When Your CMS Is Choking Your Innovation

A CMS should help boost your creativity, not stifle it. Ensuring your content reaches as many of the right people as possible, a good content management system will also support new ideas and approaches. At its best, a CMS is a catalyst for innovation.

So what happens when it’s doing the opposite? How can you fix a CMS that’s choking innovation and keeping your digital experiences from reaching their full potential?

Take advantage of the digital transformation and future proof your digital experiences:

Prioritize Flexibility

A CMS doesn’t need to offer all the functions in the universe. What’s far more important is that it can connect to third party solutions through APIs. This way, you can add or remove innovative features from a much vaster and arguably superior pool of best of breed vendors.

Flexibility also means having the opportunity to get on with daily tasks without involving developers. A flexible CMS will allow you to make a landing page, or change the formatting of a page, without the need for hands on help from the techies.

Read more: How to optimize your website user experience in 3 steps »

Make It Open Source

When researching a new CMS, ask yourself whether it should be open source. This means that the source code is open and free to be edited by anyone.

In general, open source is good news for developers, as it allows for the steady development of new code that improves the functionality of the CMS.

The result is more frequent releases, as well as increased safety thanks to higher transparency. This makes it easier for developers to review the code quality.

Choose Modular Architecture

A good CMS is like Legos. Its modular nature should make modifying and customizing your projects a breeze.

With plugins, themes, or even microservices acting like building blocks, you can add or remove elements according to your exact needs.

Have you found that a project didn’t work and is draining resources? Remove the module that’s responsible. Have a great idea for improving your digital experiences? Add another building block.

A flexible modular architecture should easily accommodate these changes without any risk to the rest of the structure.

Read more: 8 reasons why your digital projects are slow »

Improve Performance

A slow, tedious, and unreliable CMS is any content editor's worst nightmare. To get rid of this particular stranglehold, you should first weigh two options against each other: Acquiring a new CMS vs. improving the old.

In this section we focus on the latter.

First off, you should get your developers to look into and optimize the current technical solution. Maybe the setup years ago was rushed, maybe a software update is overdue, maybe some code has been moved by accident.

Figure it out together with your developers, and hopefully you'll optimize performance in the process.

Read more: How to convince your developers to change CMS »

Tuning the database at the same time may also speed things up, as well as identifying decelerating factors in the CMS, like plugins and custom code that slow everything down.

Another tip is to invest in a new, faster server. Software can do only so much. If the hardware is struggling like a broken down old car, you should change it.

Finally, maybe something non technical can do the trick: Have you considered changing your workflow routines? Maybe it isn't the CMS. Maybe it's you and your archaic, lazy ways.

Don't shoot me down if this is plain wrong. It's just a suggestion to review your work process.

Pick Modern Tech

Performance won't help if the system is completely clunky and outdated. This might be the biggest barrier to digital innovation.

While your CMS doesn’t need to be fitted out with every feature imaginable, it does need to have all the capabilities your developers require to do their job, now and in the near future. Like open APIs, flexibility, and support to mention a few.

An innovation platform might be the place to start in this ambitious endeavor.

Make Innovation a Goal for Everyone

Speaking of innovation, it should be on everybody’s priority list—stakeholders and developers alike. After all, it’s only when an entire team looks towards the future that the magic really happens.

To ensure you have the budget, resources, and support you need to accelerate new ideas and approaches, make sure you keep digital innovation at the top of your organization’s agenda.

Sometimes the most innovative ideas are the wildest, but they still rely on a solid foundation to turn them into a reality. A great CMS is flexible, modular, open source and modern. In other words, it’s a future proof architecture designed to support innovation from every level of your organization.

First published 22 August 2018, updated 18 December 2023.