As of January 2018, the content management systems – CMS community consists of 1.3 million people, including more than 100,000 active contributors. The CMS ecosystem includes more than 40,000 free modules for extending and customizing basic functionality, more than 2,5000 free themes, and at least 1,2000 ready-made builds, with which you can quickly and easily install CMS with ready-made specific functionality.
As you can see, CMS-based website development has a lot of advantages. However, Dorik prepares a small guide in which some disadvantages of using content management systems are listed. CMS is essentially a set of ready-made software modules that are linked into a single system suitable “for any occasion”. From here, we can formulate the justifications that deter the use of a boxed content management system for large portals:
System without specialization.
Almost all CMS are not specialized, they are designed to create any site, therefore, it is impossible to get maximum efficiency on a universalized tool.
Standardized architecture.
When developing a large website, there is always a stage of designing its architecture, and it determines a lot in the functioning of the site. When using CMS, the architecture is already set by the creators of the content management system, therefore, it is not possible to take into account the features of a new project.
A large number of modifications.
Large web projects have very different functionality with different requirements. Using standard modules to launch a high-quality site is impossible: with a high degree of probability, each of the ready-made modules will have to be redone to meet specific requirements. In such cases, it can be easier and faster (and therefore cheaper) to write new modules from scratch.
Problems with revision.
Any content management system for a developer is a rigid framework that is very difficult to go beyond. If you need to refine the functionality, you have to deal with the internal organization of the CMS and take into account possible technological limitations set by its developers. In addition, the selected CMS may use outdated or not the most optimal technology for the project being created.
Problems with loads.
Highly visited sites should be optimized for load in order to save resources to maintain their performance at any level of traffic. Therefore, each of the modules used should spend a minimum of computing power. Content management systems cannot provide this condition: they are developed as solutions “for all occasions”, and they contain functionality that is either difficult or impossible to remove.
I must say, some serious projects are implemented in pure HTML in order to reduce load problems (for example, Opera). Due to this, sites can withstand heavy loads with minimal resources, and the page loading speed is maximum. However, as mentioned above, only those sites that are updated quite infrequently can be made on pure HTML.
This is not a complete list of “cons” due to which large web projects are not developed using boxed content management systems. CMS are great for simple solutions, such as a corporate website, online store, blog, etc., but for large portals their use is impractical.
