CMS or Bootstrapped Website?

One must evaluate what is the scope of the website before jumping to one or another technology, tool, or stack.

Here are the few things that must be considered

Will your website need multiple daily posts/articles?

• If yes, CMS is certainly a good option, because once it’s up and different roles setup i.e. Contributor, Editor, Author, without any technical knowledge you can write posts/articles as many and focus on the content instead of tech underneath.

Will, it needs authentication and accept online payments for the users?

• If that’s the case you may want to go for a more secure and professional website, ordinary CMS may not help, though many CMS has plugins for google/social authentication and online payments, it charges a little more than your own custom website you need to check the complexity of the website before going to CMS option

How much tech expertise you have?

• That’s the key question if you no tech expertise going to a custom website would be more challenging, either learn yourself or hire some tech expertise, however, if some issues or bugs are reported later then you would need to get the tech support on your own. In CMS, mostly initial some basic to immediate tech expertise required to set up the website, if you have bought some CMS themes i.e. then you will get tech support as well from the theme developers. So, it would much less stressful compare to bootstrapping your own.

How much time you have to go to market with the new website?

• This is again the million-dollar question because time is money. If you have 4–8 months to go market, you can go choose to bootstrap your website. However, if you the limited time you can certainly choose from available CMS it won’t take more than a week to go to live. I have an example, two months back I started a tech news media/news site Big Bet Startup it took me a total of 20 hours from acquiring domain to CMS setup and deploy it over the Google Cloud and writing my first article.

How many funds you have to invest in the website?

• This is also an important factor because if you’ve tech expertise yourself you can bootstrap with much lesser funds (using Cloud tech & Infra as a Service) than going to CMS option, which would be slightly expensive also in longer-term a bit expensive compare to bootstrapped website.

These are pretty much the broader questions you need to answer before making your decisions — Big Bet Startups