The Top 10 Qualities of a Future-Proof Enterprise Web CMS

Ignoring security can have serious consequences for an enterprise. Therefore it’s vital to make security a priority when developing and maintaining your websites and online applications. Major technology providers such as AWS continue to lead innovation providing new and effective ways to make security less of a challenge, such as their development of serverless technology removing the management of servers from the mix which presents many risks and security challenges.

Prepare for the worst, expect the best - it also fits the digital strategy. Thinking about your websites you may expect that there will be thousands of people visiting it, but what if there is an amazing viral campaign and you’re flooded with millions of users at the same time? When searching for the best solution, always ask about the abilities and don’t believe those who would say that once the traffic grows, they could increase the capacity. It sounds like “we will do it too late”. Scalability should work within a blink of an eye, with no involvement on your side.

For web performance, which means the time of loading a webpage on a user’s device, every millisecond counts. We’re all fighting for the attention of new users who are constantly served with new distractions, that’s why the speed of your website or application should be a key priority. If your site doesn’t respond quickly, you can be sure you’ll lose potential customers which will impact your bottom line. Every delay in loading information, images, movies, or web forms might cost you conversions. So the hosting technology that allows you to ensure the highest speed possible is a must.

Even short breaks in the availability of your web service or a landing page for a huge sponsored campaign can have an impact on your brand’s reliability. The service should be available 24/7, with full support. Like a cloud that is spread all around the world with multiple places where backups of your data are stored and can be quickly displayed - no matter how far away the end device is.

System administrators and webmasters know that managing a traditional CMS can be very time-consuming. The maintenance costs behind a legacy system are a major cost driver. Whether it is an open-source CMS or a commercial content management system: The initial costs are often just a fraction of what needs to be invested over the life cycle of the CMS. The total cost of ownership (TCO) to keep the CMS up and running is the main burden over time.

Modern websites almost always need to be integrated with other systems such as ERP or CRM in order to have the required information available and provide it to the customer in a user-friendly, orderly way. In enterprises, usually, a large number of systems need to be connected. Integrations are critical because clients expect a seamless experience when they interact with all systems of a single brand, and they want to be able to perform all the tasks quickly and easily.

The usability of many traditional CMSs is poor. Some systems are even inoperable from the user’s point of view. This starts a downward spiral: The more difficult it is to use the CMS, the less it is actually used, quickly leading to outdated content on your websites. Intermittent use results in users getting out of practice. Time-consuming and cost-intensive training is unhelpful if the user only occasionally works with the CMS or if its complexity requires insider knowledge that is often poorly documented.

Managing content with the legacy approach, whether by means of open-source or commercial enterprise CMSs, is typically confined to pre-defined templates and limited structures. Changes are slow and expensive to implement. Some popular web CMSs cannot even run more than one website efficiently. Typically, this results in multiple CMS installations. At best, these are varying releases and versions only. At worst, there are many different CMS platforms. In reality, we have observed that some enterprises use more than 10 different CMSs.

In today’s world reacting to market changes quickly is what can help you gain an advantage over the competition, and the internet is the place where it’s visible the most. One of the things that can significantly slow you down or even stop you is poor support for your CMS. It is very frustrating to wait for weeks to have an issue solved. With open-source systems, employees often need to spend days reading through tons of forum posts to find anything helpful due to poor documentation. With leading enterprise service providers, on the other hand, it usually takes days from opening a ticket to just finding the right person to understand the issue and sometimes months to have a solution or fix implemented.

In many CMSs all editors can autonomously publish their work, making their changes visible to the world. This can be acceptable for smaller organizations where only a few people can do content maintenance tasks. Enterprises offering a diverse spectrum of information to their website visitors, however, might rather want to be able to restrict publishing content to specialists in order to preserve the quality and integrity of their content, especially when legal or reputational risk is high.

Website content that is legally binding, corporate-identity-related, or mission-critical with respect to marketing or sales matters should be subject to stricter rules regarding quality control, approving, and publishing compared to short-living daily news, for example. An enterprise CMS must allow you to set up rules reflecting your business procedures in which the production of content plays a central role.