Key Takeaways
- Start with how your team works and where the business is heading, not with a feature list.
- Price the whole job, including build, hosting, plugins, support and your team’s time.
- Treat SEO and migration risk as a selection criterion. A badly planned move can cost you search traffic you spent years earning.
- Test your shortlist with real tasks before you sign anything.
Choosing a CMS (content management system, the software your team uses to build and update your website) feels like a technical decision. It’s really a commercial one. Get it right and your marketing team can publish, test and fix things without waiting in a developer’s queue. Get it wrong and you’ll live with the workarounds for years.
Here’s how we’d approach it.
Step 1: Start with the work, not the software
Before looking at any platform, write down what your team actually does on the website each week. Publishing blog posts? Building campaign landing pages? Updating products and prices? Managing pages for several locations?
Then look two to three years ahead. If you’re planning to add ecommerce, expand interstate or publish in more than one language, your CMS needs to handle that without a rebuild.
Split the list into must-haves and nice-to-haves. It stops a slick demo from selling you features you’ll never use.
Step 2: Decide who will be using it
A CMS your marketing team avoids is an expensive brochure. If the people updating the site aren’t developers, ease of editing matters more than flexibility.
Ask two questions. Can someone build a new landing page without code? Can you set user roles and approvals, so a junior team member can draft a page but not publish it?
Step 3: Understand the main types of CMS
Most options fall into three groups.
- SaaS platforms such as Shopify, Wix and Squarespace are hosted for you, and the vendor handles updates and security. They’re quick to launch, but you get less control.
- Open source platforms such as WordPress give you more control and a huge ecosystem of plugins and developers. WordPress alone runs about 41% of all websites, according to W3Techs (August 2026). The trade-off is that hosting, updates and security are your responsibility.
- Headless CMS platforms keep content separate from the front end, so the same content can feed a website, an app and other channels. They suit complex setups but need developers to build and maintain the front end.
None is the right answer on its own. The right one fits what you found in Steps 1 and 2.
Which CMS platforms do Australian businesses use?
WordPress leads by a long way. BuiltWith detects it on around 649,000 live Australian websites, from sole-trader sites to big corporate brands. Shopify (about 171,000 Australian sites) and Wix (about 170,000) come next. Shopify is the usual pick for online retailers, while Wix suits smaller businesses that want a simple drag-and-drop builder. Squarespace and Webflow are common with design-led brands, and Drupal turns up more on government and large enterprise sites. Popularity tells you how easy it’ll be to find developers and support. It shouldn’t make the decision for you.
Step 4: Check it won’t hold your search performance back
This is where we see the most expensive mistakes. Before you commit, confirm your team can control:
- page titles, meta descriptions and URLs
- redirects, without lodging a support ticket
- canonical tags, XML sitemaps and robots settings
- structured data
- page speed, particularly on mobile
Check accessibility too. In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act applies to websites, and the Australian Human Rights Commission’s guidance points to the WCAG accessibility standards. A CMS that makes accessible templates and alt text easy saves trouble later.
Finally, look at your analytics and CRM. The platform should connect properly to the tools you use to measure leads and sales.
Step 5: Work out the real cost
The licence fee is rarely the biggest number. Add up design and build, hosting, paid plugins or apps, developer support, security, training and the migration itself.
Then add your team’s time. A cheap platform that needs a developer for every small change isn’t cheap.
Step 6: Test a shortlist with real tasks
Narrow it down to two or three options and ask for trial or sandbox access. Give each one the same jobs your team does every week: publish a post, build a landing page, set up a redirect, change a page title. Time them. Note where people get stuck.
A demo shows you the best case. A trial shows you a normal Tuesday afternoon.
Will changing CMS hurt my Google rankings?
It can, but it doesn’t have to. Google’s own guidance says to expect some temporary ranking fluctuation during a site move, and that permanent (301) redirects don’t cause a loss of PageRank.
The real risk is old URLs left without redirects, content that quietly gets dropped, and new templates that strip out page titles or structured data.
The fix is planning. Map every old URL to its new home before launch, benchmark your current traffic and rankings, and watch Google Search Console closely in the weeks after go-live. Most importantly, bring your search partner in while you’re choosing the platform, not the week before launch.
Talk to us before you sign off
If you’re weighing up a new CMS and want to protect the search traffic you already have, talk to us. We’ll review your current site’s visibility, flag the migration risks for each option on your shortlist, and work with your developers on a migration plan before anything goes live.
