How scalable is Umbraco?

Change is inevitable for any growing business, and when those changes impact its online presence, a robust CMS solution that can easily (and quickly) adapt and scale with the business is essential.

‘Scalability’ is one of those buzzwords that’s often used alongside ‘performance’ or ‘agility’. While businesses use it in reference to growth strategy, within the technology industry, it refers to web platforms and digital technologies.

In this blog, we’ll explore why a scalable CMS platform is so important, what consumers or businesses should be looking for in a scalable CMS platform and why many of the world’s largest businesses rely on Umbraco. If you’d like to find out more about what we do around Umbraco, see what we do here.

What is Umbraco?

Created in Denmark and officially released in 2005, supporting organisations requiring a CMS that is flexible, secure, easy to use – and above all, scalable and allowing web designers and developers to build an integrated site that can feed content to and from other digital platforms. 

Built on .NET Framework, Umbraco is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), and today it powers over 750,000 websites, from startups and charities to global brands and FTSE/Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Reebok, McDonalds and Mercedes-Benz.

What is considered a scalable Content Management Platform?

Businesses must plan carefully for the future and choose a CMS that will support its growth and provide the range of functionalities that may be required in future. So what should they be looking for in a scalable CMS platform?

• Will the CMS support its growth goals in 12 to 24 months?  
• Will there be additional products, e-commerce features or other web applications to integrate?
• How straightforward will it be for administrative users to create, add and delete content? 

Only when prepared with this understanding will businesses be in a stronger position to make the right CMS platform choice.

Read our article on why Umbraco is our platform of choice.

Why is scalability important in a CMS platform?

From a small start-up to an established business with a high volume of visitors to its website, a CMS platform should not only be able to handle the current requirements of the business – but to allow for future growth with its ever-more complex technologies and consumer demands.

While a start-up business will launch with a website of just a few pages, over time it will need to incorporate potentially hundreds more, as well as adding dynamic content and feature updates. Crucially, a scalable CMS platform will be capable of handling such a major upturn in users, data or activity, all without compromising its overall performance.

What makes Umbraco a scalable CMS platform?

As digital technologies continue to evolve, it’s important for businesses to keep pace with the latest trends and standards. Umbraco’s future-proof framework allows exceptional scalability through a multitude of API integrations, plugins and feature extensions and can be fully customised to meet the needs of the business, with site administrators given control over what gets added to the platform (especially important, depending on who will be using it and what level of technical expertise they possess).

This level of bespoke functionality and scalability offers businesses of all sizes and types greater flexibility to adapt and expand when necessary, accommodating their shifting needs.

Umbraco CMS has the capacity to manage large-scale corporate websites and serves as a major enterprise solution like for multi-nationals such as Carlsberg and Mercedes-Benz, which handle multiple sites with a significant volume of traffic on a regular basis:

• Carlsberg Group’s award-winning website framework ‘Pegasus’ uses Umbraco Cloud. Its creation has enabled the migration of the Group’s 500+ individual brands to one central platform rather than 100+ sites, creating locally relevant, on-brand experiences across all markets, channel & screen size while securing the widest digital footprint possible.
• Mercedes-Benz needed a dynamic solution that would boost their place within the car industry’s burgeoning private lease market. To keep up with daily price adjustments and rising customer standards and demands, Mercedes-Benz developed a fully customisable Umbraco solution, giving the luxury car manufacturer a 143% increase of conversion rate of online orders and putting them in pole position as a Umbraco Award winner.

As new technologies emerge within the digital space and user experiences become ever more complex, a scalable web presence is critical to the longevity of any business.

In order to achieve growth without suffering performance issues, a robust infrastructure is essential to ensure it is able to accommodate the business’s current needs as well as its long-term goals. Umbraco’s CMS platform is designed with the future business in mind, its flexibility, and scalability allowing it to meet the myriad digital demands associated with business growth.

If you have learnt something new, gained some inspiration, or just have a question about Umbraco’s scalability or anything else, please do get in touch, we’re a friendly bunch. Or if you’re interested to understand what we do around Umbraco, visit our services page or you can email us at info@yoyodesign.com.