How to Hire CMS Developers at an Affordable Cost?

Put simply, a Content Management System (CMS) is a system that automates the production of web pages. Content Management Systems make sure your pages are consistent, clean, and complete, which makes it easier for you to manage them, therefore you can improve your eCommerce website design cost. In this way, a CMS can help you achieve your business goals.

Many businesses in fields such as retail, e-commerce, tourism, and more need to upload new content and review existing content regularly to make sales and boost their customer base. When they explore how to hire CMS developer, such companies can save their resources since they don’t need developers or any extra coding skills to manage such systems after they are done.

What is CMS and Why is It Popular?

There are two major ways of implementing a CMS into your business. The first approach is to use a ready-made solution, but this is a very limiting choice. Indeed, you can enjoy the benefit of working with a proven system; however, such a system will not be flexible, and you can’t personalise it for your needs. Alternatively, you can build a custom-made solution where you hire CMS developers to build software that is tailored directly to your business needs and challenges.

For instance, our ProCoders website is a custom CMS built on WordPress. After the initial building, we don’t rely on developers for the continual management of our content, and this saves our company a lot of money. Here are the benefits of building your own custom CMS.

Flexibility and Customisation Options

If you build a custom CMS, you can make it look exactly like you want. You can make any design you want so that it can fit any type and size of screens because you can customise all the blocks for any screen categories. This means that whether they’re viewing your site on their smartphone or desktop computer, all their content will be displayed perfectly. However, a ready-made solution will not allow you to fully explore this creative side.

Simplified Collaboration

Once your custom CMS is finished by developers, you don’t need any special skills to manage it and upload content regularly. Further content publishing can be performed by a number of employees with minimal training. Since they can do this without requiring developers, this saves your business money in the long run.

Mobile-friendliness

If you make custom CMS, the designer will optimise your site for any type of screen – mobile or tablets included. So, all the blocks in your site will be adopted for that. A good CMS will allow you to create mobile versions of your website with relative ease and lower your ecommerce mobile app development cost.

SEO-friendliness

A good CMS will also make it easier for search engines to crawl your content and understand it better. The search engines use structured data in order to index any given page properly, so using a CMS can help make sure that happens. This will help you rank higher in search results and get more traffic as a result. Also, with the help of custom CMS you can upload some plugins to bust up your SEO optimization. These plugins will help you to fill the meta description, titles and URLs for your pages easily and correctly.

Rich Amount of Personalised Features

Unlike ready-to-use CMS solutions, custom solutions have no limitations. This applies to design as well as functionality. Indeed, ready-to-use solution may provide already made features for your site. However, nothing beats building the features you need for yourself.

When Do You Really Need a CMS Developer?

A Content Management System (CMS) plays a central role in your website, by helping you publish up-to-date content in a fast and flexible manner. Therefore, you need a custom CMS and to build one, you have to hire web developers who have this particular expertise.

To Digitalize Your Business asap

It’s not just about making your site look nice; it’s about being able to manage it easily—and being able to do that with minimal resources is vital for businesses that are just starting out or don’t have an IT team on staff. CMS solutions can be customized so that all of your team members can make changes easily, even if they don’t have experience with coding or development. For instance, as a tour operator, you can upload new offers online easily and in real-time.

To Enhance Your Site’s Performance

A CMS helps optimize your site so that it loads quickly and runs smoothly, which means better user experience and higher conversion rates—both of which are crucial for modern businesses.

Also, issues with website performance connected to the platform may result in the need to move to another CMS, for instance, to migrate Weebly to WordPress. A pro developer is necessary at this point.

To Move from Ready Solutions to CMS

If you’re looking for a more flexible way to manage your website but don’t have the time or resources for developing a custom solution yourself, consider moving from a ready solution like Shopify or Weebly over to a CMS like WordPress or Drupal instead. Ready solutions are often easy enough for anyone with basic HTML knowledge and little programming experience—but they tend not to offer as much flexibility as CMS platforms do.

Types of Content Management Systems

Custom CMS

With a custom CMS, the design and functionality are tailored to your website, making a conversion-focused website that will keep your visitors happy. A CMS from a vendor will not give your business the same results, because it was not built specifically for you. On the other hand, a custom solution allows you to choose the features you need, have them developed and integrated, then quickly take the website live. Since it is custom-built, the CMS is not only more effective, but it can help to grow your business with a better online presence.

Pros

• The flexibility of a custom CMS helps you respond to rapid market and business changes, respond to user needs, and keep your company up to date with current technology.
• A custom CMS will reflect your company’s precise branding and content strategy and it will not seem like a generic website.
• You can create the product exactly as you want it and release the solution on a schedule that meets your business needs.

