How to Achieve Digital Agility for Your Website

Key Takeaways

• Digital agility is mission-critical. Without flexible, modern systems, your site becomes a barrier to growth and innovation.

• AI turbocharges your website. From auto-generating content to smart product recommendations, AI helps you adapt faster and delight users.

• Low-code empowers teams. Let non-technical staff build pages, workflows, and apps, freeing IT for bigger projects and speeding up launches.

• Multi-site management keeps brands consistent. Centralized control and cloning functionality mean you can spin up localized sites in hours, not days.

• Headless (and hybrid) delivers true freedom. Decouple content from design so you can push updates to any channel – web, mobile, kiosks – effortlessly.

Why Modernizing Your Website Can’t Wait

Running a complex business today feels like a high-wire act. You're constantly balancing shifting customer expectations, the urge to innovate, and the need to grow smoothly – all while keeping your digital experiences seamless. But here's the kicker: if your website or its underlying software is stuck on old, clunky systems, it's not just a little slowdown; it's a huge roadblock keeping you from adapting and outsmarting the competition.

Digital agility lets you test ideas, tweak fast, and launch updates without second-guessing. Think of it as giving your team access to rapid evolution. Leaders in digital agility are also likely to gain a competitive edge, enabling them to deliver digital experiences that drive real business value more quickly. Nearly half (49%) of the global executives who participated in this organizational agility survey claimed that they spot new digital opportunities faster than their competitors.

"Digital agility is essential to successful transformation, allowing organizations to drive innovation at scale, deliver new initiatives faster and create the experiences that customers want."
Kurt Anderson, Managing Director and API Transformation Leader at Deloitte Consulting, via Forbes

If your current content management technology is holding you back from achieving the agility your business demands, it’s time to consider a modern solution. This blog post explores how AI, low-code, multisite management, and headless capabilities can support achieving digital agility. As a comprehensive guide, it covers key strategies, tools, and best practices to help your organization achieve digital agility.

Introduction to Digital Agility

Digital agility is the cornerstone of modern business success, enabling organizations to quickly adapt to shifting market demands, evolving customer expectations, and rapid technological advancements. In today’s fast-paced digital environment, being agile is not just an advantage – it’s essential for survival. 

A content management system (CMS) sits at the core of digital agility, empowering businesses to streamline content creation, publishing, and management processes. By adopting agile software development practices and leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, organizations can enhance their online presence, reach new audiences, and respond swiftly to change. A robust CMS, combined with agile methodologies, ensures that content management and development processes remain efficient, flexible, and aligned with business goals, giving companies the ability to innovate and thrive in the digital age. In fact, 94% of businesses surveyed by digital experience platform Crownpeak say speed and agility are “very” important to delivering and managing impactful digital experiences

Benefits of Digital Agility

Embracing digital agility brings a wide range of benefits that can transform how organizations operate and compete. With the right tools and strategies, businesses can effectively manage multiple sites or even multiple websites, ensuring consistent branding and customer experiences across all digital touchpoints. 

"There’s no denying the digital age demands agility."
Brett Raven, Managing Director of Accenture Song APAC, via The Australian

Multi-site management solutions simplify the oversight of different sites, making it easier to coordinate updates, share resources, and maintain quality. This agility also fosters greater collaboration among teams, driving innovation and efficiency throughout the organization. For example, healthcare organizations can leverage digital agility to streamline the delivery of medicaid services, improving health outcomes while reducing operational costs. Ultimately, digital agility enables companies to respond rapidly to new opportunities, deliver better services, and stay ahead in a competitive digital landscape.

First Step to Digital Agility

The first step toward achieving digital agility is a comprehensive evaluation of your organization’s current state. This means taking a close look at your content management processes, technology infrastructure, and team collaboration practices. By identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for growth, businesses can lay the groundwork for a successful strategy that aligns with their business objectives. 

It’s crucial to understand how digital content is created, managed, and maintained throughout its lifecycle to ensure consistency and relevance. Engaging teams in this assessment process helps uncover valuable insights and fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. By focusing on these foundational practices, organizations can create a clear roadmap for digital transformation that supports both immediate needs and long-term goals.

Creating a Digital Agility Strategy

Developing a digital agility strategy starts with defining your organization’s vision and setting clear goals. Assess your current capabilities and identify gaps that could be addressed with new technologies or improved processes. A successful strategy should include a detailed plan for implementing content management systems and adopting agile software development methodologies. Prioritizing continuous improvement and streamlining processes will help your business stay responsive and efficient. Encourage collaboration across teams and invest in tools that support version control and cost savings, ensuring your content management practices are both effective and scalable. 

By fostering a culture of innovation and leveraging the latest digital technologies, your company can create and implement a strategy that drives growth, enhances efficiency, and delivers exceptional customer experiences.

Using AI to Improve Digital Experiences and Boost Enterprise Efficiency

Integrating AI into your website boosts digital agility by enabling faster adaptation to evolving business needs. In addition, AI-driven personalization enables content tailoring at scale, helping businesses better understand and serve customers and potential customers. This strengthens customer connections, fosters loyalty, and encourages growth. In fact, 56% of consumers become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.

