Signs You Need to Scale Your Digital Tools Based on Your Growth Stage

• Author: Corina Boland (opens in a new window)
• Company: Sid Lee (opens in a new window)
• Industry: Creative agency
• Based: Europe & North America

I recently attended C2 Montréal (opens in a new window) — a renowned international business development conference bringing together brands from over 1,000 industries. And with that event came the opportunity for conversations with different business leaders from various sectors. 

I sat in sessions and did the usual networking rounds to gain insights on the ground. What are the themes MarTech leaders are sharing? I have found that my conversations have shifted dramatically in the last couple of years. We all know the theme: it’s AI. All things AI. But there is enough content published on this topic, so I will sidestep it in exchange for the next common denominator I see in the industry. The question of which MarTech platforms upper mid-market and enterprise brands should gravitate towards that can scale and accommodate our ever-shrinking MarTech budgets. 

I noticed that CMOs and CTOs have been debating whether headless architecture is worth the hassle. Now, in mid-2025, with composable architecture dominating the landscape, the question has shifted to which headless CMS best fits specific business profiles. I’ll take a few minutes of your time to define the popular tipping points for migrating to a headless CMS for brands at different growth stages.

The growth inflection point: migrating from developer reliance

While at C2 Montréal, I had a sit-down with an industry friend, a digital director in a home goods retail brand, generating about C$80 million (~US$58.6 million or €50 million) annually. They recently moved from Drupal (opens in a new window) to Storyblok after hitting what she called their "content scaling wall."

Drupal served them just fine from start-up through their first expansion phase. Its flexibility enabled the brand to build exactly what they needed when their requirements were still evolving.

Then came the growth stage in the business, where suddenly they were expanding into three new markets simultaneously while launching two product categories. Their content quadrupled overnight, and the development team became the bottleneck — not because they weren't capable, but because every content change required their involvement.

For companies hitting this inflection point, usually somewhere between C$50-150 million (~US$36-109 million or €31-93 million) in revenue with marketing teams sized between 10-20 people, I noticed (especially in RFPs I have reviewed) that the WordPress (opens in a new window)/Drupal-to-Storyblok migration path is increasingly common. Your brand may not be outgrowing WordPress or Drupal's capabilities, but the developer-centric workflow that comes with them. With new growth targets, marketing needed to move faster than the development queue typically allows.

The WordPress scale-up challenge: brand consistency

I am thinking about another conversation I had with a marketing VP for a B2B software company. His CMS migration story started with WordPress. They had no complaints, and their team of 5 people could handle the content management themselves with the plugins. It solved their problems, and of course, the platform cost was attractive.

The company’s breaking point came after acquiring two competitors in 2024. Suddenly, managing three separate WordPress instances with inconsistent themes and plugins, and user permissions became unsustainable. If a brand consists of multiple sub-brands, each with its own content structure and taxonomies, creating a consistent brand experience across all properties becomes nearly impossible. This isn’t an uncommon problem. We solve this exact challenge for many clients at Sid Lee. In fact, one of our strategic technology partnerships is with Storyblok precisely because of cases like this. This B2B software company is a good example of a migration not just for multi-site management, but also for omnichannel needs. Their sales team wanted content to flow seamlessly between the website, sales portal, customer academy, and mobile app. But WordPress wasn't designed for content to live outside WordPress. 

A pattern we (the Sid Lee team) see in several of our migration projects to Storyblok is custom integrations that break whenever clients update plugins in their WordPress environments. This is especially common for clients in the C$25-75 million (~US$18-55 million or €15-46 million) range — companies transitioning from the growth to the scale phase. WordPress implementations hit limitations not in website management but in treating content-as-a-service that feeds multiple channels. Even though the total technology spend will increase slightly with Storyblok licensing, brands eliminate separate hosting environments and dramatically reduce plugin costs with this migration approach.

The enterprise team within a larger organization

The most interesting migration story I’d like to share came from an industry colleague who runs digital for a division of a Fortune 500 company, the parent company of which runs an enormous Drupal implementation. It's robust, secure, and perfectly suited for the corporate mothership with its dedicated development team of 30+ people. The digital division, a recently acquired business unit with its own P&L in Canada, operated with greater independence and a much smaller technical team.

The team needed enterprise capabilities without enterprise resources. Waiting several weeks for changes to flow through the corporate development queue massively impacted their market responsiveness. Their solution was migrating just their division to Storyblok while maintaining API connections to the parent company's systems. This "division independence" pattern is common in 2025 as large organizations seek to balance corporate governance with business unit agility as time-to-market shrinks from weeks to hours.

Platform fit by company profile

Based on dozens of migrations I've been a part of, some clear patterns have emerged about which CMS technologies suit which business profiles in today’s saturated landscape. 

WordPress continues to excel for:

• Companies under C$25 million (~US$18 million or €15.6 million) with simple website-only needs
• Small marketing teams (1-10 people) comfortable with the WordPress interface
• Organizations with limited channel complexity
• Businesses with modest growth trajectories

Drupal remains useful for:

• Organizations with large, dedicated development teams
• Brands with complex permissions and workflow requirements
• Brands needing extensive customization
• Businesses where marketing speed takes lower priority than security and compliance

Storyblok fits best for:

• Commercial and enterprise companies between C$25-100 million (~US$18-73 million or €15.6-62.5 million), balancing growth with resource constraints
• Brands with content flowing to multiple channels beyond websites
• Marketing teams that need independence from development queues
• Brands where campaign agility directly impacts revenue

The licensing equation in 2025

The financial calculation has evolved since earlier platform migrations. With WordPress, companies typically face minimal licensing costs but increasing implementation and plugin expenses as they grow. One marketing director showed me their 2024 expenses as part of a recent pitch:

• WordPress: free
• Premium plugins: C$13,000 (~US$9,500 or €8,100 thousand)
• Custom development: C$95,000 annually (~US$69,900 or €59,500) 
• Specialized hosting: C$27,000 (~US$19,800 or €16,900) annually

Their Storyblok investment includes about C$45,000 (~US$18,300 or €15,600) in annual licensing, but eliminated most plugin costs and reduced custom development needs by 60%.

For migrations from Drupal, the math centers more on opportunity cost. Consider this use case with one of our clients in the Canadian real estate sector, they tracked developer hours before and after migrating to Storyblok, with the following results:

• Before: 62% of developer time was spent on content-related requests
• After: 17% of developer time was spent on content-related requests

Beyond technology: the operational reset

The technology decision matters, and what I've consistently observed is how companies use migrations as catalysts for broader operational transformation. This is where you may jump into an AI innovation thought piece, as it is a necessary consideration moving forward.

Moving platforms will force a brand to question assumptions about how it creates, approves, and publishes content. The technology migration will spark a workflow revolution. Companies experiencing the most successful transitions don't just lift-and-shift content; they reimagine their entire digital experience operation.

For organizations hitting growth inflection points in 2025, the platform decision ultimately comes down to where you need to invest your scarcest resource: developer time. As marketing needs accelerate, freeing technical talent from content management creates the capacity for true digital innovation. Your technology should grow with your business, not constrain it. That means embracing a platform transition that aligns with your current and projected future phase, not your past.