Seven signs you’ve outgrown your CMS

Digital teams who eliminate the hurdle of an inefficient traditional CMS deploy digital products faster. They build apps 2-3 times faster, update content in minutes, and shorten release periods by months. When teams are not wrestling with outdated tech, they’re being a lot more productive.

Across a diverse mix of industries, there are some common signs that a company has outgrown its CMS and could drastically increase its speed and efficiency by moving to content infrastructure.

A CMS is meant to centralize content management. The benefits of a content hub are lost when an organization needs more than one CMS. Multiple CMSes create content silos that require extra work to maintain, make it challenging to intelligently repurpose content and collaborate efficiently across teams.

“We originally managed our content via a Wordpress CMS—or should I say ‘CMSes’?” said one Freeletics digital product manager. “Each language had a separate website, plus its own support center, knowledge base,and blog. That’s a lot of Wordpress sites... Now, we have a simple stack with Contentful on the backend. It’s super easy to maintain.”

As a company’s digital portfolio grows, monolithic CMSes tend to become less stable as hacks and workarounds get added to support new products. Changes to one part of the CMS can easily trigger problems in other areas, and, in the end, developers are needed to publish even the smallest changes.

This overload of complexity runs the constant risk of breaking things, creates content bottlenecks, and is also a huge business risk if the few developers who understand the CMS-specific workarounds leave the company.

Working around an outdated CMS is time consuming, forcing marketing and product development teams to be selective in how they deploy resources.

As developers become focused on keeping the lights on, fewer resources are available to explore new functionalities, implement creative designs and develop proofs of concept.

This manifests as extra time needed to migrate or recreate existing content, time spent researching workarounds or plugins instead of writing clean code, and time wasted while troubleshooting bugs caused by adding new code to a monolithic CMS. Any one of these can add days or weeks to production.

“Contentful is a great fit with our speed-oriented architecture,” said Lukas Edenfelt of TUI Nordic. See how TUI Nordic boosted developer and editorial productivity.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 28% of technology content marketers say content bottlenecks hold up some or most of their projects.

Content bottlenecks are a frustrating sign that your CMS has gone from enabling to inhibiting good content management.

Read the case study on how Trunk Club broke through its content bottleneck.

When legacy CMSes struggle to accommodate growing digital portfolios, content and development workflows become entangled. Instead of working in parallel, content and development teams have to take turns working in the CMS.

Editors need developers to push content changes live, update hard-coded content and create new layouts. Developers can’t easily pull content for new products, waste time on minor but persistent content publishing requests, and get bogged down in managing and troubleshooting the CMS.

Taking a day or more to make updates in a cumbersome CMS might work with one product in one market, but is a completely inefficient workflow when companies need to add multiple products with content that is customized to different devices and localities.

Failure to scale can also occur when the CMS limits developers’ ability to choose the best languages and tools for their projects. Many developers say major CMS platforms are coded in a way that hinders their ability to build applications that scale, according to software engineer Dan Webb, in his blog post on B2Interactive “Framework or CMS better for web development.”

Here’s the good news: there’s a solution to your headache that has the potential to transform your workflows and drastically reduce your time to market.

Contentful can help you with everything from best practices for deploying a quick proof of concept, to building the case for a content platform that can scale. Our intuitive web app and support for popular languages and tools makes it easy to get started for both editors and developers alike.

Contentful is an API-first solution that provides a flexible, modular content platform that easily plugs into the modern technology stack and powers content across a company’s entire digital portfolio from one central hub.

Editors and developers enjoy interfaces that fit their individual work styles, and no longer have to waste time on workflow inefficiencies, freeing them to spend more time focusing on their best work and on ideating the next big thing.

Talk to one of our experts today. Or, learn from other brands that outgrew their CMSes and found a better solution. This white paper offers examples of how companies and agencies are leveraging Contentful to rapidly ship digital products and beat their competitors to market.