Cons

• Initially, the cost of developing a custom CMS is higher than just plugging into a ready-made solution. However, this balances out in terms of business return and ease of management once the development stage is over.
• Developing a custom CMS can take a significant amount of time, which may be a disadvantage if you need to set one up right away. However, working with an outstaffing company can help you hire developers in less than two weeks and then negotiate an optimised schedule for a speedy time-to-market.

‘Box’ Solutions

Off the shelf CMS solutions come with several benefits in terms of quick setup and so on. Unlike custom solutions, they do not require the input of developers at any stage of the process. Therefore, someone without any experience can set them up. However, this valuable for the business in the long run? Let’s examine the pros and cons of using a ready-made CMS solution.

Pros

• Ready-made CMSs have low initial setup costs and do not require maintenance.
• You can set up your website with a ready-made CMS within a few hours.
• There are several tutorial materials online for setting up popular CMS solutions with ease and speed.

Cons

• Most ready-made content management systems are designed with generic purposes in mind and many of them may not meet the needs of your industry, talk less the specific requirements for your business.
• A ready-made CMS may not work well with the existing tools in use at your company, resulting in friction in business operations.
• Popular CMS solutions may have security vulnerabilities that clients may be oblivious to. This may leave your business exposed. However, with a custom solution, you can tackle vulnerabilities by yourself.

What CMS are the Most Relevant in 2023?

You have an idea that you want to start or expand your business, but you don’t know which CMS is the best? In your attempt to hire CMS web developers, this section will help you understand what CMS will be relevant for years to come and would help grow your business.

WordPress

WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in the world, and for good reason: it’s easy to install, easy to use and has a large community of developers who have built their own plugins that can extend your site’s functionality. In one of our projects executed for a job matching company, RLM Jobs, delivered an efficient platform based on WordPress and this singular decision saved the client time and money. Due to this popularity, WordPress developer rates are some of the cheapest around, being as low as $20 per hour.

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)

Adobe Commerce is an excellent choice if you want to hire eCommerce Developers rapidly to build an eCommerce platform that will allow you to sell products online. It has an incredibly powerful back end that allows merchants to customize their stores with ease.

Drupal

Unlike services like Alfresco and Umbraco, Drupal is much more popular and known for its flexibility, which makes it an attractive option for users who want complete control over their website design and functionality options.

Shopify

From its name, it is obvious that Shopify is optimised for retail store owners and eCommerce. It is a powerful tool that goes beyond regular content management to include payments integration as well as customer relationship management features such as A/B testing, email campaigns, and smart content generation to enhance your website content. (If you still need help picking shopify vs wordpress for ecommerce, we have an article for that matter).

What Technologies Might CMS Developers Know for Building Custom Solutions?

When you want to hire CMS website developer, if you don’t plan to do anything too challenging (perhaps just a combination of some designs you like and basic functions), then a WordPress developer who has experience with SEO plugins, ACF plugins, databases and so on is perfect for you.

However, to develop something complicated and unique, or to upgrade an existing solution, for example, migrate Jimdo to WordPress, or for Drupal to WordPress migration, we recommend starting with a discovery phase to figure out all the details. The discovery phase for CMS development always includes interviews with the designer, business analytics and developer. These people will dig into your ideas in order to know exactly what and how you want your project to look like. What if to implement your vision you’ll need to hire someone really uncommon, like hire Rust developer? Only research can tell.

In addition, you might need several developers who know some advanced technologies (such as Laravel, Synfony, Node.js, Python, etc.) Find a list of recommended technologies below.

Web Programming (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

The best CMS developers can build their own custom applications using the most popular programming languages. Typically, a web developer knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But many also know Python and PHP because these are the most common languages for coding CMSs.

Database Management (MySQL, MongoDB, MySQL)

Databases are essential components of any website because they store all the content and data related to your website such as user accounts or product information. There are many types of databases available, but most CMSs use MySQL because it is free and easy to use.

Frontend development (Angular, Vue.js, ReactJS)

When you hire CMS experts, in addition to the core languages used in web development such as JavaScript or TypeScript, frontend developers are also expected to know how to work with frameworks such as Angular or ReactJS as well as package managers like npm or bower for managing dependencies and packaging code for deployment.

Content Management System (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla)

You need to know how to work with content management systems like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla if you want to build websites using them as your CMS platform. They all share some common features, such as blogging capabilities and easy editing through templates.

E-Commerce Platforms (Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce)

CMS developers should be familiar with e-commerce platforms and tools like Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce, which allow you to build fully functional online stores on top of your CMS platform. This helps them develop features like product catalogues, shopping carts, and payment gateways into the system.

