Umbraco’s Shift from CMS to Content Platform

 

For a long time, content management systems did their job well. Regardless of vendor, the core promise was the same: create content, manage it, and publish it to a website. That model worked when the website was the primary place people went to get information and engage with a brand. 

 

That assumption no longer holds. 

 

Over the past 18 months, many organizations have seen organic website traffic drop by double-digit percentages. In some cases, the decline has been modest. In others, it has been dramatic. The instinct is often to look at analytics or performance issues, but the underlying cause is more fundamental. People are still asking questions, but they are increasingly getting answers before they ever reach a website. 

 

Someone searches Google and sees an AI-generated summary. They ask a question in ChatGPT or another tool and get a direct response. In many cases, there is no reason to click through. The website is no longer the guaranteed starting point. 

 

This does not mean websites stop mattering. It does mean that content has to work in more places than just a page on a site. 

 

For years, people found information in a fairly predictable way. They searched for a question, scanned a list of results, clicked a link, and read a page. CMS platforms were designed around that behavior, and SEO became the primary way organizations made sure their content was found. 

 

That flow still exists, but it is no longer reliable as the default path. 

 

Tools that summarize answers or respond directly to questions do not return full pages. They pull specific pieces of information, such as definitions, steps, policy details, or product attributes, and combine them into an answer without the user ever seeing the page they came from. 

 

If content is not structured clearly, it becomes difficult for those tools to use it correctly. If it is not governed, it becomes risky to expose it at all. At that point, the challenge is no longer about publishing faster or redesigning templates. It is about how content is organized and whether it can be reused with confidence. 

 

Most organizations will live in a mixed reality for some time. Pages still matter. Rankings still matter. But the emphasis is shifting toward ensuring content can be used outside the website just as effectively as it is used on it. 

A content platform is not simply a CMS with APIs. It is a layer that allows content and data to be brought together, structured intentionally, and reused across systems and channels without constantly rebuilding integrations. 

 

Many CMSs, including headless implementations, still organize content around pages, even if those pages are assembled from components. That works well for web delivery but becomes limiting when content needs to support other uses, such as AI tools, product feeds, or internal applications. 

 

A content platform treats content as something that exists independently of where it is displayed. Content is defined once, related to other data, and then used in different ways depending on the context. 

 

One pattern that shows up consistently in customer and partner advisory boards across software vendors is the gap between feedback and follow-through. Many groups surface real challenges and thoughtful recommendations. What is less common is seeing those conversations materially change the direction of the product. 

 

Umbraco has been different in that regard. As an open-source platform, it has maintained a tighter feedback loop with its partners and customers. Over the last five or six years, as organizations have tried to drive outcomes across more systems and channels, Umbraco has evolved alongside them. 

 

With Compose, Umbraco extends beyond the role of a CMS. It takes on responsibility for how content and data are brought together and made usable across the organization. 

 

Compose can be hard to explain, partly because it addresses a problem many organizations do not recognize until something starts to break. 

 

Teams often assume their systems can be connected when the need arises. In practice, those connections are fragile and expensive to maintain. Over time, data gets duplicated, and new initiatives require custom work just to get started. 

 

Compose provides a stable place to bring content and data together enabling them to be structured and reused without forcing changes to the source systems. 

 

In higher education, faculty and staff information often lives in internal systems that were never designed to support real-time APIs. Compose allows those systems to provide structured feeds that can be reliably used by the website. 

 

In commerce, product data often needs to be delivered in specific formats to external channels. Compose allows organizations to assemble that data without changing how the underlying systems manage it. 

 

In regulated industries, approved content may need to appear in many forms. Compose allows those uses to draw from the same governed source. 

 

For years, CMS decisions were driven by feature lists. Organizations bought platforms that promised to do it all and then used only a portion of what they paid for. 

 

Umbraco has long taken a different approach, allowing teams to adopt what they need and add more over time. That flexibility is now a strategic advantage as change accelerates. 

 

Compose supports a posture where organizations define their own path, adopt new capabilities when ready, and avoid being tied to someone else’s roadmap. 

The CMS conversation is changing because the environment around it has changed. People are getting answers in new places. Content is being used in ways it was never designed for. And organizations are being asked to adapt faster than their platforms comfortably allow. 

 

 Umbraco’s shift toward becoming a content platform reflects that reality. The introduction of Compose is not about adding another feature or competing on a checklist. It is about acknowledging that content and data now need to move more freely across systems, channels, and use cases as those needs emerge. 

 

 This is less about predicting the future and more about staying responsive to it. As markets, tools, and expectations continue to evolve in real time, platforms that make change easier will matter more than platforms that try to define the end state upfront..Umbraco’s direction signals an understanding of that shift, and a willingness to evolve alongside the organizations using it.