a whirlwind tour of the WordPress (a good example of a CMS) interface. Let’s start with creating a piece of content. Without a content management system, you’d need to write a static HTML file and upload it to your server (sounds complicated, right?). With a content management system like WordPress, you can just write your content in an interface that looks a good bit like Microsoft Word: 
That’s a lot simpler, right? Similarly, to upload and manage media, like images, you can just browse the media library instead of needing to actually interact with your web server directly: 
The content management system isn’t just a backend management interface, though. It also makes all of the content that you create show up for your visitors exactly like you want it to.
Together, the two systems make it easy to maintain your website.
WordPress, which we showed you above, is the best example of a popular content management system. While there are certainly other content management systems in existence, WordPress maintains over a 62.7% market share on websites with a known content management system.
Note that when we mention “WordPress”, we’re not talking about WordPress.com. Instead, we’re focused on WordPress.org, which is the website where the actual open-source WordPress content management system is stored.
Beyond the self-hosted WordPress software, other popular content management systems include:
There are also lots of other less well-known content management systems that target themselves to large enterprises (with an expensive price point to match).
This is a little bit like asking, “what is the best flavor of ice cream?”.
Sure, everyone’s got their answer, but it’s difficult to come up with a factual argument for one content management system being the best in 100% of situations.
What we can do, though, is return to the numbers and make a suggestion that there’s a reason WordPress has such a dominant share of the content management system market:
For most types of websites, it provides the most user-friendly, flexible solution. It’s not always the best option, but it is the best option most of the time.
For a deeper comparison of some of the popular content management systems, you can view our posts on:
Want to build your own website with a content management system? If so, the general process looks something like this:
It’s actually surprisingly simple. And hosts like Kinsta can even help install the content management system for you (WordPress, in this case), so you can jump straight into building your site without any technical setup.
Looking to install a content management system like WordPress on your web server? We’ll do it for you. Try Kinsta for Free.
