5 Reasons Why Developers Think Headless CMS Is the Best

Headless CMS has gained popularity among developers, marketers, QA engineers, and even designers. And there is enough buzz in its favor, especially amongst developers, which shows that it is a promising technology. There are other CMS systems in place that seem to be doing well, but headless CMS is a definitive upgrade from them.

Headless CMS is giving developers more freedom to focus on core user experiences without worrying about how content is being showcased across platforms. They can juggle with frameworks and tools of their choice with no specific vendor lock-in. 

Read on to find out more about why Headless CMS is all in the rage.  

1. Faster to market

Headless CMS allows developers and content creators to work in parallel, thanks to its decoupled mechanism. There is minimum back and forth between teams regarding content placements across different touchpoints. Developers can deliver the content via APIs call to devices and touchpoints. This way teams can concentrate on the overall user experience rather than cross verifying “if the content is placed correctly”, “is it in line with the platform content consumption format” etc. 

2. Easy updates and maintenance

Maintenance is always an ongoing process and the easier it is, the more regular it will be. Developers do not dread updating and maintenance but it is tiring and tedious. There will always be new features, some glitches, small errors that will affect your user experience. Headless CMS ensures that no major red flags occur when making changes to content because there is a separation of frontend and backend.

3. Flexible tech stack for developers

A great thing about headless CMS is that your team of developers is not bound to a set choice of integrations and plugins that come with traditional CMS. While there is no harm in it, sticking to a single choice limits your options and you can not switch to better alternatives that might be there in the industry. 

Headless CMS removes this barrier, any third-party tool can be integrated via APIs, thus giving a maximum selection pool. You can easily switch between tools as well, making it easy to stay on top of new technology. This gives developers immense flexibility, making headless CMS a great choice for them.      

4. Better code reusability 

When you have Headless CMS implemented, the modular approach gives developers the freedom to reuse code from other projects and even from older ones. There will be no need to keep changing your backend to accommodate the new changes that are done from time to time.

5. Focus more on personalized user experiences

Data is what drives personalized experiences. And Headless CMS’s API approach lets you collect data from various platforms and use them simultaneously. You can shape the API call’s responses as per requirements and deliver tailor-made user experiences. Additionally, there are some indirect routes opened for IoT devices as well. 

Wrapping Up

The pointers mentioned above are the reason more and more developers are willing to shift to Headless CMS from traditional CMS and decoupled CMS. IKEA, Burger King, and many other big names have invested in headless CMS architectures, so what’s stopping you from experimenting a bit?

If you feel that there is more to know about headless CMS, drop us your contact information here, and we will be happy to assist you with any questions and migration.

Top New Plugins of Popular CMS in 2021

With over 50,000 plugins in a single CMS plugin directory, it can be difficult for business owners like you to find the right plugins from your favorite CMS platform. Plugins greatly enhance your website and there are several thousand plugins available on your chosen CMS platform and third-party websites.

Choosing the right plugins is critical for your website’s speed, security, and usability. Fortunately, some clear winners will benefit almost any type of CMS site.

In this blog, we’ve compiled a list of the best plugins for popular CMS. We’ll go over plugins designed to improve WordPress, Shopify, Craft CMS, and Joomla.

WordPress

Simple Responsive WP Slider

Simple Responsive WP Slider is a lightweight WordPress slider plugin. You can use the plugin to create and customize an unlimited number of sliders for your website. To add the slider to a webpage, you can use a shortcode or place it within Gutenberg blocks. The plugin’s features include unlimited sliders and multiple sliders on each page. Custom configuration options are available for each slide, including the navigation and slider. Adding dots or arrows to the slides is one of the basic configuration options for individual sliders.

Quick Audio Player

Quick Audio Player is a customizable WordPress audio player. The plugin is mobile-friendly and compatible with any WordPress theme. It works flawlessly on all devices and web browsers. The plugin includes an HTML5 audio player, live player editing, a player poster image, rich control settings, a player shortcode, player width and color customization, and a player color picker. The player supports a variety of audio formats, including.mp3,.wav, and.ogg.

