Every page, banner, and product story on a website has to be written, approved, published, and kept up to date, often in several languages and across a site and an app at the same time.
A content management system (CMS) is software that lets people who don’t write code create, edit, organize and publish digital content, most often a website, without asking a developer to ship every change. Content doesn’t affect just marketing, though. Having the right CMS to manage content has become a core part of businesses and touches almost every department, including sales, merchandising, and development.
A content management system helps you implement a comprehensive content marketing strategy and weave content into your commerce strategy. At the same time, your developers won’t be forced to constantly publish content and can easily make changes in the back end without disrupting content publication. This means your web pages can have fresh content on them without having to consistently exhaust your IT team.
This guide covers what a CMS is, how it works, the three main types, and how to tell which one fits the way your team works.
What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?
A CMS is an application used to manage content and publish it, allowing multiple users (even those without coding knowledge) to contribute, create, edit, and publish without having to involve a developer.
Your CMS platform also provides version management and authoring workflow to keep large, global sites consistent.
If you further break down a content management system, there are two main parts that help create your website.
- The content management application (CMA) allows marketers, merchandisers, and other content creators to work with digital content directly, without needing to involve the IT department.
- The content delivery application (CDA) acts as the back-end portion of the website, taking the content that you enter into the templates and turning it into a working website that visitors from around the world can access.
Web content management (WCM) is more or less another name for CMS, because we are an industry that loves acronyms.
What a CMS Is Not
A CMS manages editorial content and how pages are put together. It is usually not the system of record for everything else a website shows. Product data such as SKUs, prices, and attributes typically lives in a commerce platform or a product information management (PIM) system. Large libraries of images, video, and brand files often live in a digital asset management (DAM) system. The CMS references those records and places them on a page rather than owning them. Knowing where that line sits in your own stack saves a lot of confusion when you evaluate a new CMS, because vendors draw it in different places. Some CMSs store and version images themselves; others only reference them from a separate DAM. Ask which one you are buying.
How Does a Content Management System Work?
Every CMS consists of two main components: a content creation interface and a content delivery system. The content creation interface is where users can create and edit content, such as text, images, and videos, using a variety of tools and features. The content delivery system, on the other hand, is responsible for displaying the content to website visitors or other end-users.
When a user creates new content in a CMS, it is typically stored in a database or file system, along with metadata such as tags, categories, and publishing dates. This makes it easy for users to search for and retrieve specific pieces of content at a later time.
Once the content has been created and stored, it can be published to the website or other platform by using templates or themes. These templates define the layout and design of the content, ensuring that it is displayed consistently and professionally across all pages of the website.
When a visitor requests a page, the CMS retrieves the stored content, applies the template, and serves the finished page. In a headless CMS, that last step moves out of the CMS: the content is sent through an API and a separate front end builds the page (more on that below).
Some content management systems also include additional features, such as analytics, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, and user management capabilities. These features help website owners optimize their content for search engines, track user behavior and engagement, and manage user access and permissions.
Content Management System Features
If you’re examining which content management system is best for your business, you’ll want to consider these features (we go deeper on the features that ease content strategy separately):
Security
Making sure your online store or business is secure from cyber attacks is important. Not only do attacks interrupt the continuity of your business, but they also cost you huge amounts of money.
Most content management systems come with a fairly robust set of security features, including advanced authentication, strict permissions, firewalls, and protection against malware attacks. Enterprise sites usually also need audit trails, role-based access, and certifications such as ISO and SOC.
Omnichannel and Multilingual Support
A web content management system that supports easy multi-language, omnichannel delivery makes this job much easier. It also lets local brand and content managers run localized campaigns on the channels best suited for their markets while maintaining the global brand identity.
User-friendliness
Empowering your employees to support your globalization efforts starts with simplifying the process they use to do so.
Using a content management system that is intuitive for the end user, and that allows employees to quickly reuse branded components such as images, designs, and experiences, will encourage teams to take ownership of the local experience. That is even more true if it also allows all users to use the system in their preferred language.
A system that supports straightforward approval workflows will make the lives of brand managers easier and will in turn support continued effort and excellence in the globalization process.
Testing and Experimentation
To support your global teams as they localize the brand in new markets, it’s crucial that they can quickly evaluate the results of their efforts and take autonomous action based on this feedback.
The easiest way to do this is to ensure that the CMS/WCM you use has built-in experimentation capabilities for easy testing of content and experience elements, whether on desktop, mobile, or other channels.
