6 reasons to prioritize a CMS modernization project in 2025

If you’re like most of our customers, you’re probably in the midst of negotiations with your stakeholders about how to prioritize your technology investments in 2025. 

We know, there are always more systems needing an update than there are dollars to go around, and it can be a circular conversation to decide where to start. 

We’ve helped hundreds of enterprise companies escape clunky, out-of-date and frustrating customer experiences. Most of them started this transformation with their content management system (CMS). 

In fact, MACH Alliance research shows that 49% of organizations are taking over a month to develop a new service or meet a new business requirement. Slow development equals lost business. Which is why organizations adopting composable technology most commonly start their implementation with their operational and customer experience systems, such as CMS. 

There’s a chance you should, too. 

If your website, mobile app or other digital touchpoints are a significant part of your overall customer journey strategy, modernizing your CMS is the single most impactful digital investment you can make in 2025.  

Keep reading to see why.

1. The power of self-service for your marketing team

It’s time to allow marketers and content creators to design, edit and publish without relying on developer support. Investing in self-service capabilities for marketing and digital teams is crucial for businesses to win in 2025. 

A modern CMS should empower business users to manage content without requiring coding skills. Dawn Foods has a "no-coding rule," so business users can easily create and edit content without writing code. 

This allows the business to get more value out of its CMS. Empowering content teams to actually manage content means businesses can reduce reliance on IT teams where it’s not needed, removing bottlenecks and leaving more room for technology teams to focus on big-picture projects. 

A modern CMS will also give your editors tools like Visual Building, allowing for preview and live editing of experiences instead of filling in content forms. This unlocks marketing to both move faster and be more creative in delivering new customer experiences. 

“With Contentstack, we can deliver our content so much faster,” Yana Simanova, Project Lead at FBS Markets Inc said. “We’ve changed our focus from relying on developers to delivering content via the content managers, who are now wholly responsible for content on the website. Before Contentstack, we could only close 26% of requests in a day, and now that percentage is 95%.”

2. Your customers deserve a better digital experience

When asked what drove their decision to modernize their digital experience stack, starting with their CMS, Topgolf Callaway’s Earth Reiser said, “Our e-comm directors, our CMOs, everybody was shouting at the top of their lungs that we couldn't meet their customer as quickly as they needed us to meet them. We couldn't just deploy our front end whenever we wanted to because we had to deploy our back end at the same time. So, all those common things that I hear everywhere I've ever been, are challenges for e-commerce business managers. So that is really what started pushing us in this direction — how do we empower the leaders of our brands to better meet their consumers?”

It’s not feasible to deliver an up-to-date customer experience when your content management system creates roadblocks to updating your content across all channels. 

By modernizing their CMS, our customers have seen incredible CX results, like: 

• Mattel’s 9.5x increase in mobile conversions
• Ello Group’s 70% improvement in site performance, and 
• Air France KLM’s 20% decrease in service line calls.

But don’t just take our word for it — 87% of IT enterprise leaders state that composable technology has been very or quite important in helping their organization meet customer expectations in recent years.

3. Unlock innovation in your digital experience (or else)

In a recent MACH Alliance survey, 90% of global IT leaders said, “Organizations who do not innovate now will be left behind.”

Let’s face reality: Every brand is at risk of digital disruption. 

• 20% of the world’s top brands lost value in 2023, and 
• Consumers wouldn’t care if 75% of brands disappeared

You can be part of the brands that matter, but you need to be able to innovate quickly and at scale to meet customers’ demands for digital experiences that are truly differentiated. 

So, how does a modern CMS unlock digital innovation? We’re glad you asked. A modern CMS decouples back-end content from front-end presentation and its API-first approach enables:

• Omnichannel content delivery via a single source of truth for any digital platform, including new and unprecedented channels (mobile apps, messaging apps, IoT devices, etc.).
• Rapid prototyping and experimentation that can be easily pushed to production without overhauling the entire content infrastructure.
• Agile content operations so teams can react to customer and market dynamics without getting stuck in lengthy content updates and campaign launch cycles.

