7 Common Contentful Challenges Identified by Users and How to Fix Them

Contentful is a powerful headless content management system (Headless CMS) that offers flexibility and scalability for organizations looking to manage their digital content across multiple channels. As organizations increasingly rely on Contentful for managing their digital content across multiple channels, it’s crucial to understand both the platform’s strengths and the challenges that can impact its effectiveness if not addressed properly.

This study set out to gather feedback from 300 Contentful users across a variety of roles, including marketing and eCommerce specialists who manage content and IT leaders responsible for the technical implementation and maintenance of Contentful.

By examining a diverse range of reviews and user experiences, we were able to identify the most common challenges and have shared valuable insights into how these challenges can be effectively addressed. This comprehensive approach ensures that the strategies and solutions presented in this report are grounded in real-world experiences, making them both practical and applicable.

By the end of this report, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and strategies needed to optimize your use of Contentful, streamline workflows, and fully harness the potential of the platform for better results.

Our Approach

Explore each challenge in detail in the content below and read about actionable strategies to overcome them. By addressing these issues, you can enhance your team’s efficiency and unlock Contentful’s full potential.

1. Learning Curve and Complexity

Contentful’s flexibility and powerful features are some of its greatest strengths, but they also contribute to a steep learning curve, especially for users who are new to content management systems or who are coming from more traditional platforms, making Contentful their first experience with a headless CMS.

“The learning curve is steep, and we had to spend considerable time understanding the platform before we could use it effectively.”

“Contentful’s data modeling approach was challenging at first, especially for teams without prior experience. It slowed down our initial project timelines.”

A. Impact on Teams

The complexity of setting up content models, understanding the platform’s terminology, and leveraging advanced features like GraphQL can lead to longer onboarding times and slower project execution. This learning curve can be particularly challenging for Marketing, eCommerce, and Tech leaders who need their teams to be up and running quickly. Delays in mastering the platform can impact campaign timelines, content deployment, and overall efficiency.

B. Solution Strategies

To overcome these challenges, consider the following strategies:

Start with Smaller Projects

Begin with smaller, less complex projects to allow your team to gradually familiarize themselves with Contentful’s features. This approach minimizes the risk of errors and builds confidence as your team scales up to more advanced tasks.

Invest in Targeted Training and Resources

Provide focused training sessions and create tailored internal guides, step-by-step tutorials, and quick-reference materials that help onboard users to the platform and gain knowledge in how to efficiently perform the task specific to their team and role.

2. Customization and Flexibility

For teams looking to tailor their CMS to specific needs, finding the right balance between flexibility and usability can be challenging. While Contentful provides a powerful foundation, some users encounter hurdles when attempting to customize the platform to their unique workflows and content requirements.

“We needed more advanced formatting options, but the built-in editor just didn’t cut it. We had to invest in custom development to get the functionality we needed.”

“Customizing Contentful to fit our workflow was more complex than anticipated. It required more developer time than we had budgeted for.”

A. Impact on Workflow

Issues like limited formatting options and the need for developer involvement can slow down content creation and deployment. When customization isn’t as seamless as expected, it can disrupt the workflow of Marketing, eCommerce, and Tech teams. The need for additional development resources or complex workarounds can delay projects and increase costs, particularly for teams that are already stretched thin.

B. Strategies for Success

To effectively manage these customization challenges, consider these approaches:

3. Performance Optimization

For any digital platform, performance is a critical factor that directly impacts user experience. Contentful, with its extensive capabilities as a Headless CMS, provides a powerful environment for managing content across multiple channels. However,

Here are some insights from users who have faced performance challenges:

“The platform tends to slow down when handling a large volume of content, making it difficult to manage updates efficiently.”

“Previewing content can be frustratingly slow, which impacts our ability to quickly iterate on new ideas.”

A. Impact on User Experience

Performance issues such as slow loading times, delays in content previews, and challenges with managing large amounts of data efficiently can significantly affect how quickly and smoothly content is delivered to end-users. These delays can translate into lost engagement, reduced conversions, and frustrated teams. Ensuring that your Contentful setup is optimized for performance is essential to maintaining a competitive edge and delivering a seamless experience to your audience.

B. Strategies for Enhancing Performance

To mitigate these performance challenges, consider the following strategies:

Optimize Content Delivery with CDN Integration

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute your content more efficiently across different regions. By caching content closer to the end-user, you can significantly reduce load times and improve overall performance.