Tutor LMS Elementor Add-ons

Tutor LMS Elementor Add-ons is a useful plugin that adds 25+ Elementor page builder add-ons. Users can use the plugin to create custom styling and layouts for Tutor LMS courses. You must install both Tutor LMS and the Elementor Plugin for this plugin to function properly. After you’ve activated all three plugins, you’ll be able to use Elementor to create single course pages. Course rating, course title, course author, course level, course duration, course thumbnail, course price, and many more are among the Elementor Add-ons. The plugin can also be used to change the appearance of your existing courses.

Job App Manager

Job App Manager is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to display a job application form on your website for candidates to fill out and submit their information. To display the form on any webpage on your site, a shortcode is used. After completing a form, the user will receive a confirmation email. Go to the admin page and navigate to ‘All Submissions’ to find the submissions in the form. You can also search, filter, and delete forms from the admin page. There is also a dashboard widget that displays the most recent five form submissions.

Wall Pricing table

WordPress users can use the Wall Pricing Table plugin to create pricing tables for their websites. You can include the features of the various pricing plans as well as display the price table anywhere on your website. The pricing table includes the following fields: title, subtitle, price, button, and features (you can add as many as you want). Each plan can be distinguished by color. The plugin is available for free.

Craft CMS

Marketplace for Craft Commerce

Craft users can use Marketplace for Craft Commerce to turn their Ecommerce sites into a marketplace. Users can charge fees for your platform as well as add payees to products. You have the option of charging a flat or percentage fee. Stripe Connect is used to process payments.

Presence 

Presence is a Craft plugin that shows who is currently editing an entry. While editing any entry, the users are displayed in the right sidebar settings. For users who do not have a profile image, a default logo is set. Admins can review and approve the entries made.

Joomla

AA Tiny Audio Player

AA Tiny Audio Player is a Joomla extension that adds an HTML5 audio player to your website. The extension includes a responsive layout and animation support. It supports the video formats.mp3,.ogg, and.wav. It is also compatible with all templates.

MyRealPin

MyRealPin gives your website a Pinterest-like appearance. You can make your pinboards, and collaborate with your friends on them. You can modify the Joomla extension to meet your specific requirements.

AA Youtube Subscription Button

AA Youtube Subscribe Button is a Joomla module that displays a YouTube subscribe button along with the subscriber number of your site. It is simple to use and fully responsive. It is cross-browser compatible and can be used with any template.

Shopify

Advoz 

Advoz is a Shopify plugin that allows professionals to create high-quality Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads to promote your company. Once you’ve decided on a weekly budget, you’ll receive a custom graphic or video detailing how the ads will appear. The plugin will generate advertisements that will drive high-quality leads to your store.

Products Stories Convert Sale

Products Stories Convert Sale is a cool plugin that transforms your website into a trendy social network. Customers can view products in your store in a fun and easy way thanks to the plugin. Like Instagram feed stories, all of your catalogue will appear in carousel stories. Coupons will also appear in the stories to aid in sales. You will also receive real-time reports to assist you in determining what your customers are interested in.

ConvertOut Ambassadors

ConvertOut Ambassadors is a Shopify plugin that allows users to quickly set up an ambassador program. To get started, you don’t need any technical knowledge. The plugin begins working immediately after installation. ConvertOut will track the commission that must be paid to the ambassador for each sale. Payments are made to the ambassador’s PayPal account.

Wrapping Up

It is nearly impossible to run a CMS website without using plugins to add functionality. There is a plugin for almost anything you can think of on your website, whether you want to engage users through email opt-in forms, add social sharing buttons, compress images to improve website speed or optimize your content to rank in search engines.

Furthermore, plugins greatly improve and optimize the user experience, resulting in higher engagement and a better chance of reaching a larger audience.

If you’re not sure which plugins to install first, these well-known and trusted plugins will get you started.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We are your offshore CMS development partner and have state-of-art infrastructure and development expertise on the latest CMS technology trends. We have hands-on experience in customizing websites using multiple platforms, be it Shopify, Craft, WordPress, Joomla, catering to different business needs. We offer assistance from building custom CMS websites to website migration and maintenance processes.

7 Business Benefits of Choosing an Enterprise CMS

An enterprise content management system is the beating heart of your organization’s digital presence. CMS users can avail themselves of a variety of document types and content on a website, then modify and expand the information posted without the need for a web programmer to set up the site and make updates.

When evaluating a content management system, managers need to contemplate numerous factors, including: 

  • How is what you have now compared to what is available in the market? 
  • What is the longevity of the solution you have chosen?
  • If you decide to invest in something different, how do you know it will be worth your while?

