ButterCMS Pre-Build Planning Checklist

Before you begin building your new ButterCMS environment, please take a few minutes to read through this short checklist.

There are a few common questions that are better discussed at the beginning of your project. We recommend that you include marketing and engineering stakeholders in this discussion.

Checklist:

• Components
• Preview URLs
• Content types
• Taxonomy
• Canonical URLs
• Sitemap
• Redirects
• On page SEO requirements
• Code snippets

Components

Components enable marketers to compose flexible page layouts and easily reorder those layouts. If your marketing team needs to create a wide array of landing pages with differing layouts, you'll love components.

When using components, it’s important to collaborate with your marketing team to define a library of components that your team will use to compose pages. Common components include: SEO and Social Settings, Hero Section, Call to Action, Key Benefits and many more. 

Once you've defined this Component library, your marketing team will have a good understanding of what Components are available to them as they launch new campaigns.

For additional information, please read our knowledge base article on Creating Dynamic Landing Pages Using Components, and refer to our technical docs on Dynamic Landing Pages.

Preview URLs

ButterCMS allows previewing of draft content and edited content on all pages and posts. The preview functionality does need to be configured correctly in your templates, and you should take care of this during your initial setup. 

For additional information and instructions, please read our developer docs for blog posts and pages and our knowledge base article on Preview URLs. 

Content types

Defining required content types upfront is key to maintaining efficiency in your content management system. Every additional content type that needs to be created after the initial build will require additional time from your development team. 

We recommend that you review all of the required content types, page types, and layouts before you build, and then build a set of components that accounts for all of your requirements upfront. 

The following list is not exhaustive, but is meant to point out some common content types that can guide your internal discussion. 

• Website pages
• App pages
• Landing pages
• Event pages
• Conversion pages
• Blog posts
• Social posts
• Ad content 

Review the required layout and components for each content type, and then build your ButterCMS environment to accommodate them. 

Expansion and addition of fields and content types is to be expected over time, but you can limit your exposure by thoroughly planning your initial build. 

For additional information, please read our knowledge base article on Creating, Editing, and Deleting Pages and Page Types. 

Taxonomy

Content management systems use taxonomy to structure content within hierarchies. Some examples include categories, tags, authors and collections. You need to consider a few factors concerning the taxonomy of posts, pages and other content you publish using a CMS. 

Failing to structure your taxonomy can result in duplicate content and/or thin content, both of which are discouraged by search engines. 

Confusing taxonomy can also create a bad user experience. 

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are a must for SEO and syndication. We strongly recommend you use them on every project. 
 
A canonical URL tells utilities like search engines and aggregators which URL variant is the authoritative, permanent version of a page.

The way we handle this in Butter is we display the URL of the blog post. To get that link, we use "{{post.url}}" since that is how the blog post comes back in our API.

If you check the API for your post, you will see that one of the attributes of the blog post is the URL. That is generated by taking your {{blog.preview_base_url}} + {{slug}}

If you do not have a Preview URL set up, the URL in the API will just return the blog post slug. So ideally, you should have your blog post preview URL set up properly.

Another option is to hard code the URL by entering your site's blog post URL + {{post.slug}}. Basically, part of the canonical URL becomes hard-coded: href="https://yoursite.com/blog/ and the part that's dynamic is based on what comes back to Butter: {{post.slug}}.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/blog/{{post.slug}}" />

You can apply the same kind of logic for category pages and author pages.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/blog/category/{{post.slug}}" />

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/blog/author/{{post.slug}}" />

 
Setting a canonical URL is an important part of resolving the potential duplicate content discussed above. With their canonical URLs configured correctly, all of the following URL variants can refer to a common canonical page.  

Canonical URL:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/
Requested:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/
Served:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/
Requested:	https://mysite.com/category/reviews/example-page-1/
Served:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/
Requested:	https://mysite.com/pages/category/reviews/example-page-1/
Served:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/
Requested:	https://mysite.com/pages/category/reviews/example-page-1?utm_source=email
Served:	https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/

In addition to resolving duplicate content caused by taxonomies, canonical URLs also prevent problems associated with session IDs, search parameters and more. 
 
The canonical URL can be set with the rel attribute on a link tag in the page head. 

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/” />

For files that do not have an html <head> section, you can set canonicals in the fie’s http header. 

Link: <https://mysite.com/reviews/example-page-1/>; rel=”canonical”

Sitemap

Search engines use your sitemap to thoroughly index your site. Google has stated that you should populate your sitemap with the canonical URL for every page you want indexed. 
 
Before you launch ButterCMS, you should configure your sitemap. 
 
If you are using ButterCMS to build an entire site you will need to create a new sitemap, and you should configure your app to update the sitemap whenever content is added or removed. 
 
If you are using ButterCMS to implement a blog within an existing site, you can either create a new sitemap for your blog or work within the sitemap for the existing site. 
 
When indexing of new content is desired, add new URLs to the sitemap using the designated canonical URL when the new content is published. Do this for:

• Pages
• Posts
• Blog index page (blog home)
• Category index pages
• Tag index pages
• All other published content that should be indexed by search engines 

When indexing of new content is not desired, add a noindex tag to the page head and do not add the content to the sitemap. Google recommends the following:

1. To prevent most search engine crawlers, add a noindex meta tag for robots in the page head. 

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

2. To prevent only Google crawlers, add a noindex meta tag for googlebot in the page head. 

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>

Alternatively, you can use X-Robots-Tag in your HTTP response header. 

HTTP/1.1 200 OK (…) X-Robots-Tag: noindex (…)

Don’t forget to account for the removal of content that has previously been added to your sitemap. When content is unpublished, it should be removed from your sitemap. 
 
For additional information, please read our knowledge base article on Sitemaps and RSS Feeds.

Redirects

You can set up redirect fields in your ButterCMS Pages to handle content that is changed or removed in the future. Redirects can be handled automatically or manually. If you want to handle any redirects manually, you will need to configure input fields for your users to specify the redirect target. 

There are several different types of redirects you may want to provide.

On page SEO requirements

There are several fields your marketing users will need in order to optimize on page SEO for your content. The following list is not exhaustive, but is meant to point out some key fields that can guide your internal discussion. 

• Page title
• Page meta description
• Open graph
  • Title
  • Description
  • Image
• Twitter card
  • Title
  • Description
  • Image 

For additional information, and to see an example of SEO settings implemented in an HTML template, please read our knowledge base article on SEO Optimization.

Code snippets

You can give your marketing users access to add code snippets to the head or body of pages and posts. The following list is not exhaustive, but is meant to point out some common code snippets that can guide your internal discussion.

• Page head
  • Google tag manager and other analytics/tracking scripts
  • Social media integrations
  • SEO and conversion optimization utilities
  • Banner and popup utilities

• Page body
  • Google tag manager (noscript)
  • Social sharing toolbars
  • 3rd party pixels 
  • Forms 

Support

Additional information is available in our Knowledge Base and API Documentation. 

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything we can do to help. You can reach our support team anytime during business hours (US Eastern time) using the chat button below, or by emailing us at support@buttercms.com.