11 must-have CMS features in 2025: What do content teams need to stay cutting-edge?

Highlights

In order to deliver exceptional digital experiences to your buyers, your CMS should include these 11 critical features:

• Omnichannel by design: Deliver content seamlessly across websites, mobile apps, email, social media, IoT, AR/VR and more.
• Localization support: Deploy content to customers in their own languages.
• Fast CDN delivery: Content is cached and served closer to the end user, enabling fast, flicker-free personalization.
• Powerful content publishing and editing: Templates and live preview functionality that reduce content teams' reliance on engineering teams.
• Intuitive developer tools: Test and stage across unlimited environments without impacting live website data.
• Roles and approval workflows: Team roles and safeguards to prevent unintentional updates and streamline the flow of content.
• Data-driven analytics and reporting: Measure the engagement, performance and conversions of your content.
• Real-time customer data activation and personalization: Capturing visitor data and processing it in real-time to offer personalized experiences.
• Intelligent integrations: Turnkey integrations with the software and apps you use the most, making your CMS your true content control center.
• Automations that connect and optimize: Reusable, multi-step automations that drive efficiency and reduce manual and repetitive work.
• AI to work smarter, not harder: Enhance content creation with practical AI tools such as real-time translation, summaries, and idea generation.

Headless, decoupled, traditional…which kind of Content Management System is best for your business?

If you’ve been asking yourself this question, it’s time to get a deeper understanding of CMS features. After all, the most important part of a purchasing decision is not what category it falls under in the market, but whether the technology will meet your day-to-day needs. 

Let’s look at 11 differentiators of a modern CMS, and why they make all the difference when it comes to business outcomes.

Related: Is it time for your business to modernize its CMS? Find out here.

1. Omnichannel by design

Today’s digital experiences happen everywhere, from websites and mobile apps to social media, email, IoT, AR and VR. An omnichannel CMS delivers content seamlessly across all of these channels, without the need to replicate manual efforts. 

With a headless CMS, the separation of the front end and back end means that content is stored and managed independently of how it’s displayed. This allows content to be reused and personalized across different channels, promising consistent messaging and user experience everywhere, while meeting the customer where they are. 

Using Contentstack’s headless CMS, Sky Italy now serves 80% of its traffic and 70% of sales via mobile, thanks to omnichannel content capabilities. 

2. Localization support

If your audience is global, you need to be able to reach them in their own words. To enable digital experiences around the world, and offer support to customers in their own languages and locales, your CMS should make deploying content across multiple geographies easy. 

On a traditional CMS, manually replicating content across all languages is the only option. This means in the best-case scenario, content has to be published asynchronously, and more realistically, the resources involved in publishing across regions means it often never happens at all. 

Oetiker leverages Contentstack to quickly pull in content, replicate it across languages and cut down on the lead time to launch. “We can just publish English content and backfill with different languages as necessary,” Devon Warren, Head of Digital Marketing Operations at Oetiker, said. “We’ve even added a language or two since we migrated!” 

3. Fast CDN delivery

Another feature to look out for when you’re CMS window shopping is the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that static assets and dynamic content can be cached and served closer to the end user.

This means content loads faster for users anywhere in the world, enabling flicker-free personalization, reducing latency and improving omnichannel performance. Using a CDN also provides accurate analytics and intelligence, improved SEO rankings, and adds a layer of resilience against cyberattacks. 

If fast-loading content is a priority for your company, we highly recommend investing in a CMS with built-in front-end hosting. Contentstack’s Launch is a front-end hosting and deployment platform for websites that’s built directly into the Contentstack CMS. When your team creates a new project in Launch and links it with your GitHub repository, Launch will pick that code and deploy your website instantly with no, or minimal, down time.

One great example of the benefits of faster content delivery can be seen with Mattel’s American Girl Doll experience. Managed wholly through the CMS, configurable content loads at lightning-fast speeds even for users without high-bandwidth devices. Optimized user experience has led to a 4.9x higher conversion rate on web and 9.5x higher conversion rate on mobile than before adopting a headless CMS. 

4. Powerful content publishing and editing

One of the most common challenges we hear with monolithic or legacy CMS solutions is the over-reliance on engineering teams to make even small content changes or updates. However, some CMS tools offer too much flexibility, leaving content editors struggling to know where to begin. This is where you need to deep-dive into what your CMS vendor offers in terms of editing and publishing using Visual Building tools. 

