Website Maintenance - How does a Headless CMS fare?

When it comes to managing a website, there can be a heavy maintenance burden - much of it invisible to the naked eye. However, the amount of maintenance can vary quite considerably depending on the underlying site architecture (including the CMS). This short blog seeks to better understand the extent of this hidden cost to businesses.

Website Maintenance

Maintaining a website can be a thankless task. 

Especially if you are in the marketing function and are tasked with the responsibility. 

Most content management systems (CMS) are developer-first by design, and navigating a back-end can be time-consuming and downright frustrating. Especially for non-technical marketing professionals.

Herein lies the challenge at the heart of some recent thought-leadership pieces on CMS in relation to the “race to the middle”. The argument boils down to the fact that different CMS’ appeal to alternative sides of the fence, i.e. either the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) side. As a result, when one side is happy with the choice of CMS, the other is invariably not.

Websites do not exist in a vacuum and are complex systems under the hood. While all may look well on the outside the reality may be very different. 

For most commercial sites the goal is to generate leads and revenue. A pretty-looking website with negligible traffic won’t suffice. Hence content marketing (or inbound marketing) often represents a key part of any lead generation strategy. It is not just about content creation, but ensuring that the content is optimized for Search Engines. 

And not just any search engine - but Google. 

Google tends to reward fast, well-structured websites and as a result extensive playlists and checklists exist to ensure the site is set up to enhance its odds of success. 

A whole host of website audit tools exist that can help measure how well the site is performing. These include everything from aHrefs, to SEMRush, to UberSuggest (all for general SEO), to Broken Link checks, to sites designed to check for speed (Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights from Google).

The bottom line is that these tools will invariably identify a list of issues that need to be addressed. 

How come? 

Well firstly, in many instances a junior marketing person is left in charge of the website, without the necessary knowledge or training.

Often their key goal is not to break anything, rather than to ensure that images are optimized by being compressed sufficiently or that the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is being utilized correctly.

As sites mature and the number of pages expands the sheer breadth of issues tends to grow exponentially. 

I guess an obvious question at this point is are these issues material? Is it worth the time to fix these? 

At the heart of answering the question is the shadow from Google once again.

The battle for a page 1 ranking for commercial keywords is intense and gets more competitive on a daily basis. On-page performance is undoubtedly a ranking factor. This means ensuring your site is well maintained and follows the things Google ‘looks for’. These include fast page load times, good on-page SEO and indexing via Search Console to name a few.

In short, part of website maintenance is ensuring that all new pages are indexed and optimized.

Fig 1- Example of a health score for a site.

So how do the different CMS’ fare when it comes to website maintenance?

Before we dive in a word of warning.

A lot of the following is pretty subjective - down to the CMS selection, given the sheer number of options on the market. As a result, I’ve picked two to represent legacy CMS - WordPress and Squarespace, and one from the world of Headless, Contento.

Secondly, the perspective is informed from a non-technical side of the fence i.e. from a marketing perspective.

While WordPress is by far the best-known CMS on the market, there is no doubt that security question marks and scalability issues are resulting in growing numbers of decision-makers pausing before selecting it by default. While it represents a great starter website option, it is not great for commercial websites looking to scale and grow.

A lot of the power of WordPress is in its versatility. A rich ecosystem of plugins can extend the core functionality. However, therein lies a problem also. The more that you add external products, be it themes, builders (like Divi or Elementor) or plugins not created by WordPress, the more you’re reliant on these other products to ensure they are fixing bugs and security risks, and maintaining their product so it’s fit for purpose. All which will require regular updates to be implemented. Which adds additional burden to the user. 

User Interface

The user interface is also overwhelming and can be very difficult for non-technical people to navigate. Especially for those who inherit a mature site with lots of plugins in use. 

• Who added them?

• What did they add them for?

• Are they still in use?

These questions and others mean that the cognitive overload when managing a WordPress site can be significant. The fact that there is no clear separation (due to it being an all-in-one solution) also means that alerts and notices may be acted upon by someone in the marketing function without fully understanding the consequences of their actions. 

New Page Creation

When it comes to creating new pages - the process is relatively straight forward but is constrained by the existing template. 

Managing Updates

When it comes to managing updates, WordPress can be a real challenge. As sites mature the array of plugins in use can grow exponentially. Updates can also cause conflicts and for junior marketing people is fraught with risk. It is often a case of ‘doing nothing’, which means the site becomes vulnerable.  

Ongoing Support

Given the maintenance burden for WordPress can be significant, it is recommended that an agency or freelancer is on retainer to manage the back end and to keep everything up-to-date.

Squarespace represents a more modern approach to website management and offers a better alternative for most startups.

Why have they not had more traction then? 

Well, firstly WordPress supports a significant developer community who are commercially vested in WordPress remaining so dominant.

Secondly, and linked, is the fact that Squarespace is easier to use and manage, and the reliance on external support is a lot less. It is thus relatively easy to use Squarespace without any external freelance support. Hence the wider developer community is not incentivized to promote an application that doesn’t generate a steady stream of customers.

Squarespace encourages use of their own templates, or building using their own blocks. You can get external templates, and use their developer tools to add your own code, but it's not as common in this market as they are aiming at people who want to build a quick and easy to maintain website themselves. But if you do get a developer involved to customize things, or add external plugins, then the maintenance burden can start to creep up as it does with WordPress.

User Interface

The Squarespace interface is intuitive, and easy for a non technical person to use to build and maintain a site. It is also template based, so once you have chosen a template and have a ‘visual identity’ to work off it is easy to get up and running.

New Page Creation

New page creation is relatively straightforward and while not built for scaling, it is more than sufficient than most. It is a drag and drop approach with various blocks available to help construct the page.

Managing Updates

As a SaaS application there are no updates to be managed. After the initial set up everything runs smoothly in the background. 

Ongoing Support

The maintenance burden is minimal and no external freelance support on retainer is required in most instances. However, if you use a developer for customization, or use external products, then you'd likely still need some ongoing freelance support. So it's really about if someone stays within the confines of the SaaS product or adds external things.

Fig 2 - Squarespace builder options

A headless CMS backed website is a more technical setup and so access to a front-end developer is a necessity for the initial website creation and to create new page types. 

The broader category of headless is decoupled by design so there is a clear delineation of duties. The front-end code is also totally separate from the user interface in the CMS for the marketing team. 

User Interface

The headless CMS element can be managed in-house when it comes to content management and creation. Much of the maintenance takes place behind the scenes and the marketing user does not have to worry about alerts. User profiles can also have different access rights so only people with certain accounts can change key settings. Which leaves the marketing team free of burden and able to focus on creating great content. 

New Page Creation

The new page creation process is pretty straightforward if there is already a design in place. However, as most headless builds are bespoke, it is likely that a front-end developer is needed to create new page designs.

Managing Updates

The separation of duties plus the SaaS nature of the application means that there is no need for marketing to manage any updates. All Contento related updates are handled automatically behind the scenes. Any updates to the front-end code will require a developer.

Ongoing Support

It is important to have access to a developer to manage any front-end issues. They will also be required for any new page designs you wish to implement. So either an in-house dev, or a freelancer you can use as and when required is ideal for a headless backed website.

Fig 3 - Contento Dashboard

When it comes to CMS selection - it is important to factor in the overall cost of management and maintenance rather than just focusing on the initial ticket price. WordPress represents a cheap and cheerful option, however, the maintenance costs can be significant.