Here are several ways AI can drive your organization’s digital agility, with a focus on key strategic areas such as user experience and operational efficiency:

Empowering Business Users with Low-Code

Empowering business users to manage and update digital experiences without constant reliance on IT is a critical component in achieving digital agility. With IT teams increasingly bogged down by project backlogs – a staggering 72% of IT leaders report this as a major obstacle – freeing up their resources for strategic initiatives is more important than ever.

This is where the power of low-code tools comes into play. By enabling non-technical teams to contribute directly to website creation and maintenance, you can accelerate development cycles, allocate IT resources to strategic projects instead, and respond more quickly to changing market needs. Low-code platforms also give business users a sense of ownership and control over digital content, fostering greater engagement and accountability.

Here’s how low-code capabilities can enhance digital agility across industries:

Navigating Website Complexity with Multi-Site Management

As your business grows, you may need to manage multiple websites for different brands, products, regions, or campaigns. Research shows that 74% of enterprises now rely on at least two CMS solutions to manage their digital presence. This shift highlights the growing complexity of modern digital operations. Managing multiple sites presents unique challenges, such as maintaining consistency, managing content across channels, and overcoming operational complexities. Prioritizing communication, leveraging technology, and involving everyone in key decisions are essential. Having the tools in one solution to manage multiple sites simplifies this complexity.

If your solution includes multisite management, this means you have a centralized platform for creating, managing, and organizing all your digital properties, ensuring brand consistency and streamlining workflows. Content management systems play a crucial role here, supporting collaboration, version control, and review standards across all sites. Each site in a multi-site management system is unique, necessitating flexibility in management approaches to address specific needs effectively. Managing the content lifecycle – creation, storage, review, and disposal – across multiple sites is vital to ensure content remains relevant, compliant, and aligned with organizational goals.

The following examples illustrate key features of multisite management that support digital agility:

Simplify Your Multisite Environment with a DXP

Read how a digital experience platform like Liferay DXP can help you master multisite management with these five best practices. Download the ebook here.
 

Delivering Seamless Omnichannel Experiences with Hybrid Headless Technology

Headless capabilities allow businesses to separate content from its presentation, making it easier to deliver consistent experiences across websites, mobile apps, kiosks, and emerging digital touchpoints. Unlike traditional content management systems (CMS) that tightly couple content with a single front end, headless architectures provide the flexibility to serve content anywhere via APIs. This enables seamless omnichannel delivery – something 90% of users expect, but only 29% feel they actually receive. This is also an ideal approach for development teams who require maximum control and flexibility over the front-end experience. Analyzing customer behavior through tracking tools aids in making data-driven decisions for multi-site management, further enhancing the effectiveness of headless architectures.

Hybrid headless capabilities take this flexibility further by offering organizations the choice to use either API-driven content delivery or traditional, coupled content management, depending on the specific use case. This allows for both the agility of a headless system and the familiar visual content management tools on which marketing teams often rely. For companies that either transition from a traditional CMS or need to balance developer flexibility with marketer ease-of-use, hybrid headless often provides a more practical and adaptable approach.

Here's how delivering content across all touchpoints with hybrid headless capabilities contributes to your digital agility:

Implementing Digital Agility

Putting digital agility into action requires a structured, step-by-step approach. Start by:

• Developing a digital agility roadmap that outlines your goals, timelines, and key milestones.

• Implement digital technologies such as advanced content management systems and multi-site management tools to streamline content creation, publishing, and site management across multiple sites.

• Train your teams on new processes and tools, clearly defining responsibilities to ensure accountability and smooth collaboration.

• Streamline workflows to eliminate bottlenecks and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Bringing Everything Together: Synergy for the Win!

Traditional CMS solutions often struggle to provide the flexibility and scalability needed to meet the demands of a fast-paced digital landscape. As businesses expand, adopt new technologies, and face shifting market demands, the limitations of these systems can become more apparent. They lack the agility required to deliver personalized, seamless experiences across various touchpoints and quickly adapt to new market opportunities.

"Being able to leverage modern technologies like AI and low-code as well as multi-site management and hybrid headless capabilities in tandem becomes a key differentiator," says Bryan Cheung, Chief Marketing Officer at Liferay. "Imagine a global enterprise using AI to personalize product recommendations on their e-commerce website – all built and maintained by business users with low-code tools. This content gets delivered to multiple websites or channels via multisite and hybrid headless capabilities, all managed from a central platform."

Unlike most traditional CMSes, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) unifies all of these elements into one cohesive solution. By integrating AI, low-code development, multisite management, and hybrid headless capabilities, a DXP streamlines operations and accelerates growth. DXPs provide the digital agility your business needs to quickly adapt and deliver exceptional digital experiences that drive real business value.

Prioritize Digital Agility for Your Solutions

Digital agility should be a top priority in your business strategy. Your website solutions can determine whether users stick with you or turn to competitors that offer better, more connected experiences – making digital agility essential for long-term success and customer loyalty.

Ready to choose the right website technology for your business?

Check out our ebook, "Evaluating Website Technologies: How Headless CMSes, DXPs, and Liferay DXP Compare," for an in-depth look at how these platforms compare in functionality and scalability.