How to choose the best CMS for eCommerce
Maciej LewkowiczReading Time: 6 minutes
Content plays a vital role in eCommerce. From product descriptions through blog posts and buyer guides to elaborate landing pages—it helps build trust, establish your brand's authority, and ultimately drives conversions.
Modern eCommerce platforms come with content management capabilities out-of-the-box. Both Shopware's Shopping Experiences and Magento's Page Builder can go a surprisingly long way with a carefully designed and well implemented theme.
However, as an online store grows, the built-in solution might not cut it anymore.
When built-in content management is not enough
Not long ago the go-to solution was to integrate the eCommerce platform with a traditional CMS like WordPress or Drupal.
But the landscape changed and there is a wide selection of options available for your next eCommerce CMS.
Website builders let non-technical users do more
Functionally similar to a monolithic CMS, a no-code website builder has one additional feature: it gives the user control over page design within its graphical interface.
By using a website builder, content authors can create whole pages without writing a single line of code.
The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach to building websites is almost as old as the World Wide Web itself. First visual page builders appeared as early as the mid-1990s, enabling non-technical users to easily establish presence on the Web. Nowadays, with specialized hosting services that bundle the builder itself with hosting and domain management, it’s possible to create and publish a website without any technical knowledge.
Website builders have their limitations though. As they need to provide a user-friendly way to create and manage websites, some amount of code that is served to visitors with each page view is designed to handle general cases—much more than is actually required by a given page to look and work as desired by its creator. This causes slower loading times and has the potential to degrade customer experience.
Additionally, due to the level of generalization required to provide frictionless website creation capabilities, website builders are offering only a subset—albeit a large one—of what is possible with current web technologies. This means that design and functionality options they provide are ultimately limited.
A large part of each website built with a website builder service is specific to the particular vendor. Migrating away from such service is more costly than it seems at first, as layouts and designs may need to be reimplemented from scratch.
Overall, website builders are particularly well-suited for certain types of projects, such as single-page microsites and landing pages. These types of projects often require a simple, straightforward design and a limited amount of content, making them ideal for website builders.
Additionally, website builder services can provide a quick and easy way to create a functional prototype or proof-of-concept, to test ideas before investing in a full-fledged website.
The most popular website builders
Webflow is a SaaS website builder ranking among the most used CMS according to BuiltWith. It allows its users to design and publish websites using a graphical interface—either from scratch or using one of available templates.
Builder.io is another example of a SaaS website builder with a set of features similar to Webflow. Even though not as popular, it has a steadily growing user base.
WordPress with Full Site Editin (FSE) provides features known from other website builders, allowing for a blend of letting content editors control page elements with coherent look and feel of any custom or 3rd-party WordPress theme. Being built right into WordPress, FSE is likely to replace 3rd-party WordPress-based website builders such as Elementor.
Headless CMS is as flexible as it gets
Having gained popularity with the rise of Jamstack and static site generators, headless CMS have evolved to focus on one function—managing content.
With a headless CMS content (text, images) is separate from presentation (page layout) and made available in a computer-friendly format—usually over an API. This separation allows the content to be easily accessed and reused across multiple websites, mobile apps, or even printed media.
The decoupling of content management from presentation also dictates how headless CMS are used. The responsibility of actually rendering a web page is shifted to a dedicated—often custom-built—frontend application.
Large projects are where headless CMS really shine. Being both more efficient and effective at managing and delivering content, they often are a great fit for B2B and B2C eCommerce, especially in the industries such as sports, entertainment, leisure, and gaming.
The most popular headless CMS
Strapi is one of the most popular open-source general purpose headless CMS. Written in JavaScript, it can be self-hosted but also has a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) variant. It is known for its comprehensive set of features.
Ghost is a popular headless CMS designed for blogging and publishing. Being open source and written in JavaScript, Ghost can be self-hosted, but it is offered in the SaaS model as well.
Contentful is a SaaS-only headless CMS targeted at enterprise users. It provides a cloud-based platform for managing content. WIth a GraphQL API and a JavaScript SDK, Contentful can be integrated with any modern JavaScript framework such as React, Angular, and Vue.js.
Sanity is another SaaS-only headless CMS, although its admin client is open-source. It is marketed as a direct competitor to Contentful. In addition to GraphQL, Sanity supports Graph-Relational Object Queries (GROQ)—a language allowing to filter and join information from a large collection of documents and shape the result.
Directus is not a CMS per se, but it can function as one. Being an open-source data platform, it allows SQL database introspection as well as interacting with the data contained therein. It can be self-hosted—with a free tier available for smaller businesses. Directus is also available as SaaS.
Payload CMS is an open-source backend written in TypeScript and designed to be used with Next.js. It is marketed as a headless CMS but also an Enterprise App Builder and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. Payload CMS can be self-hosted and is also offered in various SaaS plans.
Hybrid CMS aims to provide best of both worlds
A hybrid CMS is a type of Content Management System that combines the capability of managing content and presentation in one place from a traditional monolithic CMS, such as WordPress, Drupal, or TYPO3, with content APIs of a headless CMS.
Modern CMS—even those considered "traditional"—typically include APIs that technically make them "hybrid". This makes it possible to test and gradually switch to headless without overhauling the existing system.
Is self-hosting better than SaaS for eCommerce CMS?
On the one hand, Software-as-a-Service promises deliverance from the hassle of managing software and infrastructure at a predictable cost. On the other, self-hosting lets organizations retain full control over both software and data.
While each model has its merits, there is no clear winner that covers the majority of use cases.
If you self-host your eCommerce, consider a self-hosted CMS
A self-hosted hybrid or headless CMS grants an organization full control over and responsibility for its software and data. This level of control lends itself well to delivering exceptional customer experience and solutions tailored to particular business needs.
Moreover, keeping all critical data in-house makes it possible to meet specific privacy and security requirements, improve auditability, and drive in-depth analytics.
And perhaps most importantly, owning software that is critical to the functioning of an organization provides a layer of protection against vendor lock-in. By having control over the software and data, businesses can easily move their operations to a different platform or vendor if needed, ensuring that they remain agile and adaptable in a rapidly changing market.
Use SaaS to quickly put together a landing page as quickly as possible
When time is of the essence, a website builder service is hard to beat.
Whether launching new products, brands, or campaigns, time to market is oftentimes more important than flexibility or consideration for future maintenance. Additionally, landing pages or microsites usually don't need to strictly follow the look and feel of any already existing websites, aiming for a more broad coherence with visual brand identification or a new design altogether.
This is what Software-as-a-Service website builders are best for.
With lower initial investment costs, these services provide a well-suited environment to quickly prototype, refine, and launch a landing page or microsite.
Be advised though, these are best short-term. As a website grows, so does the complexity of maintaining it using a website builder, as well as the eventual switching cost for when migration to a more powerful CMS is called for.
Choosing the best CMS for eCommerce
Consider Software-as-a-Service website builders as a cost-effective and user-friendly way to create prototypes, landing pages, or test ideas. When cost and time to market are primary concerns, and adherence to strict design guidelines or integration with other software is not a hard requirement, these are often the best tool for the job.
However, if you're looking for a tight integration with your eCommerce platform, coherent look and feel, and want the software to fit your organization structure, a self-hosted CMS is the way to go—either headless or hybrid. It lets you manage all content from a single place as well as use, re-use, and combine with data from other sources on multiple frontends, applications and other media. Plus, owning your software lets you tailor it to your organization's business needs and protect yourself from vendor lock-in.
Chances are, your eCommerce platform already comes with some hybrid CMS capabilities and maybe even a page builder.
