The State of CMS in 2024

Introduction

Written by codedusting on September 16, 2024

Updated by codedusting on September 17, 2024

A Content Management System (CMS) is a software application that enables users to create, edit, organize, and publish digital content. In 2024, the CMS landscape has evolved significantly, with a plethora of options available to cater to diverse needs and use cases. This report aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of four popular CMS options: Contentful, BuilderIO, Prismic, Strapi, and Payload CMS.

Problems with traditional CMS

The fundamental problem with traditional CMSes can be categorised based on two teams:

Development team

  • Customization Limitations: While WordPress offers numerous plugins and themes, heavily customizing it often requires significant coding. Developers might find it restrictive for projects that demand more unique or complex functionality.

  • Performance Issues: WordPress can become slow, especially with many plugins or heavy themes. Optimizing it for speed and performance can be challenging.

  • Security Concerns: Due to its popularity, WordPress is a common target for hackers. Keeping plugins, themes, and core files up-to-date is essential, but vulnerabilities still arise.

  • Code Bloat: WordPress includes many features by default, even if they aren’t needed, which can result in unnecessary code bloat. Developers often need to strip out or disable features, increasing their workload.

  • Plugin Dependencies: Relying on third-party plugins can cause compatibility issues, making updates and maintenance more cumbersome. Developers need to ensure that these plugins don’t conflict or break the site after updates.

  • Scalability Issues: For large-scale websites or applications, WordPress may struggle to scale effectively without extensive optimization.

  • Monolithic Architecture: Traditional CMS like WordPress have a tightly-coupled architecture (front-end and back-end are interconnected), making it less suitable for modern, decoupled (headless) CMS architectures that developers may prefer.

Marketing team

  • Dependence on Developers: While WordPress offers a user-friendly interface, more advanced customizations (such as creating new landing pages, A/B testing, or complex SEO changes) often require developer involvement. This slows down marketing agility.

  • Limited Personalization: Traditional CMS systems like WordPress can be less flexible in delivering personalized content, especially in real-time. Marketing teams might want dynamic content based on user behavior, but WordPress may struggle without extensive custom development or plugins.

  • SEO Challenges: Although WordPress has SEO plugins, it’s not always easy to implement more advanced SEO strategies without coding. Additionally, performance issues (like slow load times) can negatively impact SEO rankings.

  • Analytics and Integrations: WordPress does not offer robust, built-in analytics. Marketing teams often need to integrate third-party tools like Google Analytics, which can be challenging to fully customize without technical knowledge.

  • Content Scheduling and Workflow: WordPress’s content management and editorial workflow features can be somewhat basic for larger organizations with more complex approval processes or content strategies. Managing content schedules and ensuring team collaboration may require additional tools or plugins.

  • Mobile Optimization: While WordPress offers mobile-responsive themes, some of them may not be optimized perfectly for mobile devices, requiring extra adjustments. Marketing teams focused on mobile-first strategies might find this frustrating.

  • Plugin Overload: Relying on multiple plugins to achieve marketing goals (e.g., for SEO, forms, analytics) can lead to performance issues or conflicting plugin updates, making it harder for marketing teams to maintain a smooth workflow.

Types of CMS

In terms of rigidity

CMS solutions can be broadly categorized into three types based on their features and capabilities:

1. Structured Data CMS

These CMS solutions focus on managing structured data, such as text, images, and metadata. They provide a robust data model, schema management, and data validation capabilities.

This is best for:

  • Static Blogs with pre-defined structure and design.
  • Navigation Links
  • Product information with pre-defined set of information to be displayed in a fixed design format.

2. Component Composition CMS

These CMS solutions enable users to create and manage content by composing reusable components. This approach allows for greater flexibility and customization, making it ideal for complex, dynamic content scenarios.

This is best for:

  • Homepage
  • Product Editorial
  • Collection Pages

3. No-Code Editing CMS

These CMS solutions provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface for creating and editing content, eliminating the need for coding skills.

This is best for:

  • Landing Pages
  • Promotional Sections
  • Announcement bars

In terms of ease of editing

There are 4 different types of CMS editing approaches in 2024: #### 1. Structured Data - Visual Editing - Visual Live Preview #### 2. Drag and Drop - Visual Component Composition - Visual No Code

Evaluation Criteria

For this comparison, we will focus on the following key criteria:

  1. Marketing Team Independence: Can the marketing team work independently of the developer team once the initial development work is completed?
  2. Content Creation and Editing: How easy is it for non-technical users to create and edit content?
  3. Page Creation and Publishing: Can new pages be created and published without involving developers?
  4. Integration with Next.js: How seamlessly does the CMS integrate with Next.js?

In the following sections, we will evaluate each CMS solution based on these criteria, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.