Your CMS keeps pumping pages like a champ. Your team keeps asking for more, as if the site should behave like an app and remember every visit.
That gap between what a CMS does and what people expect is the story of the year. We are moving from a world of pages to a world of experience platforms, where content meets data, journeys, and constant change.
Marketers want personalization that is more than a hello by first name. Product and growth teams want quick tests across web, email, and push. Dev teams are knee deep in React, Vue, and serverless. The old box that publishes articles is still needed, yet it is not the whole picture anymore.
Meanwhile, the tooling race is crazy. Adobe is pushing Experience Cloud, Sitecore keeps knitting content with marketing tools, Acquia is talking about journeys on top of Drupal, and WordPress keeps extending with APIs and a plug everything mindset. React is about to land a big upgrade, AMP keeps spreading, and chatbots are trying to find a real job. It is a good time to make a call on what you build next.
Why the humble CMS feels too small now
The web changed shape. People swipe and expect things to be fast, personal, and consistent across phone, laptop, and inbox. Your audience has learned this from Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and the apps that greet them by name and pick up where they left off. The old publish and pray playbook is out of date.
A classic CMS shines at authoring, templating, roles, media, and publishing. That still matters. What is new is the need to connect content with customer data, with journeys that cross channels, with testing built in, and with experiences that update without a full page refresh. Think single page apps, service workers, and content delivered to apps that are not even your site.
Search does not go away, actually it gets tougher. Mobile results, AMP, featured snippets, voice queries, and local packs all change the rules. A digital experience platform is not a magic wand for SEO, but it does make it easier to structure content, serve it fast, and match intent with the right message at the right moment. That mix is where growth happens.
The decision tree: suite, stack, or headless
You have three broad paths in front of you. None is perfect. Pick based on your team, goals, and runway, not on a glossy deck.
Option 1: The all in one suite
Think Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Oracle CX, or cousins. You get authoring, targeting, analytics, forms, media, and more in one box, with a path into email and ads.
Good fit when:
- You already run paid media at scale and need content and audiences to talk to each other.
- You have budget for licenses and for a partner to help you set things up the right way.
- Your team wants one vendor to call when things go sideways at 3 a.m.
Tradeoffs:
- Cost, both now and later. The sticker price is only the start. People, training, and custom work add up.
- Speed of change. New features come on the vendor clock, not yours. You may wait for basic upgrades.
- Lock in. Moving out later is painful, so be sure the path matches your next two years, not just your next quarter.
Option 2: The build your own stack
Pick a core CMS like WordPress or Drupal, then add analytics, testing, email, search, and data pipes with best of breed tools. Think Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Segment, Optimizely, VWO, Algolia or Elastic for search, MailChimp or SendGrid for email, Zendesk for support, and your favorite ad pixels.
Good fit when:
- Your team likes to assemble tools and can own the glue work.
- You want to ship fast, learn, and swap pieces without asking a vendor for permission.
- Budget prefers smaller monthly fees instead of a huge yearly bill.
Tradeoffs:
- Glue code. Someone must connect systems, name events, and keep tags tidy.
- Governance. Without clear rules, tracking turns into spaghetti and reports stop matching.
- Support. When things break, you are the help desk, unless you bring a partner who owns the stack with you.
Option 3: Headless to the front
Use a headless CMS like Contentful or Prismic, or run Drupal or WordPress in headless mode with their APIs. Your site or app pulls content over APIs, and you render with React, Vue, or Angular. Great for mobile apps, multi channel use, and performance gains through a modern front end.
Good fit when:
- You want one content hub that feeds web, mobile, email, and maybe a kiosk or connected screen.
- Your dev team is strong in JavaScript and wants to control the front end experience.
- You need a fast site with smooth transitions and fine control over state, caching, and data fetches.
Tradeoffs:
- Authoring UX. Editors often miss classic preview and page feel, unless you build it for them.
