Modernising Publishing Workflows for Performance and Agility

In publishing, speed, discoverability and user experience define success. Yet many organisations still rely on workflows built for another era. Monolithic CMSs, tightly coupled front ends and manual production steps don’t just slow teams down. They limit innovation and make change expensive.

Yes, “the cloud” might sound risky if you’ve just lived through an AWS outage. But let’s face it. That ageing on-prem server, patched more times than your editorial CMS, isn’t exactly the picture of reliability either.

For digital CMOs and product owners, this is not a technical nuisance. It is a strategic barrier. Legacy systems block agility, experimentation and the ability to deliver the kind of experience readers now expect: fast, seamless and personalised.

This guide offers a practical roadmap for migrating publishing workflows to a modern, scalable stack. It is informed by real-world transformations like BMJ’s and by the latest industry trends. The goal is to move from maintenance mode to momentum, without burning everything down in the process.

2. The Problem: What Legacy Workflows Are Costing You

If you’ve been working in publishing long enough, chances are you’ve seen what legacy workflows look like up close and how much they quietly cost your organisation every day. Built around print-first processes, ageing CMS platforms and highly customised editorial tools, these systems tend to resist change by design. They’re rigid, slow and expensive to evolve.

More importantly, they create friction everywhere. Editorial teams spend more time navigating bottlenecks than shaping content. Developers work around outdated front-end structures just to make minor updates. Product teams wait on release cycles that are weeks behind market needs. Across the board, innovation slows, while the cost of inaction compounds.

You’ll often hear comments like, “It takes longer to publish a short update than it did to write it,” and they’re not exaggerations. The Association of Online Publishers’ 2025 survey found that nearly 60% of publishers listed workflow simplification and tech stack modernisation as top priorities and cited legacy platforms as the main obstacle to both.

The real issue isn’t just technical complexity. It’s strategic inertia. Legacy systems trap content in silos, block integrations with analytics or personalisation tools, and make even small front-end improvements risky. One major scientific publisher we worked with faced weeks of delays when attempting to update their article-page templates. The architecture was so tightly coupled that a design tweak required coordination across multiple departments. After modernising the front end using a component-based framework, those same updates could be rolled out in days, with performance gains that directly impacted SEO and reader satisfaction.

In another recent industry article, ePublishing highlighted the hidden costs of “workflow friction”,from redundant work caused by siloed tools to approvals stuck in inboxes. These are not rare exceptions; they’re daily realities for teams operating on legacy systems.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about inefficiency. It’s about what you’re not able to do: iterate faster, respond to your audience, experiment with new formats or unlock the value of your content across platforms. Legacy workflows might technically still function, but they function at the expense of speed, adaptability and future growth.

Let’s look at what a modern publishing stack actually solves, and what it enables when it’s built right.

3. The Vision: What a Modern Publishing Stack Looks Like

If legacy systems are the bottleneck, then modern publishing stacks are the release valve, built to handle complexity at scale, but flexible enough to support rapid change. They enable teams to work faster, launch new formats, reuse content across platforms, and experiment safely without putting core systems at risk.

So, what does “modern” actually mean in the context of publishing workflows?

At the core, it’s about decoupling; not just the front end from the back end, but also content creation from content delivery, and product logic from editorial control. This architectural shift empowers teams to iterate independently, release updates faster, and integrate new tools without reinventing the wheel each time.

A modern stack typically includes:

• A headless or decoupled CMS, separating content management from presentation,
• A component-based front end, often built with frameworks like Next.js, designed for performance, modularity and reusability,
• A set of well-documented APIs or microservices to handle content ingestion, workflow automation, metadata enrichment and distribution,
• CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, frequent deployments,
• Cloud-native infrastructure with edge delivery, caching and scalability built in,
• A robust data and analytics layer that supports personalisation, experimentation and business intelligence

You’re no longer just publishing web pages. You’re building a content platform that serves readers across web, mobile, apps, aggregators and increasingly, AI agents.

This isn’t a theoretical model. We’ve seen it in action. When BMJ migrated its article pages from a monolithic architecture to a modern stack using Next.js and App Router, they unlocked measurable performance and workflow gains. Lighthouse scores improved from 73 to a consistent 100 across article pages. Load times dropped by over 60%, and mobile performance improved significantly. Editorial teams that previously waited days for updates could now make changes within hours — cutting time to publish by nearly 50%. Read the full case.

