In the early days, managing a website was no easy task. It was nearly impossible to update or publish new content without the help of a highly skilled technical developer. Thankfully, much advancement has been made along the years to help businesses manage and maintain their corporate website more efficiently and effectively. In fact, one website advancement particularly important is a content management system, or CMS.

In simple terms, a CMS refers to the open-source software that powers a website. It is where your website lives, breathes and stores all forms of content. It’s also the solution that many enterprise companies rely on a CMS to power their corporate website.

All content management systems store various forms of content information – your website pages, blog posts, images, videos, as well as all information related to content revisions and software version updates. A CMS also allows you to assign multiple users from your company with various roles, which is helpful for businesses with many large teams.

Beyond content storage, those responsible for updating, mainlining and monitoring a corporate website can easily do so with minimal technical skills – if any at all – though a CMS.

As anyone who’s ever struggled with managing a website knows, a CMS is an invaluable tool for companies that want their site to grow and scale seamlessly with their business. But on the other hand, it’s yet another solution that some business owners have shied away from. Are there really benefits of using a content management system?

Absolutely. Here are the top four reasons why your website — regardless of size, maturity, or industry — needs a CMS.

4 Indispensable Benefits of Using a Content Management System

1) It puts you back in control

On the web, speed and ease are critical. Spending precious time getting a hold of a proprietary web developer to make changes as simple as a spelling error or a broken link is a huge waste of a marketing manager’s time. It’s also unreliable — if they forget a minor detail and are unable to fix it themselves, they risk losing valuable visitors and website traffic from every second that passes.

A CMS provides full control over your website and marketing initiatives. You will never have to sit and wait for a developer to manually reconstruct web pages for a new product, service, or marketing campaign from scratch again.

2) It improves communication across large enterprise organizations

In addition to making life easier for content managers, a CMS improves workflow across all levels and departments in your business. In most cases, there are many people who will have access and input into a corporate website, from those who add new website pages to those who produce blog posts. A CMS makes it easy to manage these roles and set the proper publishing permissions for each unique user.

There’s no more need to chase down the status of project or piece of content. With a CMS, managers from all departments can immediately assess what’s already been done with a given project and assign what’s coming next.

3) A CMS supports your SEO efforts

Another critical marketing task: A CMS makes optimizing content easy and efficient. With the use of plugins, content marketers can reduce the common SEO mistakes and better understand the quality of their content and how it is effecting the overall health of the website.

SEO support also reduces friction when search engines crawl your web pages and content for ranking purposes. Not only will all relevant content be accounted for, it will also have been recorded in a manner that makes sense for both users and search engines.

4) It’s a sustainable, secure, and scalable tool for growth

As your business grows, you’ll website will need to grow accordingly. Think ahead to one, two, or even five years from now. Where do you see your business? Presumably, you want to triple or quadruple your revenue, right? In order to do so, you’ll also need to consider increasing your website traffic and improving the quality of leads in the years ahead, too. And the time and money spent dealing with proprietary website vendors is eventually going to take a tool on your website and can effect the successful online presence you worked so hard for.

Ask yourself: Do you want to continue growing your business online? Your ability to do so is dependent on delivering your website visitors with a seamless user experience and providing relevant and up-to-date information at the right time, and you simply can’t do this effectively without a CMS.