- SEO and tracking. Server side rendering, pre render, and careful event naming are must haves.
- Extra services. Media, search, forms, and auth move outside the CMS, so plan where they live.
The real costs they do not put on the brochure
There is no free lunch. The price you pay shows up in org charts and in roadmaps as much as in invoices.
Team shape. Suites lean on certified partners and enterprise workflows. Stacks need a product owner who loves glue work. Headless needs front end minds who can ship and measure. Hire for the path you pick, not for the path you left.
Data quality. Everyone wants a single view of the customer. The tough part is naming events, mapping IDs, and keeping consent in check. Tools like Segment or mParticle help, yet they do not fix messy thinking. Write a tracking plan, keep it short, and protect it like your brand guide.
Governance. Content models start simple and drift. Someone needs to say no. Decide who owns fields, taxonomies, and editorial rules. Short names, clear descriptions, and a clean content tree save hours of pain later.
Performance. Fancy front ends can crawl if you forget basics. Render fast, cache smart, ship small bundles, and keep images in check. AMP can be a useful boost for some pages, just do not forget the rest of the site.
Privacy and consent. New rules are coming in Europe, cookies are under fire, and browsers keep tightening. Build consent flows now, label events, and make deletion a real feature. Future you will thank present you.
Vendor exits. Migrations are hard. Before you sign or deploy, write the exit plan on one page. How do we get content out, assets out, and identities out. If you cannot answer that, you are not buying a tool, you are renting your future.
How to move in the next twelve months
Here is a simple path that works across sizes, from startup to big brand.
- Start with outcomes. Pick three user moments you want to improve. Example, first visit from mobile search, returning visit from email, cart recovery on desktop.
- Audit the content model. Name the content types that support those moments, list the fields, and note what is missing. Treat content like data, not blobs.
- Map your signals. Define the events you need, where they fire, and who can see them. Keep the names human.
- Choose your path. Suite, stack, or headless, pick one, and commit for at least a year. The worst plan is half a suite, half a stack, and no owner.
- Build the loop. You need a test tool, a way to store audiences, and a way to send messages. Do small tests every week, not a giant launch every quarter.
- Train the editors. The best platform loses to a bored team. Give editors a playbook, hotkeys, and a weekly office hour where devs answer questions.
If you are on WordPress and want a taste of experience features, start with a clean theme, a schema friendly SEO plugin, server caching, a simple A B testing tool, and a tag manager with a written plan. If you want more control, run WordPress as a content hub and let a React or Vue front end read from the REST API. If you prefer one box with a phone number, talk to suite vendors and ask to see real authoring and real data flows live, not slides.
Signals from the market right now
React is getting a big update that will help performance for apps that live long in the browser. Vue keeps gaining fans for its light mental load. Angular keeps winning in places that want structure out of the box. On the content side, the headless crew grows fast, and traditional CMS tools are racing to offer APIs and better editorial UX.
Apple has an event next week and new phones tend to push the bar for mobile speed and graphics. That will raise user expectations yet again. Facebook keeps pushing instant formats, Google is all in on AMP, and email keeps being the quiet workhorse for revenue. Experience platforms make it easier to treat all of this as one connected effort instead of ten disconnected tasks.
Quick quiz. If a user reads a blog post from search on mobile, clicks a content upgrade, gets an email, returns on desktop, and then sees a tailored homepage, can your stack handle that without a manual CSV. If the answer is no, you have your next project.
A reflective close
The move from CMS to experience platform is not about buzzwords. It is about respect for the people who use our sites. They want speed, relevance, and a sense that we remember them. Whether you pick a suite, a stack, or headless, the win is the same, clearer goals, cleaner content, sharper data, and teams that can ship without fear.
Pages still matter. What changes is what sits around them, how they talk to data and devices, and how quickly they adapt. If we get that right, the tools fade into the background and the work shines. That is the point of this shift, not more software, but better experiences for the people we are lucky to serve.