Mastering CMS migrations: Solutions to 7 common challenges

This Ruler is for the Space Between Text/Buttons/Callouts. Check Your Spacing for Consistency.

Kforce digital experience experts share proven strategies for seamless CMS transitions

Companies are producing more content than ever. Reliable, intuitive content management systems are must-haves for exceptional customer experiences, but many marketing departments are stuck with outdated platforms that are cumbersome to use and lack capabilities marketers need to be effective. To keep a competitive edge, companies are investing serious time and resources into upgrading their CMSs. Spending on CMS updates has risen rapidly since 2018, with global CMS revenue expected to reach $123.5 billion by 2026, according to research from Zippia. That's a 245% increase in eight years as consumers demand higher-end experiences.

1. Siloed decision making

A new CMS impacts multiple teams within a company, but critical partners are often left out of the decision-making process. Both marketing and IT need to be involved throughout the sales and selection process to make sure the right CMS is chosen for the entire company, said Bobby Vitrano, Kforce's vice president of application engineering solutions. Marketers need platforms with capabilities, and IT needs platforms they can support operationally with development and cloud ops. Both voices need to be heard and considered. Kforce Client Solutions Director John Keefe recalled an example from an international agriculture company that was looking to upgrade its CMS. Marketing team members were leading the conversations, and the IT department felt left out of the discussion. The two departments had different needs, questions and requirements, and only one side was being heard. A lot of times, marketing is making the purchasing decisions and IT is stuck with maintaining a tool that another team picked, Keefe said. "On the flip side, we have seen instances where the needs of marketing teams went unheeded, so marketing leveraged 'Shadow IT' to accomplish their goals," said Robby Cloninger, Kforce's Digital Experience practice leader. Shadow IT can create significant risks to the business due to a lack of governance, cost inefficiencies and cybersecurity threats. Simply put, multiple organizational challenges can spring up if both sets of needs are not considered.

Connect with me

Justin Bell

Connect with me

Executive Design Director

Digital Experience Kforce Consulting Solutions

Connect with me

John Keefe

CLIENT SOLUTIONS DIRECTOR

Digital Experience Kforce Consulting Solutions

Robby Cloninger

PRACTICE LEADER

Digital Experience Kforce Consulting Solutions

Is your company ready to invest in a new CMS?

Our Kforce Consulting Solutions experts can ensure your process runs smoothly, avoids costly challenges and empowers teams to unlock its full potential.

MEET THE AUTHORS

Published NOVEMBER 2024

Together Toward Tomorrow

Connect with me

Bobby Vitrano

VP PRACTICE SOLUTIONS

Application Engineering Kforce Consulting Solutions

2. Empty promises

Nothing's worse than finally getting sign off on a product after months of vetting to then learn the platform doesn't do what you thought. "You're told what this magical tool can do, that anyone can use it, and it'll fix all your problems," Vitrano said. "Lo and behold, you get it in house and learn it needs total customization, it doesn't integrate with the rest of your systems and it doesn't have the security features you need. We hear this story all the time." How do teams avoid the bait and switch? Be thorough in your interview process when vetting different CMS options. Make sure you understand the true use cases. Determine where self-service and customization come into play. "Each of these tools still have great use cases," Vitrano said. "But you need to understand going in exactly what it can and can't do and build a functional road map around that." Also important: when conducting platform demonstrations with the software vendor, ensure the demo only includes the functionality you will actually be licensing. Vendors sometimes conduct misleading product demos which incorporate integrations with tools that will not be included. The demos may be impressive but do not accurately represent what the organization would actually be licensing. "It's equivalent to taking a test drive of a car with premium trim but then buying the standard trim," Cloninger said. "The result: underwhelm and disappointment."

3. Asset management

Companies need a detailed plan to protect their valuable assets. This includes safeguarding critical formatting, metadata and other settings that affect the quality and search-ability of content. "Asset management is a huge component of CMS migration, and it's often oversimplified," Vitrano said. "People think, 'We'll just move it over here.' But classification, hierarchy of implementation, asset governance policy and procedures, that all needs to be figured out first to be successful." Marketing departments may choose to move to a new digital asset management tool during their CMS migration. This takes skills, time and resources their current staff might not have. "Often times you're dealing with thousands of assets," Bell said. "There's the taxonomy that has to be defined, the tagging schema, the naming structure and more. It can be a massive physical lift." Leaders should make sure their timeline properly accounts for this intensive process. Consider dedicating team members entirely to the process. If you don't have the capacity, it may be worth bringing in an external partner to oversee the migration.

4. Compatibility issues

5. Impacts to the customer experience

Migration can result in downtime that will directly impact your customers and business. Likewise, bugs or issues with your content may make it less accessible. Bell recommends leaders create a plan to avoid downtime and thoroughly test the site to ensure that the user experience remains seamless. Often, companies will use a new CMS as an opportunity to create a different design language and brand experience, Bell said. As a result, their customers may come across content with different looks and feels. The design may change, or layouts might not match. The result is a different experience from page to page, depending on whether the material they're accessing was created on the new CMS or its predecessor. "If done well, clients can have a successful migration launch that doesn't impact the customer experience," Bell said. "But teams have to be thoughtful about what pages or features they roll out and when." "With large enterprise companies, rolling out a new design language can take a year or more. Some enterprise companies have thousands of pages that will need re-designing. Prioritize the most visited and use pages or flows as your low hanging fruit."