Personalization
A WCM system that allows you to automatically personalize digital experience elements like campaigns, content, or product grids will provide more agility to global teams, as they can easily create variants of the site experience from one global system.
It will also allow businesses more control over the global brand, supporting globalization at scale. Ask whether variants can be set per component on a page, or only per page. Component-level variants let you personalize one banner without copying the whole template for every audience.
Analytics
Use a content management system that has a built-in analytics engine so that your marketing teams, content creators, and brand managers can easily spot visitor trends and opportunities for improvement in the digital experience based on local visitor data. It’s even better if the system can provide this information per persona, which will give you much more precision in optimizing the content served to your visitors around the world.
Scalability
Businesses that run their WCM in the cloud will be able to scale their globalization efforts much faster. Development teams can roll out updates to the digital experience worldwide with just a few clicks, while also taking advantage of the uptime and continuous improvements offered by cloud providers.
What Are The Different Types of Content Management Systems?
As digital content became a major facet of brands, new customer channels popped up, content needed to be accessible and consistent on new channels, cross-departmental collaboration became more important, and providing individually relevant content to each customer became a focus.
Over time, other forms of content management systems have emerged. The difference between them comes down to one question: does the CMS build the page the visitor sees, or does something else?
Traditional (Coupled) CMS
The traditional CMS (sometimes referred to as a “coupled CMS”) is perhaps the simplest in terms of layout and general functionality. With a traditional CMS, users create and edit their content using a WYSIWYG or HTML editor, and then the CMS displays the content according to the CSS used for layout.
If you’re looking to make a relatively simple marketing site, a traditional CMS is a good choice for its simplicity.
Decoupled CMS
The decoupled CMS is, in some respects, more complex than the traditional (or coupled) CMS.
The advantages of a decoupled CMS come down to the architecture that separates the front-end and back-end operations. That means content creators are free to simply plug information into the content manager on the back end and not worry about layout, which is handled by the front-end system. This facilitates easy content creation. What separates it from headless is that a decoupled CMS still comes with a front end it can publish to, while also making content available to other channels through an API.
Headless CMS
The architecture of headless and decoupled is quite similar. Both feature a separation between the content repository at the back end and the publishing tools at the front end.
Unlike other designs, this architecture is considered “headless” as it doesn’t have a front end of its own or one designated front end to serve for the presentation of content.
Information is delivered via an API down various channels rather than linked to a singular front end. Essentially, the API for a headless CMS is much more flexible for delivering information as it exists as a tool for any of the front-end portions to pull data from the back end.
For teams that are looking to produce a substantial amount of content and deliver information across multiple channels, this is the optimal choice. Our guide to headless vs decoupled CMS covers the difference in depth.
Hybrid CMS
A hybrid CMS combines both approaches in one system. Some pages are built and rendered with templates, the traditional way, while other content is delivered through APIs to apps, a custom front end, or other channels. Teams can run templated and headless experiences side by side and move sections across gradually instead of switching everything at once.
Which Type of CMS Do You Need?
Most guides stop at a list of pros and cons. The more useful way to choose is to ask who will change a page once the site is live, and what your team is willing to run.
Headless moves the presentation layer, meaning how every page looks and behaves, out of the CMS and into a front end your developers build and host. That frees developers from the CMS’s templates. It doesn’t free marketers from developers on its own. If the CMS can’t show editors a live preview of that front end and let them arrange pages on it, every new page layout becomes a development task again. The implementation agency we interviewed for our headless guide warns about exactly this: a developer-first build in which businesses often sacrifice the authoring and preview controls for which the CMS was selected.
| Your situation | Type that usually fits | Who changes a page | What you take on |
|---|---|---|---|
| One website, a small team, no plans for apps or other channels | Traditional | Marketers, inside the CMS templates | Least to run; layouts are limited to what the templates allow |
| Several channels (site, app, in-store screens) fed from one set of content, and a front-end team you intend to keep | Headless | Developers own layouts; marketers edit content, and page building only if the CMS supports visual editing on your front end | A second application to build, host, deploy, and upgrade, plus caching and preview to set up |
| A templated site today and a custom front end or app on the roadmap, or a large estate you can’t move in one go | Hybrid | Marketers on templated pages; developers and marketers share headless pages | Two delivery modes to govern, and one content model that has to serve both from the start, but you migrate page by page instead of in one cutover |
Two checks apply whichever type you pick. First, ask to see an editor build a page on a front end like yours. Second, ask what happens to your URLs and redirects when you move, because broken URLs can cost the rankings your existing pages have built.
