What you need to know about CMS statistics in 2024

Many of today’s content management systems (CMS) aren’t living up to companies and customers' expectations around the digital experience. This statement was confirmed by a recent Hygraph survey.

We asked 400 technology leaders about the state of the CMS in their companies and their pain points to examine how to future-proof content management for organizations. According to the survey, 84% feel their CMS is keeping the organization from unlocking the full value of content.

Looking forward, there's a growing need for a CMS that effortlessly blends data from diverse sources and delivers it across every channel. Throughout this article, we'll examine the survey statistics, uncover CMS's top trends for 2024 and beyond, and talk about how to mitigate future risks.

#Top reported CMS challenges

• Over 8 in 10 respondents feel their current CMS is holding them back.

According to our survey, most companies are not satisfied with their current CMS, saying that it prevents their organization from unlocking the value of content and data by “a lot” (40%) or “somewhat” (44%).

With the wave of digital transformation, customers expect a more refined digital experience. Content is therefore expected to be more dynamic and relevant as the main pillar of communication. The CMS should therefore unlock the potential of content, not the other way around.

• The top reported CMS challenges are: Changes being limited by a small number of people (46%), difficulty adding new data and content types (40%), and difficulty integrating the CMS with other systems (36%).

So, what’s getting in the way of content management? When digging deeper to see what exact challenges companies are facing, statistics show a connection between operational difficulty and limited technology.

It's not surprising that the biggest challenge is that the ability to make changes is often limited to a small number of people. It happens especially when the CMS requires technical expertise, making it difficult for content editors to perform their jobs effectively or when there is a need for the development team to be involved. This means either your development team must dedicate time to content, sacrificing time for innovation, or team collaboration will suffer.

According to a Hygraph study by CMS experts, tech leaders recognize the importance of having potent content tools to unlock creativity. “We need to see the tools we use for content as enablers and technology that can set our creativity free.”, said Ola Linder, Head of Marketing at SQLI Nordics.

“In response to the evolution of content in eCommerce, content management's focus is shifting toward creating contextually adaptive content systems. These systems aim to store and generate content that adapts to different contexts, audiences, and personas.” Mark Lorenz, eCommerce Consultant from datrycs.

#The rising issue with content silos

• 9 out of 10 respondents considered their organization’s content to be siloed.

Further breaking down the CMS challenges, since difficulty adding new data and content types was among the top 3 reported issues, it raises concern about how effectively content is used by organizations. The statistics on content silos reflect this concern.

Content silos refer to content pieces isolated across different content management systems and storage databases. Silos typically arise from poor content structure or technical limitations that prevent them from communicating with other systems that are part of a larger technology stack. This results in editors having to manually enter data into other systems.

• 92% of respondents saying that it was a challenge to keep different data and content types consistent.

Content silos do not only require more time for editors to add and update content. They also raise problems with consistency. When content is created independently, it can lead to discrepancies in tone, style, imagery, and accuracy. As a result, the company suffers damage to its identity and the customer experience.

• 64% of respondents said it was difficult to reuse the content that lives in their CMS.

The difficulty off reusing content often arises due to CMS platforms lacking structured content capabilities or having poor content relationships, hindering efficient content reuse and repurposing efforts.

#Disadvantages of CMS integration & middleware

• Nearly 9 in 10 people said that managing integrations and middleware was an innovation bottleneck, and over half stated that their current CMS prevented them from bringing new services to market quickly.

Companies often rely on integrations and middleware to augment functionalities lacking in their CMS. However, this now seems to be causing bottlenecks in innovation. While integrations bridge gaps, they can also slow operations, consume development resources, and hinder time-to-market.

This trade-off is highlighted by advanced technologies such as headless CMSs, which allow functions like App Fameworks to create custom apps or extensions within the CMS environment, rather than connecting external systems, risking complexity and maintenance overhead.

• 17% went as far as saying that their existing CMS was ineffective in creating new and complex digital services.

Innovation bottlenecks directly impact the development of digital services. The more time you spend on CMS connectivity, the less room for innovation there will be.

#Driving revenue growth with content

• 77% of all respondents agreed that the difficulty of exposing data and content restricted the revenue opportunity of their organization.

It goes without saying that if you are not maximizing your content's potential, you are not growing your revenue either. If you have trouble managing data and content in today's world of omnichannel content delivery, your revenue growth will suffer.

• 74% of respondents agreed that improving the ability to expose data and content would significantly reduce operational costs.

In the absence of structured content, updating content may take extensive manual effort and testing across multiple channels, which involves a greater number of stakeholders.

Based on the survey findings, there's a pressing demand for organizations to enhance their capacity to expose data and content, which could lead to substantial reductions in operational expenses. Using best-of-breed technologies to ensure scalability and high performance can result in as much as two times increase in sales, as demonstrated by online home decor brand Lick.

#Innovation and future trends for CMS

• Nearly half (44%) of respondents said their organization has a headless CMS, with adoption higher in companies under 5,000 employees (see Figure 9).

Traditional CMS platforms were designed to provide the content authoring environment and also to render the website. This means that content storage is tightly linked to the frontend presentation. Which can be very efficient for creating websites, but very limiting for organizations that want to go beyond a web-only experience.

Headless CMS rose up as a solution to the need for multichannel content delivery. Headless content is frontend agnostic, meaning that content and data are stored in a structured way so that they can be delivered to any frontend via APIs. This flexibility has caused headless to gain a lot of traction.

• 93% of organizations demand to expose more data and content from internal and external sources to deliver personalized and future-rich content

Headless offers a lot of freedom in how content is presented, but companies need more than just frontend flexibility to compete with digital experience. It must also be easy to source and combine backend data to power unique services and personalization.

#Wrapping up

To innovate with content, companies need a CMS that makes it easy to deliver to any frontend and to connect with any backend system. One that supports a composable approach to technology, where businesses are free to compose their own unique tech stack with best-fit tools, data sources, and channels.

Looking forward, headless CMSs make it easy to evolve the digital experience. Headless delivery of content means that it can be continuously adapted to meet the needs of new channels and applications. The simplification of backend integrations allows companies to add, and remove data sources without having to rewire the whole system. Allowing companies to create a composable, future-proof content strategy.

To find out more about what 400 tech leaders say about the challenges and opportunities they are facing with CMS, head over to Hygraph’s Future of Content Report.