Why upgrade to Optimizely CMS 12?
Justin Masters
Upgrading to the latest version of any software is typically considered good practice. However, sometimes upgrades are simple, quick and barely noticeable and sometimes those upgrades are much more substantial, feature rich and require a greater investment of time and effort.
When Optimizely released the long awaited CMS 12, there wasn’t the usual rush, or indeed push, to upgrade. The release came with a fanfare around significant performance improvements both for internal and end users. And, let’s be clear, that fanfare stands up, CMS 12 is significantly faster.
There was, and still is, much talk around CMS 12 using the latest version of .NET (ASP.NET Core) and Optimizely now being infrastructure agnostic. ASP.NET Core is part of the reason why CMS 12 is faster. And being infrastructure agnostic is a benefit to some, though a significant volume of Optimizely customers rightly use Optimizely’s DXP fully managed service. Therefore what infrastructure Optimizely is running on is largely a moot point.
So, why should you be considering upgrading to CMS 12 sooner rather than later? Let’s get the basics out of the way:
- Faster is better. Faster performance of the editor UI, faster page load times and therefore better user experiences. Who doesn’t want their digital products to be faster?
- New Optimizely features, and compatibility with the rest of the Optimizely ecosystem, will undoubtedly be better supported in CMS 12 with new features built only for CMS 12+.
- One day, not in the near future, Microsoft will stop supporting the older version of .NET that previous versions of CMS utilised and, one day, Optimizely will stop supporting older versions of CMS prior to 12. Neither of these are, today, a pressing issue however upgrading is future proofing.
These are solid basics. However, these alone don’t drive business outcomes or justify the investment to upgrade to CMS 12. The investment in this upgrade is more significant than a typical upgrade – fact.
At Netcel, we’re very clear that each and every investment should have a measurable outcome. With this in mind, we wanted to explain the themes of how we view the key benefits of upgrading to CMS 12, beyond the reasons associated with just the tech (though there are a few).
Download the full article to explore the full benefits of the upgrade and why it should be on your digital roadmap: