In the world of publishing, “just use a CMS” is often said with the confidence of someone who’s never had to untangle six content types, three newsletters, a custom paywall, and a live election night landing page — all before lunch.
The truth is, many content management systems are built to store content, not to help you move fast. They’re not designed to handle 10 million+ pageviews under pressure, and they definitely don’t support editors, marketers, designers, and engineers working in the same space with competing priorities.
Having worked with media platforms serving millions of readers — from Oprah Daily to The Hill to Hearst’s digital ecosystem — we’ve learned that a good CMS solves real operational challenges that can make or break a newsroom.
Real Editorial Workflows Don’t Fit Templates
Newsrooms don’t operate like software teams. Many CMS platforms assume your content is linear, structured, and predictable. When, in fact, the real editorial work is messy. There are embargoes to manage, legal reviews to navigate, and sometimes there are editors who won’t approve something “just because”.
A good CMS adapts to how your team actually works. It supports flexible approval processes, enables rapid edits, and manages media assets without requiring developer intervention.
Performance Under Pressure Isn’t Optional
A compelling story means nothing, if your site crashes under traffic. Whether it’s scaling from 3 thousand to 50 million daily readers (true story with our customer “The Hill”) during major events, your CMS must hold up when it matters most.
Effective systems don’t slow down during peak moments. They prioritize performance through smart caching and real-time publishing capabilities. Editors need to schedule, update, or kill stories, and see changes go live instantly without waiting for deployments or hoping the servers will hold up.
Modern Content Goes Far Beyond Articles
Today’s media landscape isn’t built from Word documents. Publishers create live blogs, interactive polls, video embeds, data visualizations, image carousels, and subscription prompts that are all governed by editorial standards and distribution requirements.
If your CMS can’t handle rich content blocks without technical intervention, you are limiting your storytelling potential. Complex layouts, personalization features, and multilingual content should be manageable by editorial teams, not constant development projects.
A good CMS supports your format, voice and growth trajectory without requiring workarounds.
SEO and Distribution Should Be Built In, Not Bolted On
Based on our two decades of experience — the right CMS architecture can directly impact business outcomes.
Every minute counts when publishing across multiple channels. Too many CMS platforms treat SEO as an afterthought, analytics as someone else’s problem, and social media previews as optional features.
Your CMS should actively help your content reach readers. This means streamlined meta tag management, headline testing capabilities, fast AMP rendering, intelligent internal linking, and channel-specific publishing options.
Scaling Means More Than Handling Traffic
At the end of the day, growth is always about serving more readers, yes. But it is also about managing larger teams, multiple brands, diverse markets and evolving requirements without overhauling your workflows every six months.
A robust CMS grows with you. It handles content syndication, manages complex permissions, enforces regional compliance and supports design updates across multiple properties, while maintaining fast load times during breaking news.
The Hill’s platform evolution over the past 15 years illustrates this perfectly. We drove them through multiple reinvention phases — from static HTML to Joomla, then Drupal, and finally to AWS cloud hosting with dynamic scaling and custom caching. The result? Daily active readers grew from 3 thousand to 50 million. Their CMS didn’t just survive that 15,000x growth in visits — it enabled it.
The Real Test
You can make almost any CMS feel adequate for a few weeks. Then the real test comes when breaking news hits during the Super Bowl, when a newsletter fails to send, or when an editor accidentally breaks the homepage.
That’s when thoughtful system design reveals itself. A good CMS makes publishing faster, editing safer, distribution smarter, and traffic spikes less terrifying. Newsrooms face even more pressure with AI-assisted content creation, real-time social media integration, and increasingly complex audience engagement requirements. The best platforms are designed for when things go sideways, because in the media, they inevitably will.
In summary, if you are growing your CMS, we advise to transition from templates early, test for performance, make sure your CMS can handle a variety of content types, build for scale, and adapt with the times as our top 5.