Industry-wide, this direction is becoming the norm. The Lumina Datamatics 2025 editorial services trends report describes the shift toward metadata-driven, cloud-based platforms that prioritise automation, modularity and scale. These systems don’t just deliver content. They enable experimentation, reduce production cost and open up opportunities for AI-assisted workflows.

Modern stacks are not a silver bullet. They require thoughtful planning, governance and change management. But they offer a foundation that supports how publishing actually works today (fast, iterative, distributed) and prepares you for how it will work tomorrow.

Before jumping into solutions, though, it’s critical to map your existing landscape, not just the tools, but the friction points hiding in plain sight.

4. The Assessment: Mapping Your Starting Point

Before replatforming, redesigning or even drafting a migration plan, you need to understand what you're actually working with. Not at a surface level, “we use Drupal and FTP it to a CDN”, but in terms of how content flows through your organisation, where decisions get stuck, and what the real blockers are to speed, quality and adaptability.

This kind of assessment doesn’t need to be a months-long consulting exercise. But it does need to be honest and cross-functional. Often, the people experiencing the worst friction (editorial teams, content ops, developers) aren’t the ones shaping system decisions. So the goal here is alignment, to build a shared understanding of what’s holding your workflow back, and where to focus change first.

Here are the core areas to audit:

1. Workflow mapping

Start with a high-level view of your content lifecycle: from submission or ingestion to editing, production, publication and distribution. What are the tools involved? How many manual steps? Where do handoffs happen, and how long do they take? Are different formats (web, mobile, app, syndication) handled separately or reused from a single source?

If there are four different spreadsheets tracking publishing dates, chances are your workflow isn't as coordinated as it feels.

2. Architecture and tooling

Document what platforms are currently in use: CMS, asset management, front-end frameworks, hosting, analytics, automation, CRM, subscriptions. Pay attention to where these systems are coupled, especially between content and delivery, and what level of flexibility or vendor lock-in exists.

One publishing team we spoke with discovered they couldn’t make a change to article metadata display without involving three teams, two hardcoded templates and a deployment freeze window. That’s not architecture. That’s entropy.

3. Performance and content health

Use Lighthouse audits, crawl stats, SEO reports and analytics data to understand the current state of performance. Where are the bottlenecks? How do mobile experiences compare to desktop? How fast are your pages and how often are you shipping updates?

This is also where you evaluate content structure. Is metadata applied consistently? Can it be used across formats or devices? Are you storing content in a way that enables reuse, syndication, or AI-driven enrichment, or are you locked into legacy layouts?

4. Data and integration readiness

What kind of analytics and audience data do you collect and where does it live? Can it inform editorial and product decisions, or is it just something the marketing team glances at before quarterly reviews? Are your systems able to talk to each other (subscriptions, CRM, email, analytics, search)? If you wanted to personalise the homepage or run an A/B test on a new article layout tomorrow, could you?

In the AOP 2025 report, nearly two-thirds of publishers cited poor cross-system integration as a barrier to innovation. The issue wasn’t just technical; it was structural.

5. The Strategy: How to Plan Your Migration Roadmap

Once you've mapped your current state, systems, workflows, bottlenecks, and blind spots, the question becomes: how do you actually make the transition?

Spoiler: not all at once.

Modernising your publishing workflow is not a one-off project. It is a strategic transformation that affects technology, teams, timelines and, most importantly, trust. That means your migration roadmap needs to be phased, purposeful and anchored in real business outcomes, not just technical upgrades.

Think evolution, not revolution

While it might be tempting to imagine a clean slate — a brand-new stack rebuilt from the ground up — that approach rarely works in practice. Legacy systems often support mission-critical operations. Content libraries span decades. Team workflows are deeply embedded. And downtime is not an option.

Successful migrations usually follow a progressive rollout model:

Start small

Choose one high-impact area such as article pages or a specific content type and treat it as a pilot

Build confidence

Deliver visible improvements, such as page performance or editorial speed, that win buy-in from stakeholders.

Expand gradually

Apply what you learn from the pilot to adjacent workflows, increasing scope as the system stabilises.

Decommission legacy in stages

Avoid flipping the switch all at once. Let the new foundation prove itself under real usage before sunsetting older systems.

