CMS in Today's Digital Landscape and How We Could Deliver Content in The Light of The Channels Explosion

CMS or Content Managent System has taken significant parts in building digital experiences. What is CMS? CMS serves as a web-based content management application to organize data or information and modify web pages. Its presence is beneficial since content plays a critical role in luring traffic, and hence brands would need to keep their content updated and credible to the visitors. I'm sharing my this-far takeaways about CMS as I have been updating websites recently with the adoption of headless CMS, in which we'll go further in a bit.

Historically, CMS gained fame when the need for functionality to edit web pages rather than the manual management of HTML files. Since the mid-to-late 90s, CMS has transformed from the early tools like ColdFusion, which came with the ability to serve dynamic content from a database. In the recent decade, we have seen a rising number of full-featured applications, like Drupal and WordPress, appearing on the market.

The "Monolithic" CMS

The adoption of monolithic CMS applications like WordPress has been rising due to the resulting digital experiences of the early 2010s. As recent statistics from W3Techs reported, WordPress is used by around 42% of all the websites, accounting for more than 65% of the current CMS market share. That said, the usage of WordPress is still high compared to Shopify, an emerging e-commerce platform-first CMS, which comes up after with only around 5.7% market share. In another recent report, global web content management tools accounted for $4.9 billion in 2017 and could reach $14.2 billion globally by 2024.

Below are percentages of websites using various content management systems, by W3Techs.com.

In light of this historical context, where in the world of CMS headed in the future? And how could marketers and other business users keep building and maintaining good customer journeys to preserve and expand business? We will take a look together.

The Advent of Headless CMS

In more recent years, a significant trend is occurring in web CMS in response to the rising omnichannel needs. The way people manage and store content impacts overall web and app performance, especially conversion and accessibility. For this reason, players in web development and digital marketing have been looking for a much easier experience to make and deliver content, which we will get into in a bit.


Marketers and developers now look for more convenient digital solutions that offer scalability while mastering new channels to interact with the audience. Classic or coupled CMS — like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Shopify, etc. — offer easy and user-friendly layouts and general functionality. However, these solutions are typically less flexible when there is a need to integrate new delivery formats or channels. Flexibility and scalability are critical in response to the "channels explosion" we see today. The number of available channels has been rising exponentially in the last decade. Specifically, it means that there's no more only one place for our content to go in today's digital landscape. We have to prepare content for more than ever channels such as voice interfaces, AR/VR devices, and an array of others in addition to the web.

Due to these challenges, more and more businesses and developers would need to opt for "headless" or decoupled CMS. Headless CMS has steadily gained adoption, substituting more full-featured CMS like Drupal and WordPress. Headless CMS brings favors with the flexibility it offers in technology alignment to content management needs and requirements. To be simple, a headless CMS is an application that focuses only on managing content and providing a way for clients to retrieve it, enabling more specialized applications to display the content. 

Headless CMS over Classic CMS

The classic monolithic CMS is usually attached to a site builder to work, which is less suitable to the growing number of marketing channels and touchpoints. Unfortunately, many marketers and other business users, who are used to be working with classic CMS, might not see how they can get involved with the advent of headless CMS. The problem that causes this might be the initial values that the Headless CMS campaigns positioned. It was primarily campaigned to developers, leaving out the business users.

Marketers or other business users should go with headless CMS. Going headless can be significant as it allows users to develop integrated and personalized digital experiences whether a lead is interacting via mobile device, desktop computer, voice assistants, a marketplace, or pretty much anywhere else. Furthermore, it helps when developers would need to maintain your front-end systems as headless CMS enables them to switch between technologies while you are running campaigns. This flexibility helps future-proof both your content and in a way that a classic CMS doesn't offer.


Another point that could be more difficult to manage while making content without a headless CMS is marketing consistency, which takes part in consumer engagement amidst rising omnichannel marketing. Specifically, inconsistency in messaging can shatter trustworthy of a brand. A headless solution will enable content makers to manage and build trust optimally with their consumers through consistent content. The flexibilities a headless CMS brings could prepare site owners to scale their sites and make more interactive digital experiences for users.

After all, headless CMS is not a one-size-fits-all solution, it is critical to consider and evaluate not only the content type and suitable channels, but most importantly, what it takes for long-term maintenance.

Thanks for reading!