The role of the CMS is changing.
And as Forrester’s new report — The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q1 2025 — identifies, the requirements set forth by web and marketing teams for what they expect from their CMS are changing as well. We believe our placement as a Strong Performer confirms the market shift we’re helping lead.
We all are seeing budgets tightening, AI changing search, and tech stacks becoming more and more bloated, but the reality is that traditional CMS platforms are not empowering teams as they should to push past these challenges.
More traditional CMS platforms require significant engineering time up front during implementation where engineers attempt to build out every potential template marketing might need. Inevitably, however, new templates are needed later on, which means more engineering resources and two teams — marketing and engineering — that are slowed down to tackle what should be a quick task.
By preventing marketing from building their own designs, experiments, or personalizing content, we’re seeing unoptimized content that is built slowly, leaving money on the table and increasing the total cost of ownership as more and more time is spent maintaining the site, rather than optimizing and growing.
A push towards visual-first composability
Teams have found themselves stuck in a situation where they either have to choose between rigid, expensive tools that offer a lot in a single tool but don’t give marketers flexibility or control, or tools that are more extensible, but have long, complex implementations and are fully reliant on engineering.
The Goldilocks zone in the middle — where Webflow sits — is a CMS that is visual-first and composable — giving complete design and marketing autonomy — while also delivering agility that gives space for engineering support, but doesn’t rely on it constantly.
This evolution of the CMS comes with significant improvements that make it easier to connect with best-in-breed tools and programmatically bring data in and out at scale.
And as teams look to their website as a leading revenue generator, they’re looking for a website experience that allows them to visually build, manage, and optimize their site. Let’s take a quick look at exactly how composability fits into the website experience so many are looking to develop.
Build the way you want
A common concern around AI-driven systems is the potential homogenization of output — more on how this can be addressed later. Marketers are tasked with standing out amongst a sea of AI-automated possibilities and distractions, and their websites have to do the same.
That’s why so many are making the switch to a CMS platform that gives them the control to design the site that is right for them and their business. Ones that make it easier to establish a design system and enable the rest of their team — no matter their skill set with coding — to build visually stunning pages without issue or concern of brand inconsistency.
In a visual-first composable CMS, every team member is able to work at their most impactful level.
Designers can launch websites with or without code and build design systems that power brand consistent templates for non-designers to utilize. Marketers can use those templates to build full pages or component building blocks to write content directly on the canvas or even generate it with the help of brand guidelines and AI. And developers can add custom code into any page and build bespoke integrations with MACH-certified APIs.
With every teammate enabled to build stunning websites and pages, the chances of standing out increase as far as your creativity can take you.
Manage with scale in mind
With more and more teams operating remotely, cross-functional collaboration across team members who build web pages is crucial. Many are currently dealing with the limitations that have come from previous CMS platforms having to find workarounds in their workflows to scale production.
A modern CMS makes it easier to assign roles and permissions that keep workflows efficient, save time on quality control, and enable more teammates to be productive without unnecessary oversight. There is a shift occurring across the martech landscape that focuses on empowering all team members to do their best work and the CMS landscape is no different.
Additionally, as teams scale with more people operating in the platform and creating new pages, there is an increased emphasis on maintaining security and compliance throughout. Many are focusing on built-in security capabilities to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Optimize performance for revenue impact
A further trend encompassing martech is data-driven decision making. The modern, visual-first composable CMS incorporates analytics into its framework — whether natively or through integrations.
Marketers are consistently battling against siloed data and trying to access this data often means significant technical resources. The shift we’re seeing is towards a more holistic approach to insights with fewer obstacles in the way, gathering data that optimizes website performance directly in the platform while also fueling campaigns with direct revenue impact.
And with this increased visibility comes experimentation and testing. The website experience as we see it is one that empowers the full lifecycle of the website, including refining and optimizing pages, elements, and design to maximize each interaction at the individual level.
But the ability to properly execute testing and experimentation is bogged down by limitations in traditional CMS platforms that force users to spend more time building and managing their sites. In these scenarios, too much time and technical resource hours are spent on basic needs, hindering progress and insight gathering.
Optimizing your website for a more personalized experience means every visitor interaction has the potential to be a conversion event towards revenue or lead generation. The inability to test and experiment quickly in your CMS is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s imperative for a web team looking to scale and succeed with speed.
AI embedded, not standalone
Optimization is made quicker and easier through AI. But, the difference we’re seeing is that AI has to be embedded into workflows throughout the CMS rather than standing alone as its own product.
When AI isn’t threaded into what teams are doing across the platform, you end up with the homogeneity mentioned above. The future of AI in the CMS is one that integrates seamlessly with the user’s design system to build and grow in the look, feel, and tone of their brand rather than bringing everyone closer together.
In a visual-first, composable CMS like Webflow, AI builds onto your natural workflow to help in content generation and running experiments. This way the process is less complex, but the control is still firmly in the user’s hands.
An integration ecosystem
The final shift we’re seeing in the CMS space is regarding integrations, particularly the ecosystem that comes with it. There’s a reason the martech space has over 14,000 tools. Marketing teams have multiple needs in their tech stack and there isn’t one tool to rule them all.
So, teams are instead looking for the tech stack that (1) works best together, (2) lowers total cost of ownership, and (3) provides enough natively with room for extensibility. For a truly composable CMS to be effective in the modern age of websites, it has to have an extensive partner ecosystem to fit neatly into the tech stack puzzle.
For us, this means finding the right partners that are experts in everything we are not and connecting customers with organizations that create a website experience that meets their needs.
A shift for the better
Forrester’s assessment and findings naming us a Strong Performer are humbling and encouraging.
Web and marketing teams are looking for a better way to build, manage, and optimize their sites. Their expectations are currently not being met by traditional CMS platforms. The path forward allows designers to build, developers to innovate, and marketers to optimize at scale — all in the name of driving conversions and fueling business growth.
The answer is a visual-first, composable CMS like Webflow.
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