Looking for a new Content Management System?

This document will serve as your guide to the evaluation criteria needed to shortlist potential platforms.

As technologies and markets become more crowded, technology buyers need tools to evaluate often complex or confusing offerings. To help you, we’ve highlighted key areas of consideration below.

Content Management

Ease of Use for Creators

Creators are the people across marketing, digital, design, and content who bring digital experiences to life. Democratizing access to publishing tools and removing unnecessary gatekeepers enables you to stay on top of the market and drive growth. Difficult-to-use software limits creator empowerment and creates overhead.

WordPress, for example, is easy to use and ubiquitous, powering more than 40% of the web. It offers the largest ecosystem of prebuilt assets for creators to leverage, including the Gutenberg block editor, which provides easy visual editing.

Developer Community, Tech Partnerships, Plugins, and Extensibility

Choosing from a menu is easier than creating from scratch. Content platforms with extensive communities empower teams to move quickly and save financially. CMSes should give you the flexibility to go from pre-builts to custom assets, ensuring agile delivery without compromising your vision.

Look for a solution that aligns developers and practitioners, making it easy to connect systems and technologies with robust APIs, extensive plugins, and a thriving developer ecosystem. Assess the quantity and quality of local user groups, design agencies, technical documentation, plugins, and integrations.

Developer Flexibility

Aligning developers with content creators increases in complexity as you scale. A platform built on open technology will remove constraints, while those with strong source control will empower your team to create without causing chaos. Combining the best of both worlds empowers developer teams with freedom, flexibility, and security.

Look for vendors that provide both flexibility to code what you need while also the structure to operate large teams in sync—like the strong (and familiar) source control provided by Git. Assess whether their platform includes features built to empower developers, like CLI access.

User Management

Proper publishing workflows and access control are necessary for large organizations—especially regulated ones. APIs should let you easily customize access and workflows to your particular organization at scale.

Look for a solution that supports organizations with tens of thousands of contributors across the globe.

Omnichannel, Decoupled, and Hybrid Delivery

For years, decoupled CMSes were a market by themselves—forcing organizations to use either the intuitive traditional platforms that creators loved, or the decoupled solutions that were more developer friendly. Companies with web-first delivery usually prefer traditional CMS set ups, given their easier editing and preview capabilities, whereas decoupled setups make integrating multiple sources and multiple destinations easier. Today, the advanced platforms offer hybrid solutions, allowing you the flexibility to customize your publishing process.

Look for platforms built to be completely flexible, optimizing content creation and delivery—be it decoupled, traditional, or both. Seek platform features like adaptive media and others that enhance omnichannel delivery to ensure experiences that are consistently fast, beautiful, and high-performing across all channels.

Enterprise Commerce

Commerce and content are the new power couple. Companies are learning that compelling content is driving how consumers buy, engage with products, and stay brand loyal. Commerce stacks are also complex, with a mix of ERPs, WMSes, OMSes, PIMs, and more. Leading platforms simplify implementation, enabling agile deployment without sacrificing customization capabilities.

Look for vendors that have SaaS-like implementation while retaining flexibility and access to code. A strong technical solutions team or systems integrator partnership is a must. Assess the platform’s ability to easily create and tweak content to match your vision while also providing depth of enterprise commerce functionality.

Content Analytics and Optimization

It’s more important than ever to empower your creator teams with data they can use to inform content strategy, optimize performance, and prove how their content drives business growth. Don’t work for your analytics—make your analytics work for you.

Look for vendors that help you understand what drives performance without requiring a dedicated data analyst. Leading vendors provide value-added features such as enterprise search capabilities that can handle data at scale,
and recommendation functionality for driving engagement.

Platform

Infrastructure

Delivering meaningful content to users drives growth—but the infrastructure required doesn’t always scale. Infrastructure costs and limitations can seriously impact the total cost of ownership for your digital presence. Frequent roadblocks for organizations are hosts that can’t handle spikes in traffic, or infrastructure resellers who work in hidden fees and forced upgrades.

Platforms with a cloud-based containerized infrastructure can scale to deliver billions of page views. A priority should be put on vendors with experience working with globally operating clients and a vetted history of performance during high-traffic events. Look for a built-in CDN that caches content globally, not only greatly enhancing delivery speed but also enabling API-driven delivery customization to customer segments.

Platform Management

Managing software upgrades and security patches for a global portfolio quickly becomes complex—and risky—without a dedicated team or partner. Platforms that enable admin users to easily manage hundreds of sites greatly reduce the burden on you, allowing you to focus on critical business initiatives.

Look for a platform with deep ties to WordPress development, offering customers previews of WordPress upgrades months before release. Vendor-managed software upgrades also enable smooth transitions. The platform should reduce the effort involved in managing dozens of websites with a central admin dashboard and CLI access.

Security

Security is often the determining factor in choosing your content platform. When selecting your partner, validate that they have decades of experience with clients similar to yours, established leadership in security, and the means to resolve potential liabilities.

Look for a vendor with acknowledged security leadership, including certifications like FedRAMP, and clients in heavily regulated industries. Features such as automated code scanning catch potential issues long before they reach production.

Business Model & Comprehensive Support

Business Model

How a CMS vendor approaches collaborating with a customer has huge implications on total cost of ownership. Avoiding hidden expenses and software bloat is key.

Look for simple contracts. High traffic should be a cause for celebration, not an opportunity to sneak in overage charges. Consider the advantages of open source software: no license fees and customers own their own code.

Team Alignment

Support makes or breaks a content platform. The best support systems align with your business to understand how you achieve success, offering high-touch, concierge-like support. Often, this is the biggest differentiator between CMS vendors. Many vendors offer great developer support, or great practitioner
support, but few offer both.

Your focus is on your business goals—look for a platform that frees up your time to achieve them. End-to-end consulting includes expert guidance and hands-on partnership every step of the way.

Support Tickets

Customers that choose vendors with sub-par support systems often report issues with plugins or integrations, which may linger for months or result in downtime during a critical business period.

Ensure that your platform partner provides premier expertise on call for customers, with clear escalation for your biggest days. Evaluate whether their support and code scanning can preemptively resolve issues, and that their team doesn’t default to “just throwing more hardware at it.”