When is a good time to reboot your web operations?

At what point should you start anew and reconsider your organization’s web presence and digital operations? Are there surefire signs of when you should reboot, like organizational decay, revenue loss, and inability to retain talents?

Let’s take a closer look.

But first, make sure you choose the right CMS with our checklist:

What is a reboot?

Rebooting your digital operations doesn’t necessarily involve investing in new software, scrapping the old, and spending time and resources on teaching yourself the new solution. A reboot can simply mean a new method within your existing framework—i.e. doing more with the measures you already have.

A reboot will most likely involve your organization building or buying a new solution, acquiring new talents, or implementing a new work method. But when is it optimal to perform such transformation?

Changing organizational structure

One reason to initiate a reboot of your web operations is organizational in nature. Your organization is not a static entity—it may evolve due to changing circumstances like anything else.

If the C-suite, board, or leadership in your organization has decided to scale up from business as usual to investing in growth, this may be a good time to assess your current digital tools, CMS, and content platform.

But the time may be ripe even if the organization as a whole isn’t changing. If you have brought onboard new colleagues with new ideas, this might also be an excellent opportunity to evaluate your current state and suggest a smaller reboot to your superiors.

Start anew with the best: How to build a fast and modern site with Next.js and headless CMS »

Changing product offering

A day may come when your organization enacts a major change to its portfolio of products or services. If the change is big enough, it might justify a restructuring of your web operations.

For example: An insurance company only delivers travel insurances. After undergoing an M&A with another company, the company now also sells car insurance. This places a larger responsibility on how the website is structured. It may lead to building more services, thus demanding a larger team, and it might therefore be a good time to reboot your web operations.

Changing the business model

Introducing new products and services aren’t always enough or the right way forward for a business. While not as drastic as a major organizational change, changing the business model may nonetheless be the perfect opportunity to start fresh in your digital operations.

An example on a changing business model may be a company going from a traditional to a digital customer journey. Moving away from physical advertisements and cold calls, a customer journey with more digital touchpoints will demand more technical resources to build and handle the required solutions.

More digital touchpoints across the entire journey means that an increasing amount of your organization is becoming digital. You are in fact becoming more like a tech company, and this might prove a golden opportunity to ramp up your digital platform.

Changing the brand profile

Everyone needs a fresh makeover once in a while—whether it’s buying new clothes, getting a new haircut, or, in the case of businesses, changing their brand profile.

Redesigning and rebranding your organization lead to rebuilding the templating framework, content, and structure of your digital experiences. This vital phase makes it possible to perform a major transformation. As you’re essentially scrapping many of the old visuals and codes, it might be prime time to choose a more future-proof platform—and maybe a design system as well?

Changing outdated CMS

When your organization is growing steadily, your products are selling like hotcakes, and your brand is stronger than ever, the time to reboot your web operations may simply be due to your poor, old CMS.

The business may be going well at the moment and in the immediate future, but when your CMS is ultimately choking your innovation, it is high time to look on the fiery relationship between innovation vs. maintenance.

Every second spent on technical debt and legacy solutions is a second lost to the innovative research and work preparing your organization for tomorrow’s market. If your CMS is inflexible, closed source, monolithic, and relies on old technologies, it may be overdue to turbo-boost your web operations with a new solution.

We're rebooting as well: Why we are building our new website with Next.js and headless CMS »

Changing needs for skill sets

If your current platform is so antique that talents with the necessary skills are increasingly difficult to find and recruit, it might be a good time to reboot your web operations. 

Adobe ColdFusion is an example of a web application development platform where it is difficult to attain talents with the right skill set today. While such platforms may indeed deliver the goods, the times have moved on and so should you.

Web operations today are dependent on being available on several channels—like mobile apps—in addition to websites. This, in turn, demands that you manage more solutions and platforms than before, which consequently requires the right skills.

Again, this may prove to be a great opportunity to reboot, and in this particular case, a next-gen headless CMS might be the answer to the multichannel challenge.

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Today, market and IT departments face more demands than ever to make changes faster and keep up with the current development. Be sure to identify the signals to when it’s a good time to reboot your web operations and be sure to pick an agile solution, suited for the digital world of tomorrow.

First published 26 June 2019, updated 4 October 2022.