Company websites started as little more than digital brochures — but today, consumers expect personalized experiences, responsive design, microsecond load times, and safeguarded privacy. It’s a world away from the simple HTML pages of the early web. 

Few leaders have tracked this digital transformation more closely than Liz Spranzani, Chief Technology Officer at digital experience agency Verndale. Her team has helped enterprise brands like Stanley Black & Decker, GE, and Honda implement (and untangle) nearly every major content platform on the market. 

Onstage at Webflow Conf 2024, Liz shared her 20-year perspective on the evolution of the CMS (content management system) landscape, the rise of the DXP (digital experience platforms), and her vision for the future: composable architectures that combine no-code agility with enterprise-grade freedom.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation isn’t a one-and-done migration project — it’s the ongoing act of reshaping how value is created, delivered, and optimized. Just as door-to-door sales have transformed into outbound programs fueled by automation and intent data, website development technology has leapt from the single-site CMS to cloud-native, AI-infused stacks. 

Liz traces the start of this transformation to the early 2000s. Back then, the CMS was focused and effective at doing one thing really well, on one channel: publishing content on your website. But as CMS competition increased, vendors started adding features — like customer data platforms, marketing automation, media libraries, testing, and personalization tools — to stand out. 

Soon, the all-in-one DXP emerged, managing content and customer communications across channels. It was powerful, but painfully difficult and expensive to maintain. 

“The DXP claimed to be everything, but weren’t the masters of anything,” Liz said. “It was not agile and it was not fast, and everything was bogged down with technical debt and other problems.”

In 2020, brands hit an inflection point as the pandemic moved every interaction online, overnight. Digital laggards struggled to keep up — but so did companies already paying expensive licensing fees to DXPs. These marketing teams realized their digital infrastructure wasn't agile enough to adapt to new consumer needs. 

Agility, not feature count, became the new differentiator. Liz noted that companies became interested in ditching monolithic DXPs in favor of assembling their own composable architectures — picking and choosing best-in-breed solutions, and loosely assembling them into an integrated martech stack. 

Today, Liz sorts the current website tech landscape into four pillars, each with its own promise and price tag:

• DXP suites that support omnichannel delivery with single-vendor simplicity, but are often weighed down by monolithic code and complexity.
• Open‑source CMSs offering license‑free flexibility, offset by inefficiencies requiring developer intervention and DIY security.
• Headless CMSs that separate admin tools from content delivery with API-first flexibility, yet demand continuous engineering lift that undermines promised agility.
• No‑code builders that are lightning‑fast for simple sites, but historically thin on creative and enterprise capabilities.

These threads reveal the real meaning of digital transformation: finding a balance between flexibility, speed, and scale without drowning in technical debt. 

5 lessons in digital transformation

As the shepherd for numerous enterprise digital transformations over the years, Liz shared five key lessons for building the right website stack: 

1. Prioritize agility over complexity

Traditional CMS and DXP solutions have become bloated with features and technical debt that slow organizations down. Liz has observed companies spending years implementing these platforms, only to find themselves constantly playing catch-up with upgrades, replatforms, and redesigns — never reaching the promised vision.

"Our clients are tired,” says Liz. “They've been spending money on licenses for decades, getting a promise of a vision, but they don't actually get there.”

Instead, she advises organizations to prioritize platforms with fast implementation and flexible architectures, and focus on delivering value quickly rather than endlessly adding features. 

2. Put business outcomes first

Digital transformation is about creating tangible business value. But too often, Liz observes organizations get lost in manual interventions and subjective design tweaks — or caught up in implementing technology for technology’s sake. 

Rather, she advises marketing leaders to hyperfocus on what websites are supposed to do: drive user conversions. Whether that's completing a purchase or filling out a form, the technology should enable these outcomes while requiring minimal maintenance. 

“What really matters is that the code is maintainable and accessible and performant and secure,” says Liz. “Ultimately, after that, it doesn’t really matter — so long as the user experience is fantastic to drive those conversions.”

3. Democratize digital creation

No-code platforms give marketing teams autonomy to create their own designs and run their own experiments — without the need for engineering resources. But, Liz cautions, many traditional no-code platforms like Wix or Squarespace have been fast, easy, cheap — and very limited.

However, Liz still puts no-code capabilities on her must-have requirement list for enterprise organizations. The key is to find a website platform that can deliver this autonomy without sacrificing the ability to create unique experiences that engage customers and drive conversions.

4. Leverage AI as a collaborative partner

Similarly, AI is no longer just a nice-to-have — it's becoming an essential component of digital transformation strategies, embedded throughout the entire web experience ecosystem.

Liz shared a vision of AI-driven website creation where technology assists at every stage, across sitemap generation, design, content creation, deployment, experimentation, and reporting. This approach shifts power from developers to business and marketing teams, while maintaining quality and consistency through constant manual oversight and intervention.

She emphasized that AI should be integrated into workflows throughout the platform rather than standing alone as its own product. When properly implemented, AI can help teams overcome the potential threat of homogeneity by generating content and designs that align with a brand's unique identity.

5. Stay focused, but be ready to evolve

For most organizations, the focus should still be on the website. "I've been doing this for 23 years," says Liz, "and everyone keeps saying other channels are going to be more important. So far, the website is still 90% of our work." 

That’s why composability is key. Unlike the DXPs of the last several years, composable platforms excel at their core capabilities while providing the flexibility to integrate with specialized tools for specific needs. This approach allows teams to create a best-of-breed stack that can be tailored to meet any unique requirements. 

The emergence of the Website Experience Platform

Liz’s realization: none of the four traditional frameworks offer a perfect solution. 

DXPs try to do everything, but often become bloated and slow. Headless solutions offer flexibility but can be complex and developer-dependent. Open-source options may seem cost-effective initially. but often require significant support and maintenance investment. Traditional no-code tools limit creativity and functionality. 

When Liz and her team started adopting Webflow in 2023, they encountered a new category: the Website Experience Platform (WXP). As a visual-first, composable platform, Webflow gives complete design and marketing autonomy without sacrificing creativity or user experience.