New articles are still being written and posted on your site. Newsletters continue to make it out on schedule. Traffic is doing okay.
A reporter surveying the situation might say, “There’s no story here. Everything’s running smoothly.”
An experienced editor might respond, “Look harder.” The underlying issues with your content management system (CMS) might not be immediately apparent, but they’re worth investigating before a real problem emerges.
The media organizations that thrive don’t wait until something goes horribly wrong with their CMS before deciding to upgrade.
- They think strategically about the technology they should use to serve audiences and advertisers.
- They do their research to understand where their CMS is falling short.
- Most importantly, they ask themselves the hard questions, just like any journalist does in an important interview.
If you’re unsure what those questions are, here’s a handful to help you get started:
1. How strong is your site performance?
Speed and performance matter when you’re trying to inform, educate, and inspire an audience. One Google study found that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases by 32%. From one second to five seconds, it increases by 90%.
High traffic should be a cause for celebration in most newsrooms, but in some scenarios, it’s a cause for concern: will your site shine on your biggest day, or will it crash when you need it most?
Take the most recent U.S. federal election, when countless publishers were busy responding to the hunger for up-to-the-minute updates. For one media organization, traffic skyrocketed 162% over normal levels, reaching nearly 39,000 views per minute. Between Nov. 4-11, WordPress VIP served more than 22 billion requests without downtime.
That kind of reliability brings publishers huge peace of mind, allowing newsrooms to focus on delivering content to readers all over the world.
“Whether you wanted to look at it from a performance standpoint or in terms of speed metrics, or you wanted to look at downtime or the traffic pre- and post-launch, all the data supported the decision that we made.”
—Remy Stern, Chief Digital Officer, New York Post
2. Is your CMS good for core web vitals and SEO?
It might have gotten buried amid other headlines, but in 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals (CWV), a set of metrics that is now used to grade web performance and influence search rankings. Publishers not only need to be on top of CWV, but to continually assess whether their CMS is contributing to ongoing improvements in areas like page loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Getting ranked high on the first page of Google is obviously the ultimate goal of most publishers’ SEO strategies, which means your CMS should be able to monitor your digital “vital signs” and respond accordingly.
This is where you should be asking your CMS provider whether they have servers that can support auto-scaling during peak periods. Will your CMS automatically resize and optimize content like images so everyone enjoys the same premium performance? What can be done to reload page load times, bandwidth usage, and latency? Will an analytics plug-in slow anything down?
There’s a lot of technical detail behind CWV, but your goal as a publisher should simply be to deliver fast, beautiful, and high-performing content to your audience.
3. How much time are your developers spending on basic maintenance?
There’s a lot of opportunity to innovate within media as long as publishers have the capacity to do it right. For example, 80% of newsrooms are experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI), but full-scale use will probably require integrating tools and customizing the way they’re used. On the business side, AI and other technologies will transform how publishers attract, keep, and serve subscribers.
Developers working within media organizations should be laser-focused on creating next-generation digital experiences. Too often, they’re mired in the basic nuts and bolts of maintaining existing infrastructure, especially if they’re running a complex digital experience platform (DXP).
It doesn’t have to be this way, as other publishers have demonstrated by migrating their CMS to something better.
“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture,” reported the VP of Technology of Hachette Book Group.
Explore more
Hachette Book Group’s Single Source for Digital Marketing
Promoting creativity and innovation on your technical team will not only significantly impact your bottom line but can also improve employee satisfaction and retention. We see it happen every day.
4. Are there unnecessary steps in your content creation process?
When news breaks, there’s always a scramble to be first to lead coverage. Unfortunately, many CMSes lack the flexibility that modern newsrooms require.
Consider how long it takes your team to move a piece of content from a story meeting to live on your homepage and then push it out through a newsletter and other channels. If one of your journalists lands a scoop, can they act on it, or are they twiddling their thumbs while waiting for website updates?
Great journalism is based on taking the time to vet sources and fact-check critical details. The only shortcuts you should take are in the technical steps in getting stories to your audience. A CMS that accelerates the content creation process will empower everyone on your team, including developers, to get their jobs done quickly.
The Times is a case in point: moving to WordPress VIP sped up their time to publish by 34%, with 62% fewer clicks to publish articles. The new publishing workflow now underpins multiple digital experiences across the company.
That ease of use translates into real business value when it leads to decreased training time and higher-quality content.
Explore more
How The Times Accelerated Their Publishing Workflow
5. Are you paying for anything you don’t need in your CMS?
Each year, publishers are asked to do more with less.
So take a long, hard look at the cost of your current CMS. Of course, assessing your total cost of ownership can be troubling, even humbling—you might be paying too much for services you don’t use or need. Or underinvesting and limiting your growth and flexibility because your CMS offers little more than hosting.
The majority of digital experience providers fall in the first category: bundling expensive solutions into what essentially becomes shelfware, or locking you into a vendor ecosystem where the answer to any problem is “Buy this new product.”
WordPress VIP, on the other hand, works with each customer to assemble the best enterprise solutions, experts, and global partners from the large open source community to address their unique long-term growth goals. While an enterprise CMS is always an investment, you should never pay for anything that doesn’t positively impact your revenue growth.
A better digital customer experience for media organizations
As you look ahead to each year’s growth goals, remember that the biggest improvements in your digital customer experience will be made from the ground up.
A post on The International News Media Association summed it up well when it suggested a key trend is turning publishers’ tech stacks from barriers to assets.
“Foundational investments—such as improving site speeds, streamlining subscription processes, and unifying reporting—are likely to come first,” the authors predicted.
Take a moment to ask yourself: “Are my content tools agile, giving my journalists and developers the freedom and flexibility we need to scale engaging digital experiences? Or am I locked into pricey marketing clouds that create unnecessary obstacles for my team?”
Modern digital customer experiences require flexibility that is hard to find outside the enterprise WordPress ecosystem. If it’s time to rethink your business’s content management infrastructure, remember: no one does content better than WordPress, the software powering 30% of the Fortune 100. And no one does enterprise WordPress better than WordPress VIP.
Author
Shane Schick, Founder—360 Magazine
Shane Schick is a longtime technology journalist serving business leaders ranging from CIOs and CMOs to CEOs. His work has appeared in Yahoo Finance, the Globe & Mail and many other publications. Shane is currently the founder of a customer experience design publication called 360 Magazine. He lives in Toronto.
