Website CMS Recommendation Checklist

There’s no doubt that optimizing a website has tremendous benefits for any company. Organic traffic typically accounts for more than 50% of all website visitors.

The ability to fully optimize a website is largely dependent on a great Content Management System (CMS). Failing that, a company will need to rely on a large and costly development team. Therefore, it is worthwhile for brands to thoroughly investigate the features of their CMS before hiring a company to develop their new website.  Adding additional functionality at a later date is costly and sometimes impossible.

Here are some things to consider in a CMS:

• Ability to change URLs
• Ability to add page redirects
• Able to add/edit canonical tags
• Able to control heading use manually H1 > H2 > H3
• Add/edit “Meta Descriptions”
• Add/edit Image Alt Tags
• Add/Edit other page directives like (no follow/no index tags)
• Add/Edit Schema
• Auto Generated Sitemap.xml
• Able to create/edit robots.txt file
• Able to support next gen image formats (WebP)
• Add custom code on any single page
• Versioning – Versioning ensures you always have a copy you can revert back to if something is published by accident.
• Schema support – Schema is a specific type of information published on a website
  that allows Google to read and interpret it.
• Core functionality – Ability to create, delete, edit, and organize pages
• Multiple website/platform capabilities
• Multilingual support
• Mobile support
• CMS should be very customizable… not limited to templates
• CMS should be intuitive and easy to use for non IT
• Security- CMS should continually release periodic updates and stay on top of new security threats
• Extensibility and integration – CMS should easily integrate with other technology and platforms, as different CRM systems, ERPs, Social Networks, Mobile Applications etc.
• Alt Tags for images should be part of core functionality.

• Data Management – CMS should provide the ability to run reports and download data from on-site capture forms and traffic information as well as a fully customizable dashboard showing reports, traffic and usage stats.
• CMS should have open source code – most code is closed source or proprietary, and cannot be modified by anyone but the owners or creators. Open source code can be legally modified by anyone.

SEO tips and best practices

• Never use underscores in URLs, only dash or hyphens
• Add Social Share Buttons to bottom of blog and article pages
• Keep the Number of links on the page – keep below 500
• No page should exceed 2mb in size
• Blog/article pages should be able to have an actual author displayed
• Also optional date display for the article
• Create a custom 404 Page
• Ideally one with a search feature
• Include a Breadcrumb trail on all pages
• Avoid pop-ups, interstitials, accordions, and carousels
  (Interstitials that appear on mobile devices may trigger a Google Penalty!)
• Use as much live type as possible
• Use best practices for heading use (One H1 tag / page, some H2 tags etc)
• Use Webp image formats for all images
• Set all image height and width in the code (Prevents CLS)
• Include a viewport meta tag.
• Advise Devs not to use Next JS, or ensure that render HTML is part of the SOW
• Recommended sizes:
  • Desktop 1920 x 1080 px
  • Mobile 390 width up to 414 depending on client data
• Test the site for page-load and CLS before going live.
  Mobile pages should load in 2 seconds, desktop within 4
• Secure your website and all content sources, both external and internal
• Minifying or compression to improve the site load for all code.

Add Pero SEO as a preferred source to your Google searches to find more healthcare marketing strategies.