Artificial Intelligence and Content Management Systems
AI features now appear in most enterprise CMSs, though how deep they go varies widely between vendors. The useful jobs are specific. It can draft and rewrite copy, suggest tags and categories, fill in metadata such as SEO descriptions, and speed up translation. That removes a lot of the repetitive work that slows down large sites with many pages and languages.
What it doesn’t remove is review. Someone still has to decide what gets published, and the CMS’s roles and approval workflow decide who that is. When you evaluate AI features, ask which model runs them, where your content goes when it is processed, and whether AI output passes through the same approval steps as everything else.
Choosing a Content Management System
The most important question to ask yourself at the start of a CMS project is: “What am I trying to achieve?” With a critical look at where you currently are, and where you want to be, you can start mapping out which content, data, tools, and integrations you already have, and which you need, to build your vision. From there, the work is understanding which features will speed the project up, the total cost, and the budget your expected returns can justify. Those steps are covered in how to choose a CMS platform.
How Companies Use Content Management Systems
Bosch
As Amazon drives industry trends, it’s essential that B2B brands like Bosch don’t fall behind. With Bosch Power Tools operating multiple global sites, the organization understood that its customers inherently expect the same tailored digital experience. This was the business unit’s main challenge: creating multiple unique experiences at the country level, while keeping the brand experience consistent globally.
“We need a solution that builds an engaging brand website for millions of users…personalized by country, language and brand. At the same time, we need it for one-off applications, for B2B and across the organization,” said Sunny Mallavarapu, Digital Transformation Manager at Bosch Power Tools.
Bosch Power Tools chose a headless approach with Bloomreach’s CMS, which lets it replace its front-end system without bringing operations to a halt. It can now build features on a global scale while delivering a personalized experience country to country.
Read the Bosch case study.
Carrefour
Carrefour Group is one of the biggest retailers in the world with more than 12,000 stores in 30 countries. The technical team had a number of key selection criteria when looking for a new experience management solution and needed a CMS to bring together multiple parts of the customer experience.
Carrefour integrated its homegrown ecommerce platform with Bloomreach’s CMS. When COVID-19 hit Europe in early 2020, Carrefour was experiencing order volumes and increasing demand like never before. The team saw the pandemic as proof that its choice of a headless architecture was right for productivity, flexibility, and speed. Carrefour reports reduced operational costs from faster, cheaper development, a shorter time to market, and more productive teams.
Read the Carrefour case study.
Content Management With Loomi
You can’t really do much in digital commerce these days without a secure and flexible content management system. The answer Bloomreach built to the question this guide keeps returning to, who changes a page once the site is live, is a hybrid CMS.
Our content management is part of Loomi, an agentic personalization platform. The same system serves templated pages and headless delivery through its APIs, so you can move one section at a time. Marketers build and rearrange pages in the Experience manager and see them in preview as visitors will, even when a separate front end renders the site. They can schedule a set of changes to go live together as a project, and personalize pages for different audiences. Developers build the components those pages are made of and decide which parts stay fixed. It connects to the commerce platform of your choice and runs as SaaS, PaaS, or on-premise.
See how an editor builds a page on a headless front end in Loomi content management, from component to preview to publish. Request a demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a content management system in simple terms?
A content management system is software for creating, editing, and publishing website content without writing code. Marketers enter and arrange content in an editor, and the CMS turns it into web pages using templates, or sends it to a separate front end through an API.
What is the difference between a headless CMS and a traditional CMS?
A traditional CMS stores content and also builds the pages visitors see, using its own templates. A headless CMS only stores and manages content and delivers it through an API, so a separate front end, built by your developers, handles how pages look. Headless gives more flexibility across channels but adds an application to build and run.
Is a headless CMS better for marketers?
Not automatically. Headless frees developers from the CMS’s templates, but page layout then lives in the front end they build. Marketers keep page-building control only if the CMS offers visual editing and live preview on that front end. Check this in a demo on a front end like yours.
What is a hybrid CMS?
A hybrid CMS supports both models in one system: templated pages rendered by the CMS and headless content delivered through APIs. Teams can run both side by side and migrate sections gradually rather than all at once.
Is a CMS the same as a PIM or DAM?
No. A CMS manages editorial content and page composition. A product information management (PIM) system manages product data such as SKUs and attributes, and a digital asset management (DAM) system manages large libraries of images, video, and files. A CMS usually references both rather than replacing them.