And, depending on the solution, a modern CMS can provide much more than just content and presentation layer decoupling — think AI, automation, personalization and whatever else your marketing team may dream up next.

4. Scale and efficiency with AI + automation 

AI is transforming the way businesses create and manage content. 56% of content marketers indicate that AI-powered automation will be a high or medium priority in 2025. 

And that doesn’t mean creating mediocre, generic, genAI content that includes the word “evolving” in every sentence. 

Our customers have been unlocking growth with AI in a variety of powerful ways:

• AI-assisted content production: AI can speed up content production time by creating content briefs or first drafts for review. Our customer, Golfbreaks, has seen a 78% increase in time to market as a result of leveraging AI to create golf course descriptions, which humans then refine before teeing off (being published).
• AI and automation for publishing and migration: When AI combines with automation, you can speed up processes that would otherwise take hours of tedious work. In a recent webinar, our customer MongoDB shared how leveraging AI plus automation to migrate data across stacks saved the team 2 hours per 25-page batch.
• AI can be more reliable than a human for repetitive tasks: AI can also assist with tasks like SEO tagging, brand guideline adherence and accessibility compliance. In many cases, AI will perform these tasks in a more reliable way than a human can and will free up humans to work on more strategic challenges.

5. Outpace the competition by eliminating vendor lock-in (and reduce costs)

Eliminating vendor lock-in is critical for businesses aiming to thrive in 2025 and beyond. Traditional, monolithic CMS platforms often restrict flexibility, making it challenging to adopt best-fit solutions or pivot to new technologies. 

By embracing composable architectures, companies unlock the freedom to innovate and reduce costs. 

Here’s how:

• By avoiding costly upgrades: Organizations with over 75% legacy systems spend 71% of their IT budgets on upgrades instead of innovation.
• By breaking free from rigid ecosystems: Larger vendors, like Adobe, offer integrations only when their entire suite of products is used, limiting flexibility and making it costly to transition.
• By adopting best-fit solutions: Composable architectures allow companies to choose the technologies that best suit their needs and easily incorporate new tools as they emerge.

Composable CMS architectures also give businesses a competitive edge:

By adopting composable technologies, companies can quickly integrate emerging tools, adapt to trends and lead in their industries.

• 80% of companies with composable front-end infrastructures believe they are ahead of their competitors.

• 83% of organizations implementing composable technology report clear ROI.

Reckitt saved 20% in build time and cut costs by over 50% after transitioning to a global, headless CMS platform with Contentstack. This approach also enabled Reckitt to launch new websites faster and at scale, further enhancing cost efficiency.

6. Unlock A/B testing and personalization

“Thanks to Contentstack’s Modular Blocks, we’ve really upped our game when it comes to personalization." — Richard Bilton, Director of Technology at Leesa Sleep 

Year after year, research shows personalization is a top priority for B2B and B2C CMOs. Yet, nearly 50% of online consumers wish brands would do a better job of personalization. 

We believe the reason for this delta is that personalization is tied up by one or two technological pitfalls: 

1. It’s either too difficult to set up and use by marketing teams, requiring complex development cycles (this is often the case in legacy monolithic DXP suites), or 
2. Brands are using a bolted-on solution bought separately from a CMS, and therefore not content-aware nor intuitive to use. 

Personalization is, at its core, content, and a content management system is the best place for personalization to natively live. 

A modern CMS will allow you to integrate a personalization solution fully. Or, even better, it can have personalization functionality natively built in, like Contentstack Personalize. 

It’s time to reimagine possible

Reimagine what's possible for your brand in 2025 with a modern CMS that empowers teams, delights customers and drives innovation at scale. 

From unlocking self-service and AI-driven efficiency to breaking free from vendor lock-in and delivering truly personalized experiences, the right CMS is your gateway to digital transformation.

Don’t let outdated systems hold you back. Request a demo today and see how you can outpace the competition and redefine customer experiences in the year ahead. 

The future starts now — let’s make it remarkable.