Without a modern CMS in place, CTOs end up investing significant engineering resources in maintaining existing systems and websites rather than building new capabilities or innovative experiences. Development teams are constantly juggling security patches, plugin updates, server maintenance, compliance requirements, and content performance optimizations — just to keep the lights on. This creates a “maintenance-first” mindset that forces CTOs to be reactive rather than strategic when choosing a CMS. 

To overcome this mindset, CMS providers have introduced new offerings to reduce maintenance overhead, but these often create new trade-offs. For example, headless CMSs and digital experience platforms (DXPs) promise maintenance efficiency through minimal plugin dependencies and modular architecture, but limit marketing agility and creative freedom. This leaves CTOs in a lurch: should they prioritize lower maintenance overhead or operational velocity and flexibility? 

With Webflow’s Website Experience Platform (WXP), CTOs don’t have to choose — they can finally treat their CMS as strategic infrastructure. The platform handles security, performance, and updates automatically, while giving marketing teams the independence to publish or update content without requiring significant engineering resources, freeing up bandwidth for innovation.

What CTOs need from a CMS

For CTOs, a CMS is a critical component of their technical infrastructure, providing marketing agility (e.g., quickly shipping content, viewing campaign analytics) without introducing significant technical risks, resource allocation concerns, and operational overhead (e.g., performance challenges, security breaches). Specifically, they want: 

• Minimal maintenance overhead: A CMS that’s easy to integrate and maintain saves development time on tech debt or maintenance. This makes it simpler for CTOs to staff against the CMS and manage budgets, creating room for innovation. 
• Enterprise-grade performance and scalability: As traffic grows, CTOs want a CMS that scales with them, rather than requiring custom database optimizations or hosting management. 
• Built-in compliance and security: Many teams lack the expertise to handle specialized security and meet standards such as GDPR or SOC2. Therefore, CTOs want a platform that already meets these requirements. 
• Seamless collaboration: Modern teams need real-time collaboration capabilities to effectively work together and ship more quickly, rather than stringing together other tools. 
• Developer-friendly APIs: To innovate, development teams need full-featured, developer-friendly APIs to extend CMS functionality and integrate with other key systems. 

Common CMS challenges CTOs face

Unfortunately, most CMSs fail to meet the above requirements. Instead, CTOs must navigate persistent scalability and security concerns, tech debt, cross-functional collaboration friction, and limited integration flexibility. 

Performance and scalability constraints

As traffic increases, many websites encounter performance constraints, leading to slow page loads that negatively impact conversion rates and SEO rankings. There’s also a risk of downtime, which can cost as much as $1 million per hour for large enterprises. 

Some development teams solve this problem by modifying core CMS files or adding performance optimization plugins. However, this patchwork solution requires deep expertise and results in fragile systems that can break during updates (creating more technical overhead) or limit functionality (limiting marketing agility). 

Additionally, as content volume grows, marketing teams might struggle to manage their content pipeline independently. As a result, CTOs need to make staffing tradeoffs between supporting marketing teams or slowing down marketing initiatives (which can have a negative business impact).  

High maintenance overhead and technical debt

Traditional CMSs are often built on legacy systems (like old PHP codebases) and rely heavily on plugins and integrations to extend basic functionality. As a result, the CMS becomes a complex web of patches, plugins, and custom code, forcing development teams to manage compatibility across dozens of components that were not designed to work together. For instance, CMS core upgrades are rarely simple tasks, requiring a backward compatibility audit of all the plugins, themes, and custom integrations, as well as workarounds for any incompatibilities. 

This maintenance overhead also extends to hosting. Traditional CMSs often require development teams to manage their entire hosting stack, including maintaining web servers, databases, and runtime environments, to ensure optimal performance and security. Teams are also responsible for backup and disaster recovery planning, including setting up automatic backup and monitoring (and fixing any issues). 

As a result, CTOs must invest more engineering resources and budget towards servers, premium plugins, and security tooling to keep the existing CMS functional. Over time, this makes seemingly affordable solutions expensive. 

Security and compliance risks

CMS platforms present attractive targets for attackers because a single vulnerability can simultaneously impact thousands of websites. Further, these systems are often built on open-source frameworks, which makes it easy for attackers to study the code and uncover vulnerabilities. This results in a persistent security risk: according to research by Storyblok, 32% of enterprises suffer a CMS-related security breach every single week.