Streamline Content Models and Queries to Reduce System Load

Simplify your content models and optimize GraphQL queries to reduce the load on the system. By minimizing the complexity of your queries, you can enhance response times and reduce the chances of performance bottlenecks.

Leverage the Expertise of Certified Contentful Partners

Working with certified Contentful partners can help you identify and implement performance optimizations tailored to your specific use case. These experts can conduct performance audits and recommend best practices to ensure that your setup runs smoothly and efficiently.

4. Cost Management

Contentful’s pricing model is flexible and scalable, designed to cater to a wide range of business needs. However, as teams grow and their content management requirements expand, costs can quickly escalate, becoming a significant concern, particularly for small to mid-sized businesses.

Here’s what some users have shared about their experiences with Contentful’s pricing:

“As our usage increased, we found that the costs started to add up quickly, making it challenging to stay within our budget.”

“We underestimated the cost of scaling our content management needs with Contentful, which led to some tough decisions on feature usage.”

A. Impact on Budget and Resource Allocation

Unexpected cost increases can strain your budget and affect resource allocation across your organization. For Business and Tech leaders, managing these expenses while ensuring that the team has access to the necessary tools is a delicate balance. High costs can lead to difficult decisions, such as scaling back on features or limiting team access, which can impact overall productivity and project timelines.

B. Strategies for Managing Costs

Understanding how to effectively manage these costs is crucial for maintaining budgetary control without compromising on the platform’s capabilities. Consider the following approaches:

5. Collaboration Features

Effective collaboration is essential for teams managing content across multiple channels, especially when team members are distributed across various locations. Contentful, as a Headless CMS, provides a flexible platform for content management, but some users have found its built-in collaboration tools lacking. In fact,

“We often found it challenging to keep everyone on the same page due to the lack of built-in collaboration features, which led to delays in our content rollout.”

“Tracking changes and maintaining version control was harder than expected, making it difficult to manage larger projects with multiple contributors.”

A. Impact on Team Efficiency

Content teams need tools to work efficiently on content creation, editing, and deployment, particularly when they are distributed across different locations. When collaboration tools are insufficient or difficult to use, it can slow down content production, create bottlenecks, and lead to miscommunication among team members. This can result in delays, reduced content quality, and frustration within the team. Ensuring that collaboration is seamless and efficient is essential to maintaining a high level of productivity and ensuring that content initiatives stay on track.

B. Strategies to Improve Collaboration

To enhance collaboration within Contentful, consider the following strategies:

Integrate with External Collaboration Tools

Integrating with tools that are already familiar with your team such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or project management tools like Asana or Trello, can help eliminate friction in your onboarding and further streamline communication and task management, ensuring that everyone stays aligned.

Implement a Clear Workflow and Version Control Process

Establish clear workflows for content creation, review, and approval. Utilize Contentful’s versioning features in combination with external tools to track changes, maintain version control, and ensure that everyone is working on the most up-to-date content, eliminating the risk of conflicts and errors.

6. Support and Documentation

Reliable support and comprehensive documentation are critical components for any platform, especially for a sophisticated tool like Contentful. Users often rely on these resources to troubleshoot issues, learn new features, and optimize their use of the platform. However,

“The documentation is often lacking in detail, which made it hard to figure out more complex features on our own.”

“When we needed help, the response from support was slow, and it delayed our project timelines.”

A. Impact on User Experience

When support is slow to respond or documentation is unclear, it can lead to frustration and delays in resolving issues. These challenges can disrupt workflows, reduce team efficiency, and hinder the ability to fully leverage Contentful’s capabilities.

B. Strategies to Improve Access to Support and Documentation

Some frustration with Contentful’s support and documentation comes from a lack of awareness of available resources, while other shortcomings can be supported internally:

Utilize Community Resources and Forums

In addition to official support, take advantage of the Contentful community forums and third-party resources where users share solutions and best practices. These can be valuable for finding quick answers to common questions or troubleshooting issues that others have faced.

Develop an Internal Knowledge Base and Guides

Create an internal knowledge base or set of guides tailored to your team’s specific use of Contentful and common questions your users face, reducing the reliance on more generic external documentation. This can include step-by-step instructions for common tasks, solutions to known issues, and best practices for using the platform efficiently.

7. Integration and API Enhancements

Contentful’s flexibility as a Headless CMS is one of its strongest features, allowing it to integrate with various platforms and technologies. However,

Common issues include limitations in API functionality, difficulties with nested queries, and the complexