Web Hosting vs. Content Management: The Government Website Modernization Mistake That’s Easy to Avoid

It’s “go” time. After making detailed presentations and securing buy-in from the appropriate stakeholders, you’ve been given the necessary approvals for a website modernization project that feels long overdue.

The stakes are high because, like many government websites, the information and digital services it provides are essential to citizens. Once the project is done, everyone will expect that it is not only visually appealing and easy to navigate but easy to maintain, secure, and scale with your needs.

Your time will be split between double-checking your agency’s requirements, developing a request-for-proposal (RFP), conducting market research, interviewing users, and identifying technical resources to support. And all that is just phase one.

Nobody would suggest modernizing government websites is easy. Yet it’s easy to overlook at least one area in which it doesn’t need to be as difficult.

This happens in one of the key steps, and it involves a part of the website that most people will never see. Yet, it is an area that creates the most efficiencies across your technology, communications, and content publishing teams.

Content management systems as workflow engines

Your site’s content management system is the central command center for most of what citizens or other public sector employees will experience when they visit a site. It’s what allows them to apply for permits, make tax payments or access publicly-available government services and information.

The content management system doesn’t just allow you to publish information online and have it hosted there. It also supports the entire publication workflow, including web hosting, that agency employees will use as part of their day-to-day jobs. A well-architected content management system is also a knowledge engine, leveraging your well-crafted keyword taxonomy to automate informational updates, news, and more.

In that sense, a content management system and web hosting service can serve as the foundation for delivering a complete digital experience. Yet, too many projects often introduce additional platforms and tools that only complicate modernization projects. These include:

•  A separate piece of middleware to manage communities, user profiles, database records, and/or reporting systems
• Tools for authoring content such as text, video, and images
• Separate content servers for storage and processing

The confusion is understandable. Many websites may contain a mix of standard pages with evergreen content, a blog with more timely content, and more dynamic elements such as videos. While they may serve different purposes, you often won’t need a separate content management system and web hosting service for each one. 

In fact, WordPress VIP keeps it simple. Helping the government’s digital modernization effort by creating efficiencies in web hosting, content management, and informing the public with one service. This saves you money, time, and complaints because:

• Our enterprise-grade, managed solution reduces your spend and engineering resource dependencies.
• Our platform is always available, performant, secure, scalable, and lightweight so it can handle your traffic and reduce your risk.
• We help modernize your team, not just your tech, by building modern skills for people to leverage simple tools at no cost to you.
• Our platform supports visual trust by delivering a modern experience that meets constituents where they live and work.
• We simplify security to help you maintain shared ownership with fewer technical resources.

You don’t have to leverage a single-stack web hosting and content management solution, but you should be aware that connecting disparate tools and platforms to the front end of a website can become a complex integration exercise, costing you more money, time, and headcount. 

Moreover, the results will most likely be clunky to people who wind up visiting and using the website, which defeats the purpose of modernization. Passing up on adopting a single-stack web hosting and content management system will also present a missed opportunity to increase efficiencies across technology, communications, and content publishing teams.

The value of single-stack architecture

Continuing to treat content management tools and hosting services as separate elements means you risk running a website that looks like an office building that wasn’t well thought out—where an addition was tacked on to the side every time the team using the office grew. The better approach is an office building where multiple floors can sit on top of each other and everyone moves smoothly between them. There are numerous elevators, staircases, and hallways, and all of them are available.

Websites can have this kind of single-stack architecture too. That’s what WordPress VIP offers, and it allows public sector agencies a more streamlined and efficient way to modernize a site that avoids unnecessary costs.

By building in all the workflows you need for authoring, publishing, and hosting content in a one platform, you immediately achieve:

• Simpler user experiences, where employees can avoid signing into multiple tools
• Faster time to launch, because you’re reducing the risk of vendor sprawl
• Peace of mind that components won’t break down due to integration issues
• Reduced risk from security vulnerabilities, downtime, and performance problems

A single stack architecture also doesn’t limit you to customizing and tailoring your website to meet unique needs; it doesn’t mean you’re locked in or can’t extend your solutions as your needs grow. That’s why WordPress VIP has a rich ecosystem of third-party integrations, themes, and plug-ins that public sector agencies can draw upon.

Why combining content management and web hosting enhances modernization efforts

Once you realize content management and web hosting technologies can work together, you get a lot of time back that can be focused on other critical areas.

Regardless of what your agency does, your modernization efforts will involve steps like developing wireframes, establishing a review process for stakeholders to see what the front-end design will ultimately look like, and conducting multiple rounds of user testing and feedback.

Once the site has been finalized, you may still need to go through a beta launch and optimize content so it can easily be found in search engines. That’s great, WordPress VIP provides development and staging environments for you to do just this. 

For some projects, there may be additional content security review workflows or work to ensure websites can mitigate common cybersecurity threats, but WordPress VIP’s built-in enterprise-grade security addresses that too.

It’s natural to look at website modernization as the kind of project that involves a lot of moving pieces. The good news is that all those pieces can be moving in the same place, providing the kind of lock-step efficiency and cost savings that help governments provide the greatest possible value to the people they serve.