In this guide, we’ll help you learn everything you need to know about modern enterprise CMS, including:

  • Why an enterprise CMS specifically is key
  • What are the benefits of choosing a solution for enterprise CMS
  • Important factors to consider when you’re choosing an enterprise CMS

What is Enterprise CMS?

A content management system (CMS) is a software system that allows businesses to create, manage, and publish content for their websites, apps, and other digital assets.

As a central hub and publishing engine for marketing content, the CMS is critical to the success of any company’s marketing team. This is why it is critical for enterprise marketing leaders to select a specific enterprise CMS.

An enterprise CMS is a content management system that provides enterprise marketing departments with the features and capabilities they require to engage prospects and ultimately drive revenue.

Why go for Modern Enterprise CMS?

A content management system is used by more than 60% of websites. The following advantages demonstrate why choosing the right CMS is important to most businesses with an online presence – and why it should be important to you.

#1 Increase Your Website’s Functionality With Plugins

Most CMS provides a standard set of features and functions that are sufficient for the majority of users to have a basic platform. It is very likely that your requirements are different or that you require additional functionality. A plugin can fill this void and provide features that aren’t included with the standard CMS.

There are thousands of free and paid plugins available for almost any job or feature you can think of. There is an active community that develops software plugins that can extend the functionality of popular CMS platforms. Some are paid, while others are free to use.

#2 Omnichannel Selling Support

Omnichannel selling is another important advantage of using a CMS platform. Organizations frequently need to entice customers to visit their websites by marketing through various channels with different content that provides each user with insight into their brand. Marketing on each channel necessitates entering all of the brand’s information on each channel separately.

#3 Control Over Your Website Design

One of the most significant advantages of CMS over traditional websites is complete control over your website’s design. The main advantage of using CMS platforms is that they make website design and customization very easy and simple.

With a traditional website, you or your web development agency will need to scrap your old website in order to redesign a new one from scratch. The existing content will also need to be manually transferred to the new website design. This is inefficient and complicates and prolongs the website design or redesign process when compared to using a CMS.

#4 Multi-language Capabilities

Personalization is becoming increasingly important for brands that operate in more than one country to engage customers in meaningful ways. Having an enterprise CMS that can handle multi-language content, including translation and localization tools, helps ensure that you can deliver the right content in the right context no matter where it is needed in the world.

#5 Mobile Readiness

Over 90% of websites now report that mobile devices generate more unique visitors than desktop computers. According to Google, mobile visitors are 5X more likely to abandon a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile use. According to Google, “mobile-friendly sites rank higher in search results.” At this point, an enterprise CMS capable of delivering content to your mobile apps and experiences is required.

#6 Automation Through Integration

As your business expands, so will your content workload, which is a great reason to use automation to do more of the heavy lifting. Through integrations with artificial intelligence-enabled tools, an enterprise CMS can enable content teams to leverage technology to automate routine tasks that would otherwise take humans a long time to complete.

#7 Easy Website Maintenance 

CMS websites make it simple for you to manage your site’s upkeep. If you believe you should have control over your site or if you want an in-house team member to maintain it, CMS makes it simple and quick. A CMS’s template-based structure makes it simple and quick to create pages and posts.

Wrapping Up

If you’re looking for a CMS that can help automate the many manual tasks associated with content management, enable efficient team-wide collaboration, facilitate content delivery that improves customer experience, and make the most of all your content assets and data, look no further. It’s time to implement an enterprise CMS.

If you aren’t quite ready to abandon your current traditional CMS, this in-depth guide will help you learn about 3 Things To Know Before Switching To A New CMS. Want to see what an enterprise CMS looks like in action? Contact our CMS team today.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We are your offshore CMS development partner and have state-of-art infrastructure, and development expertise on the latest CMS technology trends. We have hands-on experience in customizing websites using multiple platforms, be it Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, catering to different business needs. We offer assistance from building custom CMS websites to website migration and maintenance processes.

5 Factors to consider for selecting the right CMS

Although CMS products are all designed to produce similar results, they all do not offer the same features. It is critical to ensure that the product you select will work for your organization. There are numerous CMS available for you to choose from, and therefore, the process of selecting a CMS can often take longer and more complex.