Therefore, CTOs must allocate engineering resources to continually monitor threats across CMS platforms and third-party plug-ins and patch any discovered vulnerabilities. However, many teams lack the expertise or bandwidth to handle all of these responsibilities at onc, creating gaps that increase the likelihood of a security breach. When breaches occur, the consequences are severe. On average, a breach costs $4.88 million while damaging the brand’s reputation (which can take years to rebuild). 

Additionally, traditional CMS platforms weren't designed with modern regulatory compliance in mind. They lack built-in support for meeting the key requirements of regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC2. For example, these platforms can’t typically generate audit trails showing who accessed what data or handle user deletion requests, required by GDPR. 

Limited integration and API support

Marketing teams often want to add third-party integrations (like a CRM, analytics software, and automation tools) to measure outcomes of campaigns and iterate on marketing strategy. However, traditional CMSs have limited plugins and APIs that don’t fully support the marketing integration use case. To bridge this gap, CTOs must allocate significant resources to build and maintain custom integrations, which takes away resources from innovation and core product development. 

For example, let’s say that the marketing team wants to build a personalized experience to show customized content based on visitor attributes (stored in a CRM). This would require custom development to integrate the CRM and CMS, unless the CMS supports content personalization based on CRM data. 

Cross-functional collaboration friction

Modern marketing, design, and development teams must collaborate effectively to ship content quickly. Oftentimes, teams work across multiple tools: Slack for communication, Figma for design handoffs, Google Docs for content review, and email for final approvals. This creates a fragmented workflow where important details get lost between platforms, resulting in inefficient handoffs and miscommunication, which can introduce or deepen cross-collaboration friction. 

To avoid this challenge, teams can use real-time collaboration tools to work together directly in the CMS. However, most traditional CMSs lack in-built support for handoff workflows, version history, or collaborative editing, making it challenging to create streamlined workflows. For CTOs, this results in decreased developer productivity and slower velocity. 

How Webflow solves common CMS challenges

Traditional CMSs force CTOs into an impossible choice: reduce maintenance overhead to free up developer resources for innovation, or enable marketing teams to move quickly and independently. 

Webflow eliminates this tradeoff through an integrated platform that automatically handles security, performance, and compliance while empowering marketing teams to publish or update content independently. As a result, development teams can focus on innovative projects and website experiences in and out of the CMS, treating it more like a strategic asset rather than a burden. Other benefits include: 

• Consolidated platform: Everything in Webflow lives in one integrated platform, eliminating the constant cycle of plugin updates, security patches, and compatibility fixes that plague traditional CMSs. The platform simplifies the tech stack, as organizations no longer need subscriptions for other design, CMS, hosting, and optimization tooling. This translates to cost savings with some Webflow customers reporting savings of up to $850,000 by decommissioning outdated systems, eliminating subscription costs, and reallocating resources. 
• Reduced engineering tickets: Webflow's visual, composable CMS empowers marketers to create and update content without developer support. As a result, engineering teams can focus on core product development and innovation, leading to faster deployment cycles and measurable business value. 
• Built-in security and compliance: Webflow is backed by enterprise-grade security, including SSO, advanced DDoS protection, a reliable hosting infrastructure, and more. Additionally, we meet common compliance requirements, like SOC2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR, making it seamless to meet regulatory requirements. 
• Enterprise-grade performance and hosting: Webflow manages hosting for your CMS through partnerships with AWS and Cloudflare, ensuring 99.99% uptime and automatic site backups. This optimization extends to performance as well. Webflow Enterprise supports over 100,000 CMS items (along with built-in performance optimizations like lazy loading images and CDN hosting), so your site's performance scales with your content. 
• Developer-friendly APIs and integrations: Install an app from the Webflow Apps marketplace or utilize our full-featured headless CMS APIs to build custom integrations. For instance, common actions like creating, reading, updating, and deleting content are optimized for performance. 
• Streamlined cross-functional workflows: Technical teams can feel secure with Webflow’s built-in version control that allows for quick rollbacks when needed. This way marketers are empowered to own their projects while technical teams know everything will flow smoothly. 

Scale content without scaling technical complexity

A modern CMS like Webflow can uplevel both marketing and development teams. Through real-time collaboration workflows and a visual, composable CMS, technical teams can focus on complex projects while feeling secure in knowing their site is easily managed. Meanwhile, the platform automatically handles security, compliance, and maintenance (without incurring additional fees), freeing up developers to focus on core product development and website innovation. This enhanced marketing agility and streamlined tech stack deliver measurable cost savings, driving business growth.

Ready to transform your team’s workflows? Learn more about Webflow for developers and technical teams.