CMS stands for Content Management System and is a tool for our clients to log in and access the backend of their website. This allows clients a level of control over their sites and provides them with a user-friendly way of quickly editing and updating their websites with us. The CMS is also a crucial tool for Ecommerce or Directory based websites as it provides a means to manage products, orders, and much more.
What CMS Do You Use?
We have developed a bespoke custom CMS which is loosely based on WordPress. Our CMS contains many of the typical features in WordPress, such as Pages, Posts etc. Users that have previously used WordPress will be able to find their way around without any issues. WordPress is Open Source and actively developed by a community of passionate developers. It currently makes up 43% of all websites on the web. Our team of developers are constantly improving our CMS and releases updates almost weekly to it.
Why Do You Use A Custom CMS?
We decided to develop our own custom CMS many years ago after experiencing many popular issues with WordPress along with numerous security concerns, performance issues and the extreme amount of bloat that comes with WordPress. With our CMS, we are able to offer our customers a CMS which is fast, reliable and ultimately secure for them. Along with this, our user interface is more modern, easier to use and ultimately more intuitive. Our client training sessions typically now take 10-15 minutes, whereas they used to take 45+ minutes.
What Makes HITS CMS Special/Unique?
We are extremely proud of our CMS system, and here are some of the many features that make it great.
- Advanced Security – We have taken security to the max and track all login activity using AI, GeoLocation, 2FA and more. Our levels of client access also ensure the correct users can only edit the areas they are supposed to.
- Real-Time Monitoring – Our CMS feeds real-time reports to our central system, informing us of potential issues or security risks. We are then able to act on these and eliminate any issues before they occur.
- User Interface (UI) – Our UI is fast, modern and super simple. No more clunky admin pages instead, clean simple to understand pages.
- Backups/Revisions – We take a backup every time you update something on the website. This could be a text or image change or the addition of a new product or service. Backups are then stored for 60 days.
- Performance – Not only does our CMS perform faster than WordPress it also features many performance improvements on the frontend. We leverage advanced Cache and Memcache engines to deliver lighting fast page loads.
Our Core Frameworks
Our CMS runs on top of a core framework which ultimately is the blueprints/foundations of your website. Each framework has been tailored to our client’s exact needs and requirements depending on their website requirements.
Currently, we are running two main versions of our core framework, Version 3 & Version 4.
Version 3 is used by the majority of our client’s sites that were built before 2020. Version 3 uses a backend style editor for updating pages, posts and portfolios. We are currently migrating all clients on version 3 over to our newer version 4 framework. We aim to have all clients fully migrated by Summer 2023.
Version 4 is our latest and greatest framework and is used on all websites developed since 2020, along with a collection of existing clients that have already been migrated. Version 4 features many great improvements over Version 3, such as a visual way of editing pages and optimised file size, and it’s fully designed for a mobile-first development approach.
What Are The Limitations Of Your CMS?
Technically speaking, there are no limitations and have yet to have a project where our CMS is not a great choice to use. Our CMS is actively developed to meet our needs along with our clients. However, we have enforced some client-side limitations to ensure maximum security is maintained on your site. These limitations are as follows:
- Adding code, embeds, scripts
- Adding new high-access users
- Adding/Updating plugins/themes
- Modifying Menus (depending on experience)
- Changing core settings
- Modifying SEO (depending on experience)
While these features are removed from client control, we are happy to action these for you ensuring your website and its security are kept in place to the highest of standards.
FAQ’s
Yes, our tests show our CMS performs roughly 33% faster with admin page loading and 47% with frontend page loading. Our primary focus currently is based around security but we aim to add even further performance improvements in future updates.
Compared to the stock WordPress experience our CMS is extremely secure. By removing all security vulnerabilities and advanced access levels we have created a CMS which is cutting edge.
In the hopefully unlikely event you wish to switch to a different provider we are easily able to convert your site to run the stock version of WordPress. We will then inform you or your new host of anything they will need to amend/edit to ensure your site remains as it was when it was on our services.
As mentioned previously our current mission is focussed completely around security and building a CMS that is worthy of a worry free security title. However, we have many plans and ideas to optimise things further including improving performance when using the CMS along with implementing user guides and video tutorials to help clients get the most out of their site.
If you have any questions or queries regarding our CMS, we would be happy to answer them, along with providing you with a demo should you wish to look around before you commit. Also, it’s worth noting we provide free training sessions on our CMS to you and your employees, typically taking around 10-15 minutes. These can be booked/arranged virtually around your schedule.