Modular Blocks is one of Contentstack’s most robust features, allowing editors to dynamically create, modify and reuse components with drag and drop ease, alongside smart templates that avoid the blank page. Live Preview then provides the no-risk visualization of how content will appear to the end-user in a preview environment, so content managers can feel confident before they hit publish.

Timeline provides a chronological view of your content so you can easily see how future updates will look, previewing and comparing different versions side by side, while Audience Impersonation lets editors step into the perspective of any audience segment and see what they will see. Together, these features ensure updates are delivered as intended, eliminate developer dependencies, and allow content updates to be real-time. 

Pirelli serves as a fantastic example of how quickly content can be migrated and kept up-to-date. As well as migrating 218 sites in just 10 months, ongoing operating time has been cut in half. Pirelli’s team can now adapt their catalog, homepages, SEO and product pages for 50 websites across 25 languages with a very short time to market. 

5. Intuitive developer tools

Make sure to consider how your CMS serves different teams across the business, or you’ll end up with siloed tools being preferred and utilized by different departments across an organization. As well as freeing up time for developers by empowering content managers and editors to self-serve, a modern CMS helps developers with their day-to-day workload. 

One feature of a robust solution is the ability to publish content to unlimited environments including development, testing, staging and production. Personalized developer tools should include a custom Command Line Interface (CLI), DataSync tools to reduce API calls, and content migration functionality.

In Contentstack, features are built with collaboration in mind, such as Branches, which allows developers to update and test content models without impacting live website data. Instead of developers and content managers going head to head, they can work concurrently on different copies of the same content, avoiding data loss and bottlenecks.

Contentstack's Developer Hub lets you expand the platform with your own custom apps. With boilerplate templates, a consistent component library, and flexible UI locations — like sidebar widgets or entry extensions — you can build anything from lightweight UI features to deeply integrated applications.

To make it even easier for your company’s developers and content team, look for a solution that offers a versatile web framework, preserving some of the best parts of a traditional CMS by offering custom themes, plugins and hooks, configuration management, cache management, a query engine, custom routing, and offline content synchronization. 

6. Roles and approval workflows

In a complex business where teams work across different time zones and geographies, it’s so easy for staff to accidentally break things. It’s crucial that your CMS allows you to define and set-up workflows and approval processes for content management and publishing. 

This not only stops anyone from making a wrong move, it also streamlines the flow of content from one stage to another, speeding up content creation and approval processes, getting content live faster, and facilitating automation across adjacent technologies.

Bonus: Look for a CMS that allows you to assign roles to teams, rather than each user individually. Being able to assign organization-level and stack-level roles means all users within a team will be given the same permissions, improving collaboration and allowing new hires to hit the ground running. 

7. Data-driven analytics and reporting

A modern CMS should make it easy for you to enhance content organization and handle complex data structures at scale. A byproduct of this is a boost to reporting and analytics, as user interactions can be tracked accurately across all channels to measure engagement, performance and conversion metrics. 

Experience analytics are crucial, helping you to understand how users interact with content, and discovering their behavior, preferences and motivations. Look for a CMS that helps you identify which content is performing best, highlight user preferences, optimize content for specific audience segments and cohorts, and test and refine your personalization strategies by experimenting and A/B testing to iterate for better results. 

Based on data-driven recommendations, Industry Dive has boosted conversions by more than 40% for specific campaigns, using customer intelligence about how people are engaging with their content to create better experiences for the end user. The company can now feel confident they are delivering the right content to the right readers at the right time. 

8. Real-time customer data activation and personalization

With all this data to hand, the next step is personalization. Personalized experiences are no longer a nice-to-have, they are an expectation from your customers. This means first capturing data across an omnichannel customer journey, and then collecting and processing that data in real-time to offer personalized content that meets their needs. 

The more real-time your data insights, the easier it becomes to deploy personalization done right. By offering your content exactly when the customer is ready, you can drive conversions and customer loyalty. Real-time data activation improves efficiencies through immediate adjustments, enhances customer experience by engaging the user with personalized truly relevant interactions, and provides ultimate business agility as teams can test and iterate on the fly.

