WordPress was released in 2003 and now powers roughly 42% to 43% of the public web. It won because it made publishing simple. A non-technical user could write a post, press publish, and get a page.
Then content work changed.
Marketing teams no longer publish only pages. They publish landing pages, product pages, offer pages, emails, ads, onboarding flows, help docs, sales assets, and test variants. The same message has to move through Shopify, a CMS, email, paid media, analytics, and sometimes legal review.
The content tool can store the page. It often does not know why the page exists, which offer it supports, which campaign launched it, which experiment changed it, who approved it, or whether it made money.
That is the missing context.
The three generations
Generation 1: monolithic CMS. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, and Wix made web publishing accessible. They were page-shaped: content lived in the same system that rendered the page. That worked well for blogs and websites. It struggled when the same content needed to go to many channels.
Generation 2: headless CMS. Contentful, Sanity, Strapi, Storyblok, Prismic, and others separated content storage from presentation. Content became structured and available through APIs. That solved multi-channel delivery, but it often pushed workflow, preview, approvals, permissions, and launch coordination back to the customer.
Generation 3: composable and hybrid CMS. MACH and composable architecture let teams pick best-of-breed services for content, commerce, search, personalization, experimentation, and analytics. Vendors also rebuilt visual editing and live preview. This made editors happier, but it did not remove the integration work. The seams moved from inside the CMS to between tools.
Each generation solved a real pain and exposed the next one.
The current gap
A modern content launch is not only a content event.
For an e-commerce team, a new landing page might be tied to:
- an offer
- a product bundle
- Meta and Google creative
- Klaviyo follow-up
- Shopify products and discounts
- tracking tags
- approvals
- experiment variants
- revenue, AOV, refund rate, and payback
Most CMSs do not hold that full launch context. They know the page body and maybe its workflow state. The rest lives in campaign tools, ad accounts, commerce systems, analytics tools, spreadsheets, and Slack.
That is why content teams can publish faster than growth teams can learn.
AI makes publishing cheaper, not learning cheaper
AI has made it much easier to create more content.
A team can generate landing page variants, ad angles, product descriptions, email drafts, SEO outlines, and lifecycle copy faster than before. That is useful. It also shifts the bottleneck.
When asset production gets cheaper, teams do not automatically get better growth. They get more things to launch, more variants to track, more approvals to manage, more results to read, and more decisions to remember. If the launch context is weak, AI increases volume faster than it increases learning.
This is already visible in content-heavy teams. They can produce dozens of angles, but cannot say which angle worked across paid social, landing page, email, checkout, and repeat purchase. They can refresh SEO pages, but cannot connect the refresh to revenue quality. They can generate more lifecycle flows, but cannot compare them cleanly against margin, refunds, or retention.
The durable advantage is not "we can make more content." The durable advantage is "we can learn which content moves the business, for which audience, under which offer, and reuse that learning."
What good content systems should answer
For every important asset, the team should be able to answer:
- What business move is this asset part of?
- Which offer, audience, channel, or experiment does it support?
- Who approved it?
- What changed between versions?
- Where did it launch?
- What revenue or conversion result did it influence?
- What should the next asset reuse or avoid?
Those are not CMS-only questions. They are company-work questions. But content is often where the work becomes visible, so the content system has to connect to the rest of the loop.
The new standard
Growth content should not be stored only as a file or page. It should be stored as part of a launch.
That means a page, brief, email, ad concept, research note, or sales asset should keep links to:
- the offer or message it supports
- the audience or segment it targets
- the campaign or test it belongs to
- the channel where it launched
- the approval or review that cleared it
- the version that actually went live
- the revenue, conversion, or retention result that followed
- the decision the team made after reading the result
This does not mean every content tool has to become an analytics platform. It means content that is used for growth should not be detached from the growth loop. The more AI reduces the cost of creating assets, the more important it becomes to preserve the reason each asset existed.
What Lyberty does
Lyberty treats pages, documents, briefs, canvases, campaigns, experiments, approvals, and decisions as related work, not separate files floating across tools.
A landing page can be connected to the offer it supports, the experiment that launched it, the audience it targets, the approval that cleared it, and the revenue result that followed. A doc can stay tied to the campaign or workflow it was written for. A test result can point back to the creative and page versions that produced it.
Lyberty is not trying to beat every dedicated CMS on editing polish today. Best-in-class block editing, visual preview, and schema-driven editorial admin are still deep product areas. The Lyberty bet is that growth content becomes much more valuable when it stays connected to launch, measurement, and learning.
What to check
- Pick a high-performing page or email.
- Find the brief that led to it.
- Find who approved it.
- Find the campaign and audience it served.
- Find the revenue result.
- Find the next asset that reused the learning.
If that takes more than a few minutes, the content tool is storing content but not the work around it.
Sources
- Usage Statistics and Market Share of WordPress. W3Techs, May 2026. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
- Contentful raises $175M at a $3B valuation. TechCrunch, July 28, 2021. https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/contenful-raises-175m-from/
- Contentful history. Wikipedia, retrieved May 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contentful
- Contentful's journey. Balderton Capital. https://www.balderton.com/resources/contentfuls-journey-a-case-study-in-thoughtful-fundraising/
- The History of WordPress from 2003. WPBeginner. https://www.wpbeginner.com/news/the-history-of-wordpress/
- Strapi lands $31M. TechCrunch, June 22, 2022. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/strapi-lands-31m-for-its-headless-cms-platform/
- Storyblok raises $80M. TechCrunch, June 4, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/04/storyblok-raises-80m-to-bring-more-ai-into-its-headless-cms-aimed-at-non-technical-people/
- Sanity Raises $85 Million. CMSWire, May 2025. https://www.cmswire.com/the-wire/sanity-raises-85-million-for-alternative-to-the-cms/
- The end of CMS era and our $85M Series C. Sanity, May 8, 2025. https://www.sanity.io/blog/why-the-age-of-cms-is-over
- Sanity Studio v3. Sanity, December 2022. https://www.sanity.io/blog/sanity-studio-v3-simplified-yet-powerful-customization
- Welcoming Payload to the Figma Team. Figma, June 17, 2025. https://www.figma.com/blog/payload-joins-figma/
- Webflow Raises $120M Series C. PRNewswire, March 2022. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webflow-raises-120m-series-c-at-4b-valuation-led-by-yc-continuity-301503860.html
- MACH Alliance. https://machalliance.org/
- Is MACH Still the Blueprint for Modern Digital Architecture? CMSWire, 2024. https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/is-mach-still-the-blueprint-for-modern-digital-architecture/
- Don't Lose Your Head: Evaluating Headless. Smashing Magazine, April 2021. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/04/evaluating-headless/
- Composable commerce & MACH in 2024. Valtech, 2024. https://www.valtech.com/blog/2024-state-of-composable-commerce-mach-technologie/