This approach keeps risk low, momentum high and change manageable. It also gives teams space to adapt, retrain and iterate without disrupting live publishing workflows.

Define success beyond delivery

One of the most common pitfalls in publishing migrations is defining success as technical completion. Yes, launching a decoupled front end or integrating a new CMS is progress, but it is not the end goal.

What matters more is what those changes enable:

• Can editorial teams publish faster and with fewer dependencies?
• Can product teams launch features more frequently?
• Has performance improved in measurable ways (load time, SEO, engagement)?
• Are you now better positioned to introduce personalisation, analytics or new distribution formats?
• Has the cost of maintenance and iteration gone down?

If your roadmap is tied to these kinds of outcomes, you can guide decisions through a business lens rather than a technical wishlist.

Make governance part of the plan

Modern publishing stacks give teams more autonomy and flexibility. Without clear governance, that flexibility can turn into fragmentation.

Before you migrate, define:

• Who owns what - that includes the content model, front-end components, integrations, and analytics.
• How approvals and changes are handled - especially for shared systems or design elements.
• How releases are managed - including testing, versioning and rollback plans.
• Where documentation and shared knowledge lives - so onboarding and continuity are not tied to specific individuals.

Governance is not bureaucracy. It is how you give your teams the clarity to move faster without creating chaos.

When we worked with BMJ on modernising their journal platform, we started with a focused pilot: migrating their article pages to a modern component-based front end using Next.js. That narrow scope allowed us to demonstrate meaningful gains in performance, editorial flexibility and maintainability — without interrupting the wider publishing operation. Performance metrics from the initial rollout helped secure internal alignment. Article pages saw a 40–60% improvement in load speed, and SEO performance increased within weeks of launch. These tangible outcomes made the business case for scaling the new architecture far easier to communicate internally.

It worked because the strategy was incremental, measurable and grounded in the real needs of both developers and editorial teams.

And now, with priorities and approach in place, it is time to dive into the part where everyone tends to have strong opinions: the technology stack.

6. The Technology: Choosing the Right Stack for the Job

Once the strategy is in place, the next step is selecting the technology to support it. This is where conversations often drift into buzzwords and vendor debates. But the real question isn’t “What’s the best CMS?” or “Is Next.js better than Astro?” It’s this: what stack will enable your teams to move faster, iterate safely and deliver better experiences to your readers?

What makes a modern stack

At a minimum, your tech stack should support:

• Separation of concerns - a decoupled or headless CMS lets you manage content independently from how it is presented.
• Composable architecture - modular front-end components allow for faster iteration, testing and reuse across products.
• API-first tooling - integrations with analytics, subscriptions, personalisation and other services should be straightforward, not duct-taped together.
• Cloud-native delivery - performance, scalability and resilience should come baked in — including edge caching, CDN support and fast deployments.
• Automation and CI/CD - your development process should be continuous, not ticket-based. Changes should move from prototype to production without long release cycles.

Why this matters

The stack you choose defines how quickly your team can ship improvements, how well you can respond to readers' needs and how easily you can scale. If every feature requires custom backend work, or if publishing a new content type breaks your front end, you are back in the same situation you are trying to escape.

In our collaboration with BMJ, moving to a decoupled stack with Next.js and a flexible content model unlocked the ability to iterate at the component level. Editors gained more control over what appeared on each page, developers could release updates faster, and the architecture now supports personalisation and experimentation — things the previous stack could not deliver without major overhead.

What to avoid

• Heavy custom CMS builds that try to do everything in one place,
• Front-end monoliths where layout and logic are tightly coupled to the backend,
• Siloed tools that do not integrate with your analytics, data or subscription ecosystem,
• Over-engineered solutions that look impressive but slow your teams down.

Choose tools that are widely supported, well-documented and allow for incremental adoption. You do not need the trendiest stack. You need the one that lets your team do their best work, with the least friction.

Conclusion: Build What’s Next

Legacy workflows were built for stability. Modern stacks are built for momentum.

If your teams are fighting the tools instead of shipping ideas, it’s time to rethink the foundation. Start small, move fast, and focus on outcomes that matter: speed, flexibility, performance.

We’ve seen firsthand how this shift plays out in publishing environments with deep complexity and high stakes. The gains are real, and they compound quickly when the right strategy and tools are in place.

The hardest part is starting. But you don’t have to start alone.