Speak to your CMS vendor about its Customer Data Platform (CDP) capabilities, including: 

• Unification of customer data: Could you pull data from multiple sources into individual dynamic profiles that can automatically and instantly update as customers interact with your brand? 

• Advanced segmentation: Can the platform leverage predictive and behavior-based audience segments so that you can build hyper-targeted campaigns? 

• Personalized omnichannel experiences: Would you be able to deliver a personalized experience to your customers across disparate channels such as web, email, mobile and ads? 

• Analytics and reporting: Which kinds of actionable insights should you expect from the platform, and how have other customers used these to quickly execute strategic campaigns? 

Once you have that information, your CMS also needs to provide the tools to put the personalization in place, adjusting content for different audience segments and maximizing content reuse where it will have the greatest impact. 

We love how Leesa has inserted targeted product recommendations and links to personalized product pages based on customer or prospect behavior on-site, which allows the brand to be mature and intentional about how it delivers content to the user. 

Related: Activate first-party data, deliver real-time personalization, and orchestrate seamless cross-channel experiences with Contentstack’s real-time CDP.

9. Intelligent and easy integrations

With the current pace of technology, there’s no way of knowing what features will be must-haves tomorrow. That’s why a powerful integration engine with hundreds of turnkey integrations that are ready to plug and play is so important. 

Some CMS solutions will offer static, non-customizable integrations, but beware of extensive updates, management and maintenance. The right CMS will allow you to easily take advantage of a marketplace of integrations that just work, so you can move from developing features in-house, and deliver sophisticated capabilities at speed and scale. 

MongoDB saw the value immediately when adopting Contentstack.

“Coming from an in-house CMS, our background for several years was focused on developing CMS features,” Subi Babu, Engineering Lead at MongoDB, said. “Now, we can use the Marketplace and get plug-and-play integrations, which is exciting. We’re already using Smartling [for language translation and localization], experimenting with BrandFolder [for digital asset management], and down the line, we’re looking to leverage the Optimizely connector [for digital experimentation.]”

10. Automations that connect and optimize

The ability to create or leverage reusable, multi-step automations tightens operational efficiencies and reduces manual and repetitive work for content and development teams. 

Look for a CMS that provides connectors to easily integrate with your third-party tools in areas such as e-commerce, DAM and AI, and that offers automated front end hosting and event-based automations, too. Consider whether your CMS will allow you to benefit from ready-to-go, customizable automations to suit your needs, the way that Contentstack offers “recipes” from its Marketplace, ready-equipped with predefined workflow triggers, third-party connectors, and steps for action. 

BOSE uses Contentstack Automate to drive operational efficiencies and to bring data into Salesforce’s SFRA tool, which is their Storefront Reference Architecture. They can then automatically deliver out to the customer after making a GraphQL call. Common connectors for everything they need allows them to get on with what they need to do — and all without reliance on DevOps. 

11. AI to work smarter, not harder

Every CMS vendor you speak to will drop AI into the conversation, but what AI features and tools are game-changers, and which are just smoke and mirrors? An AI Assistant for example should be able to take manual tasks off your hands with ease, enhancing content creation with features such as real-time translation, creation of simple summaries, and idea generation — all from within the authoring tool itself. 

AI should also be able to simplify your workflows everywhere within the CMS, for example adding AI capabilities to your automations, or leveraging a Brand Kit with key brand assets including Voice Profiles to set specific rules for tone, style and language. 

One great example of the kind of benefits you should be able to achieve from AI can be seen from Golfbreaks, who achieved a 78% faster time-to-market by automatically generating localized and on-brand descriptive listings and snippets for its courses. Once generated, Golfbreaks could also use AI to automatically categorize each listing to improve discoverability. By leveraging Contentstack Brand Kit, all content is set to the right tone and style for the company, and will accurately match the format for certain audiences, including localized spellings and terms. 

Looking for CMS features that empower teams, accelerate workflows and maximize reach?

From omnichannel publishing and localization tools to lightning-fast performance, intuitive editing, and powerful AI and personalization, Contentstack is a modern headless CMS that checks all the boxes, helping teams move faster, collaborate better, and deliver exceptional digital experiences. 

If you're serious about scaling content management without limits — and getting real business results — it's time to see it in action. Book your demo here, or have your developer team start a free trial to begin building in Contentstack today.