What to consider when planning integrations with your website

When launching a new website, most of the work tends to focus on areas such as design, content, coding the back and front-end, and so on. But often a website project also involves some kind of integration between your CMS and a third -party application, platform or resource.

Our experience over hundreds of website projects is that while most integrations are straightforward, it is important to:

• Define and assess the requirements for any integration.
• Scope and plan the integration itself.
• Have access to the required technical skills to make it happen.

In this post we’re going to explore what to consider when planning and implementing integrations for your website project.

What are the reasons for integration?

There are multiple reasons why an integration could be an important element of your website project:

• It might provide an improved and more complete user experience for anyone visiting the site with access to additional data or the ability to get more things done.
• An integration is often involved if visitors need to complete a transaction – from buying on your online shop to booking a hotel room to completing a form.
• An integration can improve processes and drive efficiency, saving on manual effort.
• Integrations often underpin and streamline digital marketing efforts.
• You may need to integrate a site with another package to make fundamental improvements, for example analytics to track usage or a CDN to improve performance.
• Integrations often are required for security and compliance reasons ranging from managing consent around cookies to preventing cybercrime.

Which tools and platforms might be integrated with a website CMS?

Website integrations coma in all shapes and sizes. Here are just some of the tools that you might need to integrate with your CMS or DXP:

• A CRM system or even a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to streamline digital marketing efforts, drive personalisation and establish one source of truth for customer data.
• An emailing marketing platform to support digital marketing campaigns and communications, such as enabling newsletters and subscriptions.
• Other core systems such as your ERP system to drive process efficiency.
• A cookie management solution such as Usercentrics CookieBot in order to establish user consent and do the heavy lifting on cookie management.
• SEO and analytics tools to drive an uptick in visits and measure success.
• An e-commerce solution to digitally sell goods and services, while providing any necessary product content all in one unified experience.
• A booking solution for people to book anything from accommodation to flights to meetings, depending on the nature of your business. · A blogging platform such as Passle that provides a fit-for-purpose and intuitive solution to enable subject matter experts to write and disseminate articles and posts.
• A security solution such as Imperva to provide an important additional security layer to protect against cyber-attacks.
• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) in order to improve website performance across the world.
• An identity management solution such as Microsoft Entra ID to support the security of your core CMS.
• A Forms or Survey solution or Captcha in order to allow customers to complete forms.
• A Search solution to help site visitors find what they need in cases where search needs are more complex and specialised.
• A digital asset management (DAM) platform to be able to use brand-approved image and videos, as well as documents.
• A specialist personalisation or AI engine for more advanced user experiences and digital marketing, and to optimise experiences.
• A front-end experience if you are using a headless CMS to house all your content.
• A mobile app that might accompany your website and use some of the content or other elements from your CMS.
• Third-party data sources to include anything from weather information to external news feeds to updated statistical data.
• Other internal content repositories such as a database of CVs.
• A jobs board or applicant tracking system to enable people to apply for jobs.
• And many more!

Key considerations when planning integrations

When planning an integration for your website there are always a few considerations.

Don’t make it last minute

An integration is a project requirement like any other that needs to be scoped, investigated, and documented. However, often integrations can be initially overlooked and end up being an afterthought or inserted at the last minute. Always consider any potential integrations as part of your overall requirements. Of course, it’s also possible that some of your business requirements don’t obviously involve a required integration and the need may emerge later.

Speak to the right stakeholders

Working out the need for any potential integrations is often the result of speaking to the right stakeholders including your digital marketing team, your IT function and your compliance team who may have additional requirements for the website and the CMS. Always ensure you speak to all the necessary business functions when documenting functional and non-functional requirements.

There’s usually more than one option

“Integration” is quite a loaded term that can mean different things to different people, for example from a technical perspective or from a user experience point of view. A back-end

custom integration involving APIs or third-party data appearing on a web page might involve very different approaches.

Frequently there can also be more than one integration option depending on what you’re trying to achieve and the system you want to integrate with. When we scope out a project for clients we sometimes come back with a range of options with slightly different outcomes and depth of work involved.

Integrations often need technical help to set-up

Despite what a CMS or DXP vendor might tell you about low code no code interfaces and a “plug and play” approach, actually many integrations do need some degree of technical knowledge and experience to be able to make them work. Some custom integrations also really need developers who know what they are doing. Always ensure that you have the right experts involved.

Out-of-the-box connectors might not work in the way you want them to do

It’s great that the number of out-of-the-box connectors have increased in recent years, providing multiple options for marketing teams to build best-of-breed ecosystems and use their favourite tools. However, it’s always worth considering that something that is out of the box is just that. It might not always work in the way you want it to – for example in how it displays data or only provides a one-way or limited integration.

Custom integrations need ongoing oversight and can create technical debt

If you have a legacy system or a lesser-used solution involved in an integration, then it might be that you’re looking at creating a custom integration. These customisations are usually worth the value, but they do create “technical debt” (where you might need to carry out extra work if you upgrade your CMS), and they also need ongoing oversight and management.

If your CMS or the system you have integrated with undergo any changes, then it’s possible that the integration may not work. This will likely involve testing and getting technical help in to sort out any issues. Often integrations stop working suddenly without any notice, so you will need some kind of technical support in place and potentially monitoring to spot when there is an issue.

Always consider future integration requirements

Sometimes integrations are “nice to haves” and fall out of scope of an initial “MVP” website launch. In terms of any work done, always consider any future integration requirements. For example, when we built a website for Small Luxury Hotels of the World, we knew there would be a future integration with a mobile app. To enable this to happen we built an API during the original project so we could achieve this further down the line.

Integrations cost money

A custom integration will involve development resources. Some out-of-the-box connectors also come at additional cost and may also be dependent on additional applications being in place. Ultimately, integrations cost money and need to be considered when you are budgeting for your project.

Planning for website integrations

Integrations are often a core part of many website projects, but they need planning and thought. Want to discuss an upcoming integration with your CMS or DXP? Then get in touch!