Note: This article was last updated on August 13, 2025.
 

Key Takeaways

• Exceptional website experiences are the standard, not the exception.

• A Content Management System (CMS) is software that enables users to build a website without code and is the most common technology used to build websites.

• An enterprise website is designed to handle the complex requirements and structures of an enterprise business.

• Prioritize security, accessibility, and scalability as crucial components of an enterprise website.

• A DXP typically includes out-of-the-box capabilities that go beyond traditional CMS functionality so you can create multichannel digital experiences and consolidate your tech stack.

Everybody Needs a Website

After the dawn of the internet in the mid-90s, the business world started scrambling to go online too. Initially, companies created websites to complement in-person experiences. Having a website was a flex in itself, no matter how questionable the design. 

Over time, however, digital strategy has moved from the sidelines to front and center. Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of your organization’s website.

Your website isn’t—or shouldn’t be—just a glorified advertising mouthpiece that ticks another digital marketing box. You need a website that is an authentic and engaging introduction to your products, services, and corporate identity. As Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, once put it, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” And in today’s digital-first era, that brand knowledge comes from your website.

After all, websites influence 97% of buyers before they make a purchase decision. And even if, for instance, you’re operating in the public sector for citizens who won’t be buying from you directly, your web presence should still communicate clearly who you are, what you do, and how to accomplish specific tasks. 

The most effective websites are those that captivate visitors and serve regular users effectively.

What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

Almost 70% of active websites have been built using a Content Management System (CMS).

A CMS is software that enables users to build and manage websites without code. CMSes drastically decrease go-to-market times and reduce maintenance costs. With a CMS, web developers don’t need to use a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but can instead take advantage of user-friendly functionality to create and edit content, pages, and sites quickly.

Common Features of a Content Management System

What Is an Enterprise Website?

Most companies, enterprise businesses included, have software like a CMS that can handle the premise of captivating visitors and serving regular users to a certain extent. But there’s a difference between a website for your enterprise and an enterprise-level website.

Enterprise businesses are typically large businesses of around 500+ employees that have complex structures and requirements, often but not exclusively B2B. So an enterprise-level website is a website specifically designed for these organizations that adequately addresses the complexity and requirements of the business itself with the right functionality. 

Enterprise websites act as the central hub for all digital touchpoints, including mobile applications and even social media. In order to maintain a consistent brand identity, an enterprise website should connect these touchpoints together through seamless integration. 

Important Elements of an Enterprise Website

• Support for multinational corporations with translation and localization tools.

• Information and resources that can be personalized to a variety of audiences including end users, customers, business partners, and suppliers.

• Strong architecture that can accommodate large traffic volume.

• Sophisticated data management that processes user and visitor data safely and in compliance with regulations.

• SEO tools that help search engines surface relevant search results.

At the heart of a successful enterprise website is providing a fantastic user experience, measured in metrics like engagement and conversion rates.

Enterprise Web Design

An important part of UX is how well your CMS or other website software handles best practices for enterprise website design. 

Best Practices for Enterprise Website Design

• A design system that helps control brand consistency across large teams.

• Mobile responsiveness that adapts according to screen size and offers compelling, user-friendly experiences on all devices.

• Optimization for page speed. Most users now expect pages to load within three seconds or less. 40% of visitors abandon your website if it takes longer.

All of these elements are important for building a website that reflects your needs. In the rest of this post, we’ll dive deeper into three additional key components of an enterprise website that your current website software must address: security, accessibility, and scalability.

3 Key Components of an Enterprise-Level Website

The trifecta of security, accessibility, and scalability, when handled well, can ensure your website truly meets the complex standards of your business. Read on to find out if your current technology measures up.

Security: Take a Thorough and Proactive Approach

Every day, around 30,000 websites get hacked. That adds up to almost 1 million websites per month.

Those are sobering numbers given how many industries are protecting sensitive user and business data. And if your website and hosted applications can’t afford unexpected downtime, security should also be top of mind when evaluating the effectiveness of your website software. 

Most website software providers have the basics down, like encrypting web traffic and adding MFA and Federated Authentication. But not all prioritize security adequately.

So what should a truly secure website platform offer? 

Key Security Business Needs

• Certified protection. While you have to follow security best practices when building your website, certifications confirm the platform’s secure foundation, allowing you to concentrate on your website’s specific security needs rather than addressing platform vulnerabilities. Key certifications include ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 (Type 1 & 2) for general security, ISO/IEC 27017 and CSA STAR (Level 1 & 2) for cloud security, and ISO/IEC 27018 and HIPAA for data privacy. (HIPAA only applies to the healthcare industry.)

• Sophisticated user access control. Many businesses may need to go beyond the standard roles basic website software offers and create custom roles that grant highly specific permissions to ensure only the right users access the right content or edit that content. No one should be able make changes without authorization, whether accidentally or maliciously in the case of a cybercriminal. This is important whether you’re a university differentiating between administrators, professors, and students or a manufacturer with a different microsite for each of your dealers.

• Application safeguards. Layers, layers, layers! Secure your sites like a multi-layered vault, with an IP permission layer, authentication layer, service access policy layer, and a user permission layer. These layers strengthen your website’s defenses.

Enhanced Protection Through Cloud Deployment

Hosting with the right cloud provider can actually be more secure than self-hosting. Does your platform vendor enable PaaS or SaaS deployment?

SaaS and PaaS subscription options can include:

• Protection against cyberattacks. Cloud subscriptions may have intrusion detection systems for constant monitoring and identification of possible threats, DDoS technology that absorbs malicious traffic, and anti-malware technology that keeps malware information stored for recognition purposes.

