CMS Maintenance Shouldn't Be a Full-Time Job

Just like our cars and houses, it’s obvious when our digital assets get neglected.

Whether it’s an app, a Content Management System (CMS), or a website — people notice. Unmaintained assets can speak volumes about the owner.

When it comes to your CMS, maintenance isn’t the sexiest task. It is often misunderstood while also being critical to the success of your business.

CMS Maintenance itself is a big umbrella term. It can refer to some of the following tedious tasks:

• Security updates
• Add-on plugins
• Testing
• Software updates
• Backing up your site
• Compatibility checks
• Link checking

Moreover, that’s not even the type of CMS maintenance that looms largest for most companies, which is maintaining the actual content and assets that live within the system.

These nitty-gritty elements of CMS maintenance are so essential...when you’re running a traditional CMS.

However, there’s a much better way to manage your content in this new era of digital transformation. Enter CaaS — Content as a Service. With a CaaS platform, you can eliminate virtually all of the typical technical maintenance you’d face with a traditional CMS.

Even better, a headless CMS solution like Contentstack vastly improves how you maintain the content within your CMS. That’s where headless CMS shines: If you do it right, you’ve got a great modular content library to tap into as you engage your customers.

Here’s a bit more on headless CMS as an out-of-the-box solution for your CMS maintenance woes.

How To Eliminate Virtually All CMS Maintenance

We’re not living in the wild wild west of the Internet anymore.

These days, few people are building websites by writing HTML directly. The needs for most companies tend to diverge into two main camps:

1. Simple websites built with basic editors and out-of-the-box solutions
2. Omnichannel experience management that includes deploying and maintaining content across multiple channels like websites, apps, and third-party content integrations

At the enterprise level, most firms require a more advanced approach. A simple editor and basic website software don't meet the needs of sprawling corporate websites with localized content and multi-platform content distribution.

However, this has traditionally meant building, integrating, and deploying a cacophony of technology solutions. Additionally, it means maintaining the systems, both in terms of technical maintenance and maintaining content parity on different platforms.

The big secret is that, with a CaaS platform, you can avoid nearly all maintenance of databases, servers, and infrastructure since your provider manages it.

There’s another side of the coin as well: Headless CMS solutions broadly change how you manage your content!

A headless solution like Contentstack allows companies to create modular content using content modeling and other taxonomy, which makes updating and maintaining content much more manageable. The advantage isn’t just with how your CMS is maintained; the benefits also apply to your content and how you deploy it across any number of channels.

For example, using a traditional CMS, you might have content that lives in multiple places on your site. If you want to edit that content in each place, you have to make manual edits to every single page or template accordingly. Moreover, that’s just for your website, if you have other channels, such as mobile sites, applications, microsites, kiosks, VR, your work is likely compounded by having to do this for each channel as well. That’s a lot of work.

Inevitably, templates get broken, and content blocks get out of sync because they’re not native to the system.

That doesn’t have to be the case. With a headless CMS, the content is built in a modular fashion. Updating and maintaining content is much simpler since you can update a recurring block of text in a single pass.

Assuming you set up the content modeling with the right taxonomy and content governance, you can edit and deploy new content updates without spending hours making changes on every individual page or in every place the content exists.

That’s arguably the best way to handle CMS maintenance — eliminate it — while doing yourself a major favor by optimizing your content management simultaneously.

Maintaining A Headless CMS

If you are using Content as a Service (CaaS), all technology-related maintenance of the CMS itself is, essentially, eliminated. Security updates, backups, and server related maintenance are taken care of by your provider.

What remains is maintaining the content and assets that live within the headless CMS itself.

Nevertheless, these tasks are also streamlined in a headless architecture that centralizes all of your content and content maintenance into a single platform.

Maintaining content is made simpler within a headless CMS.

Omnichannel content upkeep

Assuming that content is being properly organized and modeled for use across all relevant platforms, making and deploying changes should be as simple as editing only affected sections. Those changes propagate across all places where the content appears on all front-end channels.

Content democratization

Since a headless CMS promotes a more agile way of working, content owners across the enterprise can dive into content maintenance simultaneously. This agility eliminates internal bottlenecks that come from traditional CMS workflows where all changes would land on marketing or IT to update and maintain content from all areas of the firm.

The content itself becomes democratically controlled by the stakeholders in your organization.

Keeping in mind these unique considerations, a headless CMS offers significant advantages when it comes to reducing the CMS maintenance burden. In short, a CaaS solution can eliminate virtually all typical maintenance while ensuring enhanced content management at the same time.

That’s a big win-win when it comes to your choice of CMS. Choose a CMS that allows you to stay focused on your content and your customers while getting rid of the need for costly maintenance. Your team is sure to thank you.

If you want to take a look for yourself, we invite you to try out a headless CMS solution for your company. Build a free proof of concept with Contentstack today.