What should you consider before building a custom CMS?

Before designing a custom CMS, clarify your content volume, update frequency, categorization needs, and multilingual management requirements. Then assess whether an existing system can meet those needs and whether your team can commit to development and ongoing maintenance. Needing a CMS does not mean needing a custom CMS. The supplied material supports starting with requirements, existing solutions, and maintenance resources, but is not sufficient to determine that a particular website definitely needs a custom system.

List content tasks before choosing technologies

An answer on Webmasters Stack Exchange illustrates the management workload through manually maintained tag pages: every new article requires adding a link to the relevant tag pages, and overly long lists require additional pages. If a website frequently adds content, these repetitive tasks should factor into the CMS assessment, rather than considering only the article-editing interface.

• How often is content added? Which category or tag pages need to be updated at the same time?
• Do pages frequently need to be edited, duplicated, or deleted in bulk?
• Are multilingual content, database or API integrations, and different team members’ access permissions involved?

The first two sets of questions help identify repetitive work; the last helps establish the scope of collaboration and integration the system needs to support.

Use large-scale examples to check requirements, not copy feature lists

In 2021, Ahrefs profiled Wise’s custom CMS, Lienzo, in the context of large-scale multilingual content production. Its features included template-based page creation, internal linking, meta tags, structured data, and the generation and updating of hreflang and canonical tags, as well as bulk page management.

This case offers a useful prompt: does your own website also have tasks that must be handled at scale? For example, if multilingual pages require repeated updates to the tags linking corresponding language versions, that should be included in the initial requirements. But a single company’s case does not prove that standard CMS platforms cannot do these things, or that a small website needs a system of the same scale.

Assess ongoing maintenance, not just initial development

The Lienzo case also lists local testing before launch, platform monitoring, SEO split testing, data integration, and role-based permissions. If these are also essential features for your site, establish early on who will handle development, testing, and troubleshooting, rather than simply estimating when the editing interface will be ready.

In a 2024 article on alternative platforms, Tenten reported, based on its team’s experience, that ongoing updates to WordPress plugins, themes, core software, and PHP consume resources and may introduce failures or security risks. This is one team’s assessment of its experience, not an inevitable outcome for all WordPress websites, nor a basis for concluding that a custom system would require less maintenance.

First study how existing systems solve problems

Another Webmasters Stack Exchange answer recommends studying common frameworks and CMS platforms before designing your own, because many problems already have solutions, while others are not apparent early in the design process. Compare each of the requirements above with how existing systems handle them, noting what can be used as is and what needs customization. Use that comparison to define the scope of custom development, rather than rebuilding every feature for which a solution already exists.