Why Concrete5 CMS is the tried, tested, and trusted solution for your website

Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your business is a big decision, whether you’re responding to constant frustration, making a strategic move, or enhancing your customer experience.

It sets the tone for your entire relationship with your website.  Here at Made Simple Media, we’re all about making digital simple. For that reason, we recommend Concrete5 CMS as our CMS of choice. 

The Elephant In The Room

Before you ask, the Concrete5 CMS, of which we speak, has very recently rebranded to ConcreteCMS. In this article, we’ll continue to refer to it as Concrete5, as this is how it’s more widely known.

Why Choose Concrete5 CMS?

When you think CMS, the undisputed market leader, is WordPress. Unsurprising, really, as it holds a 65% market share, powering 41% of all websites and nearly 35% of the million highest-performing websites on the web.

However, bigger doesn’t always mean better. 

Our view is that in the Concrete5 vs WordPress debate, Concrete5 comes out on top. Like a plucky underdog, they beat the odds stacked against them. 

To help you decide, we’ve shared our top 10 reasons why Concrete5 CMS is the logical choice for your next website build.

1. Distinctive Design

A beautiful website should be a staple part of any web design service.

Your website has to look and feel the part as the beating heart of your digital and online presence. It’s your 24/7 salesperson. The online marketplace is crowded and noisy, so a standout website is a must.

Concrete5 CMS hosts an extensive theme directory with thousands of add-ons. There’s something for everyone to suit all tastes and industries. Page themes and layouts are fully customisable, giving your site a sophisticated feel without a hefty price tag. 

The style editor also allows you to personalise your layouts, fonts, and colours, to add those nuances and details associated with your brand.

2. Easy To Use

There’s nothing worse than feeling held hostage by your website. That sinking feeling when you know you’ve got changes to make. Still, you avoid them because of the time they will take to make and rectify the inevitable mistakes along the way. What’s worse, it feels like the time it takes is disproportionate to the benefit of the change in the first place.

Never again.

With Concrete5 CMS, feelings like these are a thing of the past. Simplicity is at its heart and boy, does it deliver.

Multiple templates mean you can easily choose and apply a layout you like without changing a thing. But if you want to make changes, modular building and editing mean there’s no coding knowledge required. 

The highly intuitive ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) in-context editor allows you to customise your site using drag and drop functionality entirely. Fonts, colours, layouts are all personalisable - no more troublesome back-end editing. Just point, click and go.

3. Peace Of Mind

For many, there’s an element of fear around building and maintaining your website. There’s often a reluctance to touch anything or grant access to anyone beyond a carefully chosen few for fear of something getting broken beyond repair.

Good news. Concrete5 CMS combats these fears by affording you complete control over user permissions. You can set multiple permission levels and approval workflows, enabling you to relinquish some responsibility to your wider team and empowering them to edit. However, you’ll retain some control, safe in the knowledge that you’ll have the final say before anything goes live. Accountability is guaranteed, with features including email verification, login history, and audit trails, as standard.
 

4. Easy Install And Maintenance

In business, time is money, so another bugbear of many a business owner is a website install and update process that’s slow, complicated, and a little bit soul-destroying.

More good news, Concrete5 CMS was built for busy business owners. Their entire install and updates process is lightning-fast and fully faff-free, saving you hours better spent on your business.

5. No Fees

Like WordPress, Concrete5 CMS is open-source, making your site far cheaper to maintain than mid-tier subscription-based CMSs like Kentico.

6. Easily Adaptable And Extendable

As your business scales, your website needs to evolve. Suddenly, your site lacks sophistication, doesn’t reflect the customer experience you’re trying to achieve or the functionality you require. 

So to avoid a future headache, when choosing the right CMS, it must have the capacity to adapt with you.

Concrete5 CMS meets and exceeds that expectation. 

With just a few clicks, additional functionality can be added to your site using Concrete5’s extensive theme directory, add-on library, and built-in marketplace.

All add-ons are controlled by the Peer Review Board (PRB), ensuring strict coding standards. It also avoids compatibility problems (and nasty surprises) sometimes associated with using third-party plug-ins on WordPress.

Concrete5 CMS offers various tools to support your digital marketing strategy, including blogs (with RSS syndication), customisable forms, email marketing tools, and sophisticated, integrated reporting.

7. Powerful Performance

Considered a dark art by many, search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial to a successful digital marketing strategy. If a website is the beating heart of your digital brand, SEO is its lifeblood. Without it, your website won’t function as it should by bringing warm leads directly to you from the search engine results pages.

Concrete5 CMS’s SEO options are more sophisticated than its rival WordPress, which relies on third-party plug-ins to match its in-built functionality. Another win for Concrete5 in the Concrete5 vs WordPress debate.

As well as being optimised for search without the need for additional code, all Concrete5 CMS themes are fully mobile optimised and responsive. Today, a mobile optimised site is a must. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, website traffic via mobile devices accounted for 54.8% of web traffic worldwide. Because it’s growing year on year, some companies are going as far as adopting a mobile-first website design strategy.

8. Data and Cyber Security

In an age where GDPR rules supreme, cyber security frequently crosses the mind of every savvy business owner - gathering, storing, and processing personal data daily through cookie tracking, email list sign-ups, and online contact forms. 

Ensuring our information security management systems adhere to the highest cyber security standards is an effective risk management strategy, protecting ourselves financially and reputationally.

Concrete5 CMS is a fully ISO27001 solution, which means it’s an internationally recognised information security management system, following data protection and privacy best practice. With hosting, it’s also SOC 2 compliant (a data compliance framework for service-based organisations).

An SSL certificate is also easy to install if required to encrypt any information entered on your site. 

9. Online Support

Like WordPress, Concrete5 CMS has an online support community. On the Concrete5 vs WordPress front, WordPress’s online community is superior. It’s larger with more content readily available and has more active forum users ranging in technical skill level from amateur enthusiasts to sophisticated web admins. 

However, because of Concrete5 CMS inherent simplicity, intuitive in-context editing, and internal marketplace for additional functionality, there’s less need for online support. 

You point, click, and never look back.

10. It’s An ‘Out Of The Box’ CMS Solution

If you hadn’t noticed, we’re big fans of Concrete5 CMS at Made Simple Media. So much so that we were early adopters of it in the UK. One of the main reasons for this was its cohesive and comprehensive nature out of the box. 

Unlike WordPress, which relies heavily on third-party plug-ins for additional functionality because of its core design as blogging software, Concrete5 CMS has all the functionality that most websites will ever need available internally, with minimal fuss to install and use. 

It’s a complete CMS solution, but of course these things can always be taken further.  Check out some cool things we've done with Concrete5 CMS

The CMS Of Choice For Beginners And Coders Alike

So, there we have it. If you’re looking for a tried, tested, and trusted solution to your current website woes, look no further than Concrete5 CMS. 

With simplicity and versatility at its core, you can’t go wrong.

Ready to Make Our Relationship a Little More Concrete?

Are you looking for a trusted partner to make your website dreams a reality? As trusted Concrete5 developers, we’ll happily use our expertise to plan, design, and build it right the first time. If required, we even offer comprehensive Concrete5 CMS training, leaving you feeling reassuringly relaxed about your new CMS.

Take your first step towards a frustration-free website. 

Send us a message today.