Does your CMS value the time of content editors?

One of the things we care about for Perch and Perch Runway is that the CMS is fast.

With Google counting page load time as a ranking signal, and people increasingly accessing the web on slow mobile connections, the speed of your site is important. However there is another, less often talked about place where performance is important. The performance of your control panel.

The control panel is the place where content editors have to come to edit and update content on their site. They have to use the system day after day, long after the developer has moved on to other projects.

What so often happens with a CMS, is that the developer creates the site and the admin experience seems to be reasonable. However, a year on, when the client has added a lot of data, everything slows to a crawl. The site becomes difficult to manage, the client gets fed up with waiting for the admin to load to make content edits. They stop updating the site so frequently, and the content becomes stale.

There is often nothing you can do about a poorly performing CMS control panel. With the front end of your site you can opt to use a cache of some description to deal with a slow CMS, but you can’t cache your admin. Your only option might be to throw resources at it, upgrading to a more expensive hosting plan.

Systems that require many plugins are very prone to this problem. Even if the core software performs well, badly written plugins stacked on top of it can slow everything to a halt. Systems that are only tested in high performance environments can also have problems when installed on cheap webhosting.

At Perch we care about the experience of content editors. We value their time. We also know that if your clients are happy, you are able to get on with doing great work, rather than answering yet another phone call about why the site is so slow. We actively push back against adding features that will slow down the system, wait until we have a way of adding that functionality without compromising performance.

By using our own API to develop our add-ons we can ensure that the same care is taken there as it is with the core product. We can, through the API, give people the tools to create good additions to the product and we’re always happy to chat to add-on developers to share tips on good practice.

We never rest on our laurels. Although the editing experience in Perch is fast now, we’re already working on new admin filtering and sorting capability to help those sites with large amounts of content. This should make it faster for editors to locate the right item of content to work on.

If you are currently using a CMS that doesn’t value the time of content editors, why not give Perch a try? We’re committed to valuing their time, and valuing their time often gives you as their web designer more time too.