Umbraco is a Danish developed CMS coded in .NET. It is built on an Open Source platform and therefore the code is free and accessible to all. More than you 730,000 companies have already joined the platform since its launch back in 2008.
But why should you choose Umbraco as your CMS? We try to give the answer.
Below we give you an insight into the Danish Content Management System and 6 reasons to choose Umbraco over so many other CMS.
1. Ease of use is the focal point
“Content is king”. You have probably heard that before. Although the linguistic turn is gradually a bit watered down, it is nevertheless still relevant. Content on your website plays a crucial role in your appearance and can be your way of differentiating yourself from the competition.
In order to produce content that engages and excites the recipient, it is important to have a CMS that makes it easy, simple, and clear to create content for the website. And that satisfies Umbraco, which is why it is appropriate to mention Umbraco's ease of use as the first in the series of benefits of the platform.
With Umbraco setting up landing pages, blog posts, and news articles is easy. And at the same time, it has been made manageable to plan the release of these. So you can produce content in advance and plan it out in the future.
Ease of use permeates many parts of Umbraco. You can even view previous versions of the content you have written. This means you can go back and see original versions of content before changes are made. At the same time, it is possible to configure how many versions you want to keep. Then you do not have to have a whole stock of old versions lying around and only the ones you need.
Finally, you also have the option of using Umbraco's built-in media library. Here you can save photos, videos, and documents. Today, however, videos are often posted on 3rd party services such as YouTube and Vimeo which is why it is often chosen to embed these directly with the content on the website.
2. You can do a lot yourself!
Above, we were able to establish that content is the backbone of any website, and that Umbraco provides optimal conditions for producing the good content. In continuation of this, it is of course also crucial that you can build and design your content exactly as you want it. Not only the content but also the appearance of it is important for the performance of the website.
With Umbraco you get the opportunities to free yourself from developers and easily build your pages on your own. That is a huge plus in the book. Sometimes the production or adjustment of content needs to be done quickly, and you may not have the time to wait for an external developer.
It is even made so easy that you can insert your text directly from Word to Umbraco in no time. In addition, it is easy to insert images and videos and divide the pages into columns.
With the new block editor it is also possible to define content blocks in which content is filled in and settings are tweaked and thus can build a more structured page layout than with a traditional WYSIWYG editor ("What You See Is What You Get"). And that is pretty cool!
3. Umbraco helps you with search engine optimization
Once you have the good content and the design of it in place, the search engine optimization should move it even further - The good content should not be hidden away. And Umbraco helps you strive for the best rankings on Google.
SEO requires blood, sweat, and tears no matter which CMS you choose, but with Umbraco you are at least sure they have done their part to help you along the way. To assist you in the best possible way in the battle for the good rankings, Umbraco has among other things the following SEO functions:
- Schema Markup - It is possible to implement schema markup in Umbraco as you have access to edit and update the source code for your website.
- General meta tags - You can easily define title, description, keywords etc. to provide an indication of how the page should be crawled or indexed.
- Hreflang tags for the multinational pages - Already at Umbraco 8 language variants were introduced for handling multilingual websites in Umbraco. And when you want to make sure Google shows the right language variant to your visitors, you can add hreflangs tags to your Umbraco site.
- URL structure according to Google's requirements - You can easily create a clear URL structure that also complies with Google's requirements.
- Google has easy access to crawl and index your pages - HTML is the standard way to present content in Umbraco that can be crawled and indexed by Google. And if you need to present content through JavaScript it is also possible with Umbraco
- ... and much more. You can read more about the SEO friendly CMS on Umbraco's blog here.
4. You become part of a large support community
The second you install Umbraco on your website, you are invited to a large community. The support community consists of general users, developers, project managers, and marketing experts. Here news is updated regularly with the latest launches and updates. It also means that you can get help quickly if you have questions or should experience problems.
In addition, the Codegarden is held annually in Odense for the entire Umbraco community, which is the largest and only official conference for the environment which provides the opportunity for sparring across the community. It is a unique opportunity to keep up with the latest developments and at the same time get help from other Umbraco users.
When you collaborate with MCB you also get the opportunity to get advice from our Umbraco MVP, Bjarne. MVP stands for Most Valuable People and today numbers only 61 people worldwide. Umbraco even appoints MVPs in Umbraco, and among them you will find our Umbraco developer, Bjarne. MVPs possess the competencies to take Umbraco a step further, contribute extraordinarily to the Umbraco environment and have the necessary experience within Umbraco to advise you.
You can read more about Umbraco Support here.
5.Umbraco 9 - A CMS that improves itself all the time!
Umbraco manages to stick to the fire by continuous updates and adjustments. Latest major release is Umbraco 9.
Umbraco 9 is built in .NET Core which makes your Umbraco page ready and secure for the future. In addition, there have been several upgrades from Umbraco 8 to Umbraco 9 with better performance and modernized technology that makes the platform even more scalable.
With Umbraco 9 you get the following benefits among others:
- 3rd party modules/packages have been updated so that they now also support the newer Microsoft technology.
- Static events have been replaced by new notification options.
- The installation process has been updated.
In addition, Umbraco 10 is on the way which has been updated to .NET 6, where Umbraco 9 basically runs on .NET 5. Existing solutions on Umbraco 9 can relatively easily be upgraded to Umbraco 10 (expected launch 16 June 2022).
If you want to know more about Umbraco 9 you can read here.
6. Easy launch
Last but not least, Umbraco has understood to make it easy and convenient for you to launch your Umbraco page. It all takes place without superfluous and time-consuming oscillations. Once you have developed, produced, and designed your new top-tuned Umbraco site, you need the launch to take place as smoothly as possible. And fortunately, Umbraco has also taken this into account. In a short time you can have your website up and running.
It also means that you can potentially save yourself a lot of time on setup and launch by choosing Umbraco over other similar systems. In continuation of this, the Umbraco Cloud platform is an attractive choice that takes care of hosting, so you can instead spend time on concrete development of your website. Read more about Umbraco Cloud here.