The amazing content you produce needs to be presented and managed perfectly, or you will not make the right impact. Let us ponder on the factors that should be considered while selecting a CMS? What features should you put first? 

In this blog, we’ll show you the answers to these questions.

#1 Technology integration

In an era when technology affects every aspect of your business, your CMS must integrate seamlessly with your other marketing, sales, communication, and project management initiatives.

Tip: Begin by conducting a technology audit. Make a list of the tools/technologies you use to complete the following tasks:

  • Marketing automation
  • Customer relationship management system
  • Project management system
  • Forms management
  • Email/Social media marketing
  • ERP
  • Customer support

The majority of these tools will either feed or pull data from your CMS.

For example, your blog post could include gated content or a lead magnet. This lead magnet connects to your lead acquisition tool, which connects to your marketing automation and email marketing tools. Once a lead is marked as qualified, it should be routed to your CRM. This is then integrated into your marketing automation tool to further nurture the leads.

This creates several dependencies that influence your CMS choice. The more tightly your CMS is integrated with your other marketing and sales tools, the smoother your marketing machinery will run.

#2 Business Impact

Tip: When considering the effects of a CMS on your business, you should consider the responsibilities you accept when choosing a platform.

With a development platform, you will either require internal resources to manage them or outsource the services required. When you build your website on these platforms, you have to go through a lot more steps in terms of functional requirements and development cycles to get to the final product.

The majority of the development is completed with a solutions platform, and your company will need to configure the platform to meet your specific needs. Adoption is also generally faster because these systems are designed to be user-friendly.

#3 Ongoing Requirements

The process of creating a website for your company can be difficult. Managing stakeholder expectations, ensuring you deliver on business requirements, and getting your vendor to deliver on their promises are just a few of the issues that arise during the process.

The build, however, should be considered the start of your digital journey. The hard work begins the day the website is launched and you now need to validate the assumptions you made many months prior during the discovery phase.

Tip: Integrated analytics serve as a springboard for your responses, A/B testing of content, and user journeys. This then leads to website updates, content changes, and the launch of landing pages for specific campaigns. Understanding how the CMS platform behaves when there is a need for continuous change should be part of the decision-making process.

#4 Security

Security is a major consideration. You need a CMS that will protect your content and customer data from current and future threats.

There are four things to think about here:

Security features: Does the CMS include built-in security features (for example, two-factor authentication)? If not, does it have security plugins and third-party integrations?
Infrastructure requirements include: Is the CMS in favor of infrastructure-level security upgrades?

Environment for plugins/modules: Are your most frequently used plugins/modules secure? Do their developers check for updates regularly?
Development speed: How quickly do developers release updates and security fixes? This is especially problematic with open-source software.

#5 WYSIWYG content creation

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interfaces have become a standard feature of CMS platforms ranging from the most basic to the most sophisticated.

A WYSIWYG content authoring environment, as the name implies, allows marketers and non-technical users to create content using familiar formatting tools (such as those found in Microsoft Word).

Consider the following:

  • Can marketers use the editor to easily change the look and feel of content?
  • Does the editor support multiple delivery channels with previews of content?
  • Is the editor responsive and quick, or is it slow and difficult to use?
  • Does the editor allow you to embed video on product pages and other web pages to support your video content?

How to make the best choice 

Choosing a CMS is a difficult task. You must balance multiple requirements from various departments, evaluate dozens of options, and choose something that falls into the Goldilocks zone of cost, complexity, and ease of use.

Hopefully, this blog will assist you in making a more informed CMS decision.

Here are your next three actions to take before you leave:

  • Inquire with your marketing, editorial, sales, and IT departments about their CMS requirements.
  • Examine your current technology stack and skills concerning all stakeholders.
  • Estimate a budget and take into account the cost of implementation for both open and closed source solutions.

The flexibility and features they offer are out of the box, along with their content-first approach they are not too high up on the learning curve. All these features combined, make them our go-to for nearly every custom web project.

It is an essential component of our web design and development capabilities. Are you interested? Contact us, and we’ll be happy to discuss how they can improve your site.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We are your offshore CMS development partner and have state-of-art infrastructure and development expertise on the latest CMS technology trends. We have hands-on experience in end-to-end WordPress CMS development solutions catering to different business needs. We offer assistance from building custom CMS websites to website migration and maintenance processes.