In this article, you will learn why Sitecore CMS is a good choice to power your website. Everyone nowadays understands the importance of having a digital in business. A website is the easiest way for a company to communicate with customers. A website can help you communicate and even sell products to your customers. A website can make or break a company.

As the company website is so important, building it the correct way is vital to a companies success. Building a website from scratch can seem like a good idea, however, there are hidden development costs and potentially long build times. This is where content management systems can help. Especially the ones that focus on all aspects of companies digital experience.

Sitecore can help empower businesses and their marketing team to work more effectively. Sitecore started off as a CMS, to simply manage website content. In recent years, as the digital world is playing a bigger focus within the business, Sitecore has also evolved to cater for this. One example of this is email automation. It is now possible to also manage your companies email campaigns within Sitecore itself.

One area where a lot of businesses struggle is data management. Most businesses seem to have hundreds of different systems, one for CRM, one for time-sheets, one for email marketing, or one for CDP. The issue with having lots of different systems is that none of the data integrates. Data is stored in lots of different buckets. This, unfortunately, means that a lot of businesses can not make the most of their data. Sitecore's aim is to try and create a single place that can cater for all things digital. In today's post, I'm going to cover some reasons how Sitecore can help your business accomplish this goal.

Sitecore comes with a lot

One question I get asked a lot, is Sitecore worth the license fee when we can use a free CMS like Umbraco? Umbraco is a great CMS and it does what it aims to do well. Umbraco, however, is just a CMS. Sitecore, on the other hand, is a completely digital business package. Sitecore comes with the WCM editor (web content manager), email (EXM), commerce connector, mobile, social media manager, and a print manager. Sitecore can even help you manage other websites not built-in Sitecore 🤯🤯🤯.

Sitecore is popular

At the time of writing, Sitecore is the most popular Microsoft powered CMS. It's ranked as the number one CMS in the Garner report. It also has the most active development community on sites like Stackoverflow. I think one of the reasons for this popularity is because it ticks a lot of boxes that companies are looking for in a digital experience platform.

Sitecore is mature

Sitecore is over 10 years old. During that period Sitecore has been refined, tested, and enhanced. Over the years a number of CMS systems have come and gone and Sitecore's still standing. Sitecore's test of time proves why it's a world-class web publishing system. It would be impossible for you as a company to build a website as feature-rich as one powered by Sitecore without investing in many years of development effort. It is much quicker to use a CMS than create something from scratch. Also, consider upgrades. With a CMS patches and upgrades are released frequently. It usually takes minimal effort to instal one of these latest patches. Upgrading a custom-built website to fix a security issue will distract your developers from working on features that add value to the business.

Flexible

Sitecore CMS is built on something called an object model which means it is very extendable. Most CMS systems are built following a template. Most people new to CMS can understand the template model fairly quickly. In a template model, someone designs your website, are a type of page is modelled using sometimes called a template. This approach is simple, however, CMS systems that only provide a content tree that works with pages/templates is limited.

In an object based architecture, the data and how the page will look are separate things. In Sitecore, you define data templates. Data templates can be thought of like a schema. Data added into a template could include text, numbers, or dates. There are too many to list here. These templates aren't coupled to how a page will look. In Sitecore, you might have multiple views associated with the same data template. A website, email, or a mobile view could all be created against the same data template. This separation of concerns makes Sitecore slightly harder for content editors to master the CMS, however, this flexibility also gives businesses more power compared to some other CMS systems.

Safe and secure

Since Sitecore is such a popular CMS, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s a target for hackers. One of the benefits of using Sitecore is that the company is continually improving the platform and providing updates. Companies that decide to create their own in-house CMS system don't get this benefit. If you built a bespoke platform, you have to do all the maintenance,, updates, security checks yourself.

Support

When you decide to power your website with Sitecore, you will also get access to their support portal. In the support portal, you can raise support tickets that will reach a Sitecore support expert. If you're having a problem with your website, it's likely someone else has had a similar problem. Instead of having to re-invent the wheel and try to resolve the problem yourself, being able to ask someone can save your team hours/days/weeks' worth of time figuring things out themselves.

Sitecore keeps getting better

Sitecore spends a lot of time and effort hiring top-notch developers, so you can be certain that Sitecore is only going to get better as time goes on. All you need to do in the future is upgrade your website and you can take advantage of new features that would have taken you months' worth of effort if you tried to build it in-house.

Analytics

In the battle to make money online, stats and analytics are the tools that will help you make more money. It's all well and good getting a designer and UX guru to come up with some amazing concepts and user journeys, however, in reality, they're just guessing if their approach is the one that converts the most optimally. To make real leaps and bounds in your conversion rates you need to perform experiments on your site. You need to measure and compare which layout and which component convert customers. Analytics will help you with this.

Sitecore has a massive focus on analytics. Sitecore is the only CMS to provide real-time stats. Based on this data, Sitecore allows you to define personas. Personas will allow you to personalise your website based on different types of customers.

Sitecore also provides the ability to A/B test components. Sitecores focus on analytics is so strong, a whole book has been written about it! No other CMS systems come close to this level of marketing testing.

Sitecore Takeaway

There are probably two types of people who will read this article. Developers who are sceptical about using Sitecore CMS and marketers/business owners trying to figure out if Sitecore can help their business. I think for both groups the answer is yes ✔️✔️✔️.

A lot of businesses have similar marketing goals and in this day and age there really isn't a good justification to build everything in-house and re-invent the wheel. You'll never be able to build something as good as Sitecore with your in-house resources. Instead of trying to solve a problem that's already been solved, it's a better use of your time to work on your business's specific needs. For business owners, Sitecore can help you standardize your business. You can have one portal to manage everything, this can save you money in licensing multiple products. As you can guess, I'm a big fan of Sitecore and I think you should be too! Happy Coding 🤘