Umbraco shares five factors affecting digital experience creation in 2025

Odense, Denmark, 11^th December 2024, open-source .NET content management system (CMS) company, Umbraco, has shared its predictions on the major trends affecting vendors and users of web content management systems (CMS) over the coming year.

Hundreds of thousands of public and private sector organisations have built websites on Umbraco’s CMS platform over the past two decades.  It is now the largest open-source .NET CMS in the world, with more than a quarter of a million active contributors, backed by a commercial organisation that provides support, training, and ongoing maintenance of the platform.

As the company prepares to celebrate its 20^th anniversary since becoming open-source, Umbraco foresees AI, personalisation, security and compliance, orchestration, and the demand for demonstrable ROI as the major trends shaping the CMS industry in 2025. In addition, the growing AI burden on computational resources, and their associated CO2 emissions, will drive the requirement for all software providers to reduce their carbon footprint.

Evolution of AI-driven content:

The mass-production of digital content, enabled by generative AI, will revolutionise how CMS platform users curate and personalise content for different audiences, using AI-powered analytics to identify gaps and refine content to meet audience needs and preferences.

Predictive analytics, drawing on multiple data sources, will enable content to be dynamically adapted in line with changing requirements, drastically reducing manual effort for resource-constrained teams.

Paul de Metter, CTO, of Umbraco partner, Conclusion Experience, comments, “In general, I see the trend of dedicated CMS players, like Umbraco, staying focused on their core, composable CMS platform, providing the flexibility for more technologically mature organisations to select and integrate the right external AI tools for real-life use-cases.”

Umbraco also foresees that AI-powered search, integrated with CMS platforms, will increasingly connect users to content tailored to their needs.

“Personalisation has long been the dream of marketers. The challenge has been getting it to work in practice and finding a way to scale it up for the mass market,” observes Mats Persson, CEO of Umbraco, “AI-powered content generation opens the potential for CMS platforms to be used to deliver personalised customer journeys to vast audiences.”

Digital platforms driven to deliver ROI

As marketing budgets continue to be constrained over the next twelve months, Umbraco foresees greater scrutiny of the time-to-value delivered by digital investments, including CMS platforms. Solutions that help organisations to automate processes, control costs, enhance user engagement, and improve conversion rates will come to the fore.

Kyle Brigham, Chief Strategy Officer, Marcel Digital, attests, “As an integrated digital marketing and development agency, we’ve seen first-hand the impact that a new website can have on bottom line revenue. With a rapidly evolving search landscape, an optimised website can quickly produce lucrative ROI, with even small increases in conversion rate, speed, and user experience positively impacting results from marketing efforts. Choosing a CMS with faster deployment and time-to-value will allow organisations to realise and multiply these results sooner.”

Security and compliance will drive demand for robust platforms

Attendees at the NATO Cyber Defence Conference were recently warned of the dual cybersecurity threats presented by state-sponsored adversaries and AI.

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) draw on multiple data sources, presenting a digital attack surface in modern organisations. As core components of DXPs, CMS platforms will be required to incorporate strong security controls as standard. Organisations will increasingly demand robust CMS platforms that aid compliance with regulatory frameworks including the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and emerging data privacy regulations in the US.

Zoja Antuchevic, CEO of Umbraco partner, Solution Lab, asserts, “In an era of escalating cyber threats and tightening privacy regulations, CMS platform providers have no choice but to innovate. Leveraging machine learning for proactive threat detection will become table stakes, as will offering built-in compliance solutions tailored to frameworks like GDPR and the Cyber Resilience Act. The platforms that prioritise security as a business enabler—through features like multi-factor authentication, encryption, and seamless cloud integrations—will set the benchmark for trust and resilience in 2025 and beyond.”

CMS Platforms are in a “Race to the Middle”

As digital transformation continues across all sectors, organisations will increasingly seek CMS platforms that empower their non-technical employees to securely create, update, and manage digital experiences, without heavy reliance on developers, enabling faster time-to-value.

Digital democratisation will drive increased demand for cloud-based, composable CMS platforms that allow smaller companies to meet immediate business needs, with the flexibility to integrate further components as the organisation grows.

A growing number of enterprises will also start to leverage the scalability of these composable platforms to empower non-technical teams to manage content for multiple websites, apps, and international marketing campaigns. This will drive a rise in “universal” CMS platforms that combine accessibility, flexibility, and scalability to serve the needs of organisations small and large.

“Marketers want to be empowered to move quickly, utilising technology to amplify – rather than hinder – their efforts. Historically, marketers have been put into a box, oftentimes feeling the slow crawl towards technological obsolescence as they “put up” with a CMS that refuses to meet their needs. This is typically due to constraints around the technology or a developer-first approach to CMS implementation,” observes Alex Vilmur, Web Development Director, Marcel Digital. “The future will be about meeting both needs. Universal CMS will give developers even more flexibility, and provide marketers with a customised, intuitive user experience with the ability to scale.”

Orchestration of composable digital experiences

Customer interfaces draw on multiple data repositories, including product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM), customer data platforms (CDP) and email marketing. Organisations increasingly seek ways to avoid disjointed experiences, such as customers responding to marketing campaigns, only to find that products are out of stock.

As the hub of content creation and management, the CMS provides the ideal point at which to orchestrate the delivery of content from diverse sources in a way that feels seamless to customers. This requirement has driven increased implementation of composable CMS platforms, that allow organisations to connect PIM, DAM, CDP and other data sources, while presenting an intuitive frontend editor that empowers marketing teams to synchronise content and campaigns.

“Having the flexibility to add or remove CMS features, in-line with current needs and available budget, means that marketers can focus more on marketing, and generating ROI, and less on technical headaches, usability issues, and wasted license costs,” enthuses Matt Sutherland, Head of Technology at true. “Orchestrating all of this in a way that continues to be user-friendly and seamless to CMS platform administrators is golden, and the reason why composable architecture will continue to be the best choice for our clients’ digital experience platforms in 2025.”

The wider application of AI-powered search in CMS platforms will see digital experience orchestration enhancing the delivery of personalised digital experiences that correctly-interpret intent and more readily connect users to the products and information they were looking for.

“Orchestration, dealt with in a low-code SaaS way, will deliver on the original promise of composable DXPs, allowing organisations to select and seamlessly connect the best products for their requirements, with minimal complexity, and no vendor lock-in,” says Filip Bech-Larsen, CTO of Umbraco, “Balancing technical complexity with an intuitive editing experience allows technical and marketing teams to work in a co-ordinated way, that promotes cutting-edge functionality, efficiency, and rapid ROI.”