Josh Koenig is a Co-Founder of Pantheon, a platform for extraordinary websites with a goal to put the internet’s magic in everyone’s hands.
Anyone who works in digital marketing likely remembers their first experience with a web publishing tool. For me, it was setting up WordPress in the early aughts after three years of painstakingly hand-coding my personal website. What started as a labor of love (and learning) had become something of a chore, and the open-source blogging tool made it easier for me to publish content, giving me time to focus on creativity and more ambitious technical explorations.
Twenty years later, I’m seeing enterprise organizations in an oddly similar position: looking to publish web content quickly so they can shift their technical resources away from content production to more strategic innovation. Global families of brands, government institutions and even big tech companies—they’re all seeking user-friendly web publishing tools as part of their strategy for delivering digital experiences. And they’re looking beyond the usual suspects in analyst reports and seriously evaluating the web’s most widely adopted CMS: WordPress.
My company commissioned a study that asked over 250 enterprise marketing and IT professionals about their views on the CMS marketplace. It turns out that 80% of respondents felt WordPress was now enterprise-ready and able to deliver on key business needs such as security and versatility. Add that it already owns two-thirds of the global CMS market share, and there’s a generation of rising talent that’s already comfortable using it, and you can see the appeal.
Agile content management is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies want marketing team members to publish in real time, without having to consult IT. With the mission to “democratize publishing,” WordPress delivers on this promise.
There’s also a need to deliver on the value proposition of composability in digital experiences, which WordPress’s open-source foundations uniquely support. It truly is “door number two” for enterprises that feel trapped on the DXP treadmill. Let’s take a look at why.
The Digital Landscape Is Changing Fast
It might be cliché to say we’re in a time of great change, but when it comes to digital marketing, it’s undeniably true. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen customer purchase behavior transform, and expectations skyrocket, with 68% of global consumers saying they continue to shop online more than they did before.
Generative AI has also dramatically altered content creation and discovery, and search engines are working furiously to adapt, altering SEO strategies, too. All of which is affecting web teams in a major way. Those without the ability to continuously evolve their website have found themselves stuck with a static, depreciating asset.
While this all starts with your company’s web strategy, including team resourcing, without a modern web platform, you’re dead in the water. It’s not enough to put up posts quickly. Creators want to assemble rich content with an up-to-date set of components.
Beyond inefficiency, it’s existentially threatening to be stuck with a user journey that’s no longer relevant to your customer, which is what happens when you lack composability and are living with an aging design. As more organizations face long-term decisions about their digital infrastructure, these are risks that have to be avoided. Many are considering all of their options—including tools like WordPress.
Going Beyond A Software Purchase: Investing In Strategy
When NASA moved its websites to WordPress in 2021, it made waves. But the decision wasn’t just about new software; it was part of a strategic web modernization process that aligned with the federal government’s endorsed design system. The move enabled NASA to leverage an established and repeatable pattern to get their websites modernized in months rather than years.
The average publicly traded company has hundreds of websites. So, it goes without saying that changing content management systems is a big decision, and it has to be a strategic one—going beyond shiny new tech or vendor incentives. Treating it like a typical software purchase with a traditional requirements-gathering process may lead to a dead end.
When I work with large-scale clients on these questions, I always suggest they think of it as a platform selection process and look for the technology that provides the best framework for their organization versus one that purports to be one-size-fits-all.
Enterprises need a holistic approach—exploring how the new tools can solve pressing web problems across the entire organization. Different divisions, geographies, products and individual marketing campaigns will have divergent needs. A single-instance solution quickly becomes overbuilt and clunky, or worse yet, a battleground for internal politics.
But with a technology that gives you a choice over what to lock in as part of the framework versus where you allow freedom in implementation—and one where the number of instances is unburdened by licensing barriers—you can shift from bickering over feature requests to efficiently driving innovation and execution across the organization. This was the case for Clorox, which standardized its brand family on WordPress back in the late 2010s as its creative team shifted to working as an award-winning in-house agency.
A Platform That Can Grow With You
Whether you have eight sites or 180, there is beauty in a platform that offers value out of the box and is also infinitely customizable. Users get the best of both worlds for publishing and innovating efficiently. It’s also cost-effective so that you can put resources back into innovation.
Yes, WordPress offers this, but I don’t mean to glorify it above all other solutions. My company works with many open-source tools that offer value for enterprise web teams. But for a forward-looking and flexible enterprise CMS, I wouldn’t overlook this old stalwart from your blogging days. It’s come a long way over the last 20 years. What makes it stand out from more traditional CMSs and DXPs is its commitment to ongoing evolution.
Of course, software on its own is never a silver bullet. But if you want a CMS for the long term—one that will grow with your brand and flex with the ever-evolving web landscape—WordPress may be the right choice for you. And you won’t be alone in that decision.
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