6. Learning curves

Effective change management is essential to ensuring your team loves your new CMS. They will need training, which may require time away from other high-value tasks. Communicating with transparency throughout the migration process can help bring employees along and ensure business-critical tasks don't suffer, Bell said. Keefe encourages leaders to be direct when setting expectations around the platform and ensure employees are leveraging its full capabilities. Otherwsie, companies may find themselves switching to new tools at a higher rate—with each change adding new costs. The vice president of marketing at a publishing house once explained the risk of poor expectation setting to Keefe as a costly cycle. Leaders weren't clear about why they were purchasing the new CMS, what it could and couldn't impact, and what team members would need to do to unlock that value. "As a result, he saw the company fall into a pattern of, 'Buy a tool. Don't set expectations correctly. Teams are frustrated. Buy another tool,'" Keefe said. "It felt like every six months they were looking for a new product because the team wasn't properly prepared for what the current tool could and couldn't achieve."

7. Unexpected costs

You can't really plan for the unexpected, but you should budget for it. A new CMS often requires additional development or customization teams hadn't considered. "It's critical to partner with an implementation specialist who can set realistic expectations forged through past migrations and deployments," Cloninger said. Internal training and additional licensing fees are two commonly missed budget lines. Marketing teams mistakenly think they only need one platform license when in fact each user needs their own seat license. Also consider that CMS software providers are moving quickly into a cloud-first model where they can charge based on consumption as well as licensing. This creates a lot of uncertainty for businesses that do not know how much growth or usage to anticipate. Another decision to be aware of: sometimes companies think they're getting a great deal if they buy an entire experience platform with a lot of tools—and platform providers will try hard to sell this way. But the savings are only there if the marketing teams plan to use and maximize each part of the experience stack. "Decision makers need to carefully vet the offerings and determine whether their teams will use all the tools they're purchasing," Keefe said. "If not, what appeared to be a great deal becomes a sunk cost."

Ready to invest in a new CMS?

Before a migration can happen successfully, leaders first need to produce an application topology to fully understand their current platform, tools and products. When working with clients, Keefe said that initial education and assessment is critical to developing the right plan. "It's important for the customer to have a deep understanding of their entire ecosystem," Keefe said. "Recently we've seen the need to bring in an architect to outline what exists, what is being used, what's integrated and where other systems can be integrated. This understanding is a key part to ensuring compatibility in the migration process." Your existing solutions—whether they are custom plug-ins or your entire CMR—may not play well with your new CMS platform, so plan for the time and expense of updates or adjustments. "It's all in the data and the details," Vitrano said. "Without proper asset mapping, a company will likely need to restart its journey at some point because of capability-related challenges, particularly around differences in content structure, custom functionality and integrations." Common issues arise around mapping complex content types, managing custom code or plugins, and maintaining third-party integrations, especially if API compatibility is lacking, Vitrano said. Migrating user roles, permissions and authentication systems can also be complex, as well as ensuring SEO settings, URL structures and media management remain intact. Differences in search functionality, scalability and performance between systems can affect user experience, while security protocols and automation workflows may need to be reconfigured. Additionally, features like e-commerce, content versioning, analytics and editorial workflows may require custom development if the new CMS lacks equivalent capabilities, necessitating thorough planning and testing for a successful migration.

At Kforce, we are frequently asked to assess problematic CMS installations for our clients. We often discover CMS platforms that are modern and capable but poorly implemented for real-world use. If you determine your existing CMS is not meeting your business needs, we recommend first evaluating whether the issue is the CMS platform itself or the way it was implemented. It may be possible to adjust your existing CMS platform to maximize its value. If your organization is currently inhibited by an antiquated CMS, there are many benefits of migrating to a modern platform. Leaders who make this investment can expect to see the efficiency of their marketing teams improve as they unlock new capabilities, such as personalization and analytics. But undertaking this large-scale change could severely impact customers and employees if not properly prepared for and managed, said Justin Bell, Kforce's executive design director. If your company is putting time and energy into this investment, here are seven challenges to anticipate, along with advice from our Kforce Consulting Solutions experts on how to address them—or avoid them completely.

GLOBAL Cms Revenue expected by 2026

$123.5 billion

global cms REVENUE increase in eight years

245% increase

Zippia

SPACE IN BETWEEN BUTTONS

SPACE IN BETWEEN MODULES/ Macros/ Sections

SPACE IN BETWEEN HEADER AND SUBHEAD + Subhead & Body

How to Optimize Your Professional Brand on LinkedIn

Stay Updated on Industry Trends with Twitter

How to Use Instagram During Your Job Search

National insurance company earns major design award following Kforce UX collaboration

Technology industry: Streamlining data asset management within AEM

Healthcare industry: Building a world-class intranet in a new CMS

Success stories

bringing in an external partner

benefits of migrating to a modern platform