Hard Skills CMS Developers Should Have:

Before you get started to hire CMS website developers, it is important to know exactly what your hiring team will need to create and maintain content across your digital channels.

Programming Customisations

A good CMS developer will be able to make customisations to existing systems or create new ones if necessary. They should be familiar with coding languages such as PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3 and MySQL. Ideally, they should have years of experience with most major programming languages used today, so they can adapt quickly to changes in technology or market trends and write code that is fast, efficient, and reliable.

Experience with APIs and Third-Party Integrations

Developers must know how to use these APIs in order to create integrations between their CMS and other systems. For example, they might want to integrate their site with payment processing software. This requires knowledge of both the API provided by the payment processor and the API provided by the CMS. For example, in our case study building a similar solution for RLM Jobs, our client wanted their simple site to have a document signing feature for the drivers. This was implemented very easily as our developer found a plugin which suited the company needs.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The ability to understand SEO is crucial for CMS developers because they must ensure their websites are up-to-date and compliant with Google’s ever-changing algorithm. This means that they need to have an understanding of all the latest SEO trends, as well as the technical aspects of making a website compatible with Google’s standards. As you must have noticed in reading this article, ProCoders site is SEO-optimized for our search engine audience. If you want your site to be easily found from Google searches, this is essential.

Website Security (SSL, Data Encryption, etc.)

Website security skills also essential abilities for CMS developers because they must ensure their websites are secure from hackers and other malicious threats, while also keeping them up to date with the latest security patches. This means that they must be proficient in things like data encryption, SSL certificates, website backups and more.

Website Maintenance and Continuous Updates

You want a CMS developer who will be able to maintain your site as well as provide continuous updates when necessary, so that your website doesn’t fall behind competitors’ sites in terms of functionality, security, or appearance.

Step-by-Step Hiring Guide from ProCoders

Define your requirements

Based on your requirements, we will pick a developer from our team so that you can interview him/her and proceed to work. This can take as little as few days. If we don’t have a developer available (usually due to having too many clients at that present moment), we have an optimized process to quickly find the right developers to work with.

• First, we will select candidates that we think are going to be a great fit
• Next, we have an initial screening, and one important feature of this stage is to check their English fluency. Since we work with international clients, we hire developers who can communicate effectively with teams across the globe.
• The technical interview comes next and it includes a test task to test the candidate’s live coding skills and abilities.
• Afterwards, we schedule an interview for the candidate with the client so that you can directly assess them
• Once all these stages are completed, then comes the onboarding

With our client, Blue-o-Two, the company knew exactly want they wanted and after an initial conversation, we understood which developers to propose to them.

Select candidates

Once you’ve written up a job description, start looking through resumes and portfolios for qualified people who meet your criteria. It’s important that each candidate understands your business goals and how they can help you achieve them—and it’s also important that you understand how they will fit into your team environment when you hire remote CMS developers.

Interview the candidates

You’ll want to evaluate each candidate’s skills as well as their personality and fit with your company culture. To make sure that you’re getting all of this information from your interviewees, it’s important to ask them questions about their experience working with content management systems (CMS) or similar technologies; their technical knowledge; how they would approach this specific project; and their motivation for pursuing this role within your company. These are the ways to test technical expertise when interviewing your candidates.

Make an offer and onboard

After finding the right candidate(s), it’s time to make an offer! You should be prepared with all the details—hourly rate, benefits package (if applicable), etc.—so that once they accept your offer, onboarding can be as smooth as possible. Get them started right away by sending over any relevant documentation or information needed.

As you can see, it takes a lot of time to hire the best CMS developers (or any other kind of developer, for that matter). However, startups and SMEs simply don’t have that much time.

That’s where ProCoders comes in. As a software development company, we do the hard work of assembling and screening developers for our clients, thereby helping you lower the cost to hire a web developer. When hiring developers from ProCoders, you would find that all the work is done throughout all stages, except the final interview, where you interact with the developers to determine if they are the right fit for your company.

In this way, we help startups and SMEs save precious time and resources that could then be expended on valuable ventures. In fact, as our client, your project can kick off in as little as two weeks from the time you first contact us with your business requirements.

Conclusion

• CMS has gained immense popularity and companies are aiming towards developing a website that will not only boost their business but will also help them to create a strong online presence.
• When hiring a CMS developer, you need to make sure that the professionals you hire have the skills to work on the technologies you’ll be using through technical interviews and skill-based tests.
• As you want to hire CMS programmers from ProCoders, you would find that all the work is done throughout all stages to save you costs on the hassle of recruiting them by yourself.