Before starting a CMS selection, define why you're replacing your current platform, what outcomes the new CMS needs to enable, who will make the decision, how the decision will be made, and what resources you have to implement it successfully.
Doing this work before evaluating vendors prevents one of the most common problems in CMS selection: starting with a long list of features instead of the problems your institution is actually trying to solve. A feature checklist tells you what software can do. It doesn't tell you whether your university will improve recruitment, reduce risk, increase productivity, or deliver a better digital experience.
Start by documenting what's driving the project. What isn't working today? Where does the current platform create constraints for visitors, contributors, or your central web team?
Common triggers include:
Inaccessible content is too easy to publish
Contributors struggle to maintain content
The central team has become a publishing bottleneck
Information is duplicated across the website
Outdated content keeps accumulating
The website is difficult to personalize
You can't structure and reuse important information
Content is hard for search engines and AI-powered systems to interpret
Maintaining quality across many contributors requires too much manual effort
The current platform is approaching end of life or failing to evolve
Separate problems caused by the CMS from problems caused by governance, content strategy, staffing, training, or process. A new platform can enable better practices, but it won't automatically create them.
Before writing requirements, determine what should be different several years after implementation. Anchor the evaluation to outcomes like these:
Recruit more students. Make academic information easier to discover, improve traditional and AI search visibility, deliver more relevant experiences, and make it easier for prospective students to take the next step.
Reduce institutional risk. Help contributors create accessible content, enforce standards through templates and guardrails, and maintain oversight across a distributed publishing environment.
Improve team productivity. Reduce repetitive work, reuse content, automate content maintenance, and let routine updates happen without unnecessary central-team involvement.
Deliver better digital experiences. Create consistent, accessible, relevant experiences for different audiences rather than treating every visitor the same.
Prepare for future needs. Support structured content, integrations, APIs, changing search behavior, and evolving audience expectations.
These outcomes should drive the evaluation, not a race to find the CMS with the most features.
Before selecting technology, understand the organization that will use it. Document:
How many websites and pages you manage
How many people contribute content
Which teams own different types of content
Whether publishing is centralized, decentralized, or hybrid
How approvals work
Where contributors struggle
Which activities consume your central team's time
Which content is duplicated across sites
How ownership and reviews are managed
Which systems need to integrate with the CMS
Higher education presents a particular challenge: hundreds of people across departments may contribute content even though web publishing isn't their primary job. A CMS that works beautifully for a five-person centralized marketing team may be a poor fit for a university with 500 occasional contributors.
Establish a realistic budget before beginning the formal selection process, and account for the full cost rather than the subscription or license alone. Your total investment may include:
Implementation
Website development
Content migration
Design or design-system work
Integrations
Training
Accessibility remediation
Consulting or professional services
Hosting or infrastructure
Ongoing support and maintenance
Internal staff time
Also decide whether CMS selection is part of a larger redesign or a separate technology project. These decisions are related, but they don't have to happen at the same time. A realistic budget keeps you from spending months evaluating solutions that were never financially viable.
Determine who needs to participate and what role each person plays. A CMS affects far more than IT. Depending on the institution, stakeholders may include:
Marketing and communications
Central web or digital teams
IT
Admissions and enrollment
Accessibility
Academic units
Content contributors
Procurement
Legal or compliance
Senior leadership
Not everyone needs equal decision authority. Clarify who provides input, who evaluates vendors, who approves technical requirements, who controls the budget, and who ultimately decides. Without this clarity, selections can stall late in the process when someone who wasn't involved earlier suddenly has approval authority.
Decide how your institution will reach a decision before vendors start presenting. Will you issue an RFP? Conduct an initial market review? Invite a shortlist to demonstrate? Require a proof of concept? Speak with references?
Establish the stages, participants, and approximate timeline. Then determine how disagreements will be resolved. If Marketing strongly prefers one platform and IT prefers another, who makes the final call, and on what basis? Making that clear beforehand keeps the process from becoming a competition among departmental preferences.
Determine what matters, and how much it matters, before vendors show you what they do well. Start with your desired outcomes and work backward to the capabilities needed to achieve them. Reframe feature questions as outcome questions:
Instead of "Does the CMS support structured content?" ask "Will this help us manage thousands of pages efficiently and keep important information consistent?"
Instead of "Does it have an accessibility checker?" ask "Will it help many contributors consistently create accessible content before problems are published?"
Instead of "Does it support personalization?" ask "Can our team realistically deliver relevant experiences to different audiences with the resources we have?"
For each important capability, evaluate more than whether it exists. Consider capability, usability, evidence, and scalability: Can the system do it? Can your people use it? Can the vendor demonstrate results? And will the approach keep working as your needs evolve? A sophisticated feature provides little value if your team can't realistically use it.
Some requirements are genuinely binary. Security standards, required integrations, procurement rules, hosting restrictions, accessibility requirements, authentication, APIs, and data requirements may eliminate a platform regardless of how well it performs elsewhere.
Separate these must-haves from capabilities where different approaches can achieve the same outcome. Otherwise, a 150-item requirements spreadsheet gives trivial capabilities the same apparent weight as the reasons you're replacing the CMS in the first place.
Don't evaluate a CMS based on what could theoretically be accomplished with unlimited staff and technical resources. Evaluate it based on what your institution can realistically accomplish.
If sophisticated personalization requires a full-time developer you don't have, the feature isn't useful. If a workflow system is so complicated that occasional contributors avoid it, it isn't solving your governance problem. Features only produce value when distributed teams can actually adopt and use them. Ask:
What expertise will be required after launch?
Who will administer the CMS?
Who will train contributors?
Who will maintain integrations?
How much ongoing effort does the platform require?
You're not only selecting software. You're choosing a technology partner for the next five to ten years or longer. Before selection, determine what you expect from that relationship:
Support responsiveness
Training and implementation assistance
Product-release frequency
Customer involvement in the roadmap
Experience with higher education
An active customer community
How the vendor responds as customer needs evolve
These factors are hard to capture in a feature checklist, but they can have a substantial effect on your experience long after implementation is complete.
Once the evaluation begins, don't turn every demonstration into a tour through 100 requirements. Give vendors realistic scenarios instead:
"We have 400 occasional contributors across 60 sites. Show us how you'd let departments maintain their own content while helping our five-person central team enforce accessibility, brand, and content standards."
"Our tuition information appears in dozens of places. Show us how your platform would let us maintain that information once and use it in different contexts."
This reveals far more than asking a vendor to check a box indicating it has permissions or reusable content.
A successful CMS selection starts before the first vendor demonstration. Before evaluating platforms, know the answers to these questions:
Why are we replacing our CMS?
What outcomes are we trying to achieve?
How does our institution actually manage content?
What can we afford, in full?
Who is involved in the decision?
Who ultimately decides?
How will we make that decision?
What criteria will we use?
What requirements are truly non-negotiable?
What can our team realistically implement and maintain?
Once those questions are answered, features become much easier to evaluate because they finally have context. The goal isn't to find the CMS that can do the most. It's to find the CMS whose capabilities best support what your institution is trying to accomplish over the next five to ten years.
Download our white paper on the outcomes first approach