Content Management System (CMS)

A content management system (CMS)A content management system (CMS) is software for creating, managing and publishing web content, usually without programming knowledge. Well-known examples are WordPress or Shopify.Open glossary entry → is a system for managing web content. Editors can maintain text, images and pages without editing the underlying code directly. Content and presentation are usually managed separately.

For search engine optimisationSearch Engine Optimization (SEO) covers all measures that help a website become more visible in unpaid (organic) search results.Open glossary entry →, the CMS matters because it determines how cleanly key elements can be maintained, such as:

• title, meta descriptionThe meta description is an HTML element in the page that briefly summarises the page's content. Google can display it as the description in the search result.Open glossary entry → and canonical,
• alt textAlt text is a text alternative for an image, stored in the alt attribute of the img element, describing the content or function of the image.Open glossary entry → and file names for images,
• structured dataSchema markup is code that describes a page's content in a structured way, so search engines understand it not just as text but as clearly classified information.Open glossary entry → and internal linkingInternal linking refers to links that connect pages within the same website. They control how search engines and users find and thematically classify content.Open glossary entry →.

A particular variant is the headless CMS: here the system delivers content only via an application programming interface (API)An application programming interface (API) is an interface through which software systems communicate and exchange data. It defines how requests are made and answered.Open glossary entry →, while presentation happens in a separate frontend. This is flexible but can raise renderingJavaScript rendering is the process by which a browser or crawler executes JavaScript code to build the final, visible page. Content that is not already in the delivered HTML only appears after this step.Open glossary entry → issues when content is assembled client-side. Good CMS workflows embed SEO tasks such as alt text directly into the publishing process.