• Effective vulnerability management. The most secure platform vendors proactively monitor and scan their infrastructure for security vulnerabilities. They should alert customers or apply fixes directly depending on the deployment method. SaaS deployments in particular benefit from the platform vendor’s regular DAST and SAST scans that also help test and expose application vulnerabilities.

• Expert help from a SOC team. A platform vendor’s in-house security team dedicates resources to ensuring the security of their software. With SaaS deployments, SOC teams will take on additional security tasks like performance and log monitoring, scans, and updates and patches.

• Assistance if an attack or outage does happen. Sometimes, either through bad actors or an event like a natural disaster, websites still go down. Most SaaS and PaaS subscription options help restore your website using regular backups and disaster recovery strategies to bring you back ASAP. 

This is really only the start of what you should consider regarding security. For a more in-depth look at how to ensure the security of your website, read 6 Best Practices to Strengthen Website Security.

The Accessibility Imperative: Creating a Better, More User-Friendly Web for All

Nearly two billion people are living with a disability—yet 96% of the top 1 million websites aren’t accessible. And in critical industries like government, news, and ecommerce, for instance, 70% of websites are inaccessible to vision-impaired users.

At a fundamental level, if you want to reach as much of your audience as possible, give all users equal opportunity to visit and perform tasks on your website, and comply with accessibility regulations, meaningful accessibility is non-negotiable. 

As Annie Jean-Baptiste, author and Director of Products for All at Google, noted, “Build for everyone, with everyone.” 

Does your website platform have the right tools to help you build for everyone and meet accessibility requirements? Or have you had to develop cumbersome, custom, even expensive workarounds that are hard to manage?

The right website platform will:

• Prioritize accessibility features. Built-in tools like color contrast, keyboard navigation support, and alternative text generators for images make accessibility easier to achieve.  Additional elements include screen reader compatibility and resizable text.

• Check accessibility for you. Verify your website’s compliance with different standards like WCAG and WAI-ARIA with the platform itself. WCAG includes many broad recommendations for helping make your websites more accessible, while WAI-ARIA publishes definitions and technical documents to help implement website accessibility. 

• Help scale accessibility. You should be able to create accessible templates and components to maintain consistency throughout your website. Accessible templates and components decrease time to market and expand your audience sooner.

• Be accessible itself. Your website platform should accommodate developers with accessibility needs too. This widens your potential talent pool and also increases fairness and inclusion.

Meaningful accessibility places accessibility at the center of your thinking when designing and building your website, which isn’t a possibility if you’re stuck with the wrong platform. 

Scale Your Business—Not Just Your Website

If you haven’t figured out the recipe for digital agility with your website platform, your organization will have trouble growing. 

Empower Business Teams Alongside IT with Low-Code

Can your website software handle the challenges of a rapidly evolving market in order to scale effectively?

If you have a beautiful but static website that requires an MIT degree and ten years of coding experience to know how to update, you’re limited in how you can respond to changing market conditions and the changes of your business itself.

As we mentioned before, website development platforms like CMSes with low-code tools enable business users to do more than just create and edit content. Some even allow you to create new sites and applications without code. With more people in your business able to take on what used to be IT-exclusive tasks, you save time and improve internal efficiency.

Two Practical Examples

• A telecom provider launches a hyper-local campaign for a new fiber rollout in a specific region. With low-code, the provider’s regional marketing team could build a dedicated campaign microsite.

• A manufacturer wants to create and integrate a parts request app into their website that connects with inventory and supply chain systems. With the right technology, the manufacturer could build this app with minimal IT involvement.

Add Commerce and Self-Service to Think Beyond a Simple Website Experience

The example we just used may require the integration of additional commerce capabilities, including a parts catalog, real-time inventory checks, automated purchase order generation upon review, and customer notifications for order and shipment dates. Website builders usually lack built-in commerce, a limitation that becomes apparent as digital experience needs grow. These tools will require you to add additional software that may not integrate smoothly.

Your customers will also need support further along their journey, like self-service options that allow them to act independently when logging in. These authentication experiences can become complex in ways that most website development platforms struggle to handle without costly customizations. 

If you want a single platform with a wide range of out-of-the-box capabilities to build your websites and fulfill other digital experience needs as your business grows, look into a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). 

How DXPs Help You Consolidate Your Tech Stack

A DXP is software, often targeted to enterprises, that combines the functionality of multiple products or tools into one platform to create user journeys with interactive, engaging, and useful content at scale. As digital channels became the main method of communication for most organizations and as users gained an appetite for superior digital experiences, DXPs have risen in popularity.

3 Origin Stories of the Modern DXP

Most DXPs started as a different, more basic technology like a CMS, portal, or commerce tool.

Today, DXPs are often equipped with analytics to understand and optimize the user experience. On the operational side, a DXP can help encourage collaboration among multiple departments like marketing, IT, design, and sales in digital experience creation.

A great DXP will empower you to be flexible and agile in creating truly customer-centric experiences. DXPs go far beyond the traditional CMS; they enable the building of smooth, personalized journeys across websites, portals, and other online and offline touchpoints.

Don’t Settle for a Lackluster Enterprise Website

Your website can’t be an afterthought in your digital marketing strategy. Enterprise websites that act as gateways to critical services must prioritize security, accessibility, and scalability, as these elements are crucial for organizations that want to protect data, reach all users, and support growth.

Geoff Cubitt, CEO of Isobar US, framed it this way: “Companies that invest more in digital transformation actually outperform their peers over time.” Strategic investments in digital strategy and the right technologies are critical to the long-term health and success of your business.

Are you interested in comparing website technologies? Read how headless CMSes, DXPs, and Liferay DXP stack up against one another in seven common use cases.