Investigating Optimization Strategies that Determine Performance of CMS Websites in Organizations

Abstract: Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) have evolved over years from very primitive systems to complex and robust intelligible systems. These systems provide the ability to maintain and navigate the structure of a website and allow the developers to design websites more easily, hence making content publishing on the internet fast and easy. Due to the complexity of CMS, most corporate websites tend to experience performance downside. Studies reveal that a lot is being done to improve websites performance. Several web optimization techniques have been adopted to reduce pageloadtime and much has been achieved but as the web content keeps on growing, performance is lowering. This study tries to address the CMS website performance gaps by providing strategies that can achieve better performance.. The study employs experimental research design. Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal CMS were used in the experiment to represent the most popular CMS used in organizations. The experiments were done in Moi university labs. Optimization process was achieved using GTMetrix and GiftOfSpeed online tools. The findings were that: Image optimization, CSS/JS & HTML Minificaition, Caching, mobile optimization had significant impact on CMS website performance. A combination of these techniques results to web optimization strategies that will improve CMS website performance

Keywords: Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal, Joomla, Wordpres, Performance, GTMetrix, GiftOfSpeed , WCMS