When a CMS makes sense — and when it doesn't
How unnecessary content management adds complexity instead of flexibility.
Content management systems are often treated as a baseline requirement for any digital project. The logic seems intuitive: giving non-technical users the ability to update a website without touching code is an objective positive. It promises speed, autonomy, and a lower reliance on engineering resources for day-to-day operations.
However, in the context of building stable, long-term digital systems, a CMS is not just a tool; it is a high-stakes engineering decision. It introduces a permanent layer of complexity, a new set of security vulnerabilities, and a structural rigidity that can eventually become a bottleneck rather than an accelerator. Choosing when to implement a CMS—and when to avoid one—is a matter of balancing immediate convenience against long-term reliability.
The Mirage of Total Control
The primary promise of a CMS is independence. A marketing team or a founder can change a headline, swap an image, or publish a post at 2:00 AM without needing a developer to merge a pull request. This is a powerful advantage for high-velocity environments where content is the primary product.
But this independence comes at a cost. A CMS is a dynamic application that sits between your content and your users. It requires its own hosting environment, its own database, and its own maintenance schedule. Every update to the CMS core, its plugins, or its underlying engine is a potential break-point for the live site.
Furthermore, many organizations find that the total control they sought is rarely exercised. In practice, content updates on many professional sites happen once a quarter or even less frequently. When the frequency of change is low, the overhead of maintaining a CMS—patching security holes, managing user permissions, and troubleshooting database connections—often outweighs the minor friction of a code-based update.
The Architecture of Maintenance
At Deltum, we view every dependency as a liability until proven otherwise. A CMS is one of the heaviest dependencies a system can carry. When we choose to use one, we are acknowledging that the cost of its maintenance is lower than the cost of manual updates.
When you use a CMS, you are also tethered to its schema. If the business needs to restructure how services are presented or how data is categorized, you don’t just update an HTML template or a JSON file. You must migrate structural data within the CMS database. What was originally sold as a “flexible” solution can quickly become a rigid cage that makes deep structural changes slow and expensive.
Static content, managed through version control (like Git), offers a different kind of stability. The content lives alongside the code. It is peer-reviewed, easily rollable back, and inherently secure because there is no live database to query on every request. For systems where quality and uptime are paramount, the requirement for a developer to “touch the code” is not a bug; it is a protective layer that ensures every change is intentional and tested.
When a CMS Earns Its Place
A CMS is not a “bad” tool; it is simply a specialized one. It earns its place when the utility it provides justifies the maintenance debt. We consider three primary factors when deciding if a CMS is appropriate for a project:
1. Velocity of Change
If you are publishing daily or weekly—blog posts, case studies, news updates—a CMS is essential. The friction of code-based updates would stifle the business and create a developer bottleneck. If you update your “About” page or your value propositions twice a year, a CMS is almost certainly an unnecessary burden.
2. The Feedback Loop
Who is responsible for the content, and how many people are involved in the approval process? If content must pass through multiple non-technical stakeholders for internal review and refinement within a visual interface, a CMS provides the necessary collaborative environment and audit trail.
3. Data Reusability and Distribution
If the content is “headless”—meaning it needs to be consumed not just by a website, but also by a mobile app, a newsletter system, and third-party APIs—a structured CMS acts as a single source of truth. In these scenarios, the complexity of the CMS is shared across multiple delivery channels, providing a net gain in organizational efficiency.
Choosing the Middle Path
The choice is no longer binary between a heavy legacy CMS and hard-coded HTML. Modern web architecture allows for a more nuanced approach that prioritizes stability without sacrificing all flexibility.
“Content Collections” in frameworks like Astro allow us to treat Markdown or MDX files as a structured database. Developers get the stability of static files and the power of version control, while editors can use simple text editors or lightweight Git-based UI layers to manage the content. This approach provides many of the benefits of traditional content management with almost none of the operational risk associated with running a live database-backed application.
Conclusion
The decision to use a CMS should be driven by operational reality, not by industry habit. A system that is easy to update but hard to maintain is not truly flexible; it is fragile. Over time, the cost of that fragility often surpasses any initial savings in developer time.
In engineering, simplicity is the ultimate hedge against time. Before adding a content management layer to your next project, ask if you are solving a genuine bottleneck or simply adding a layer of management that will eventually require its own manager. Sometimes, the most flexible system is the one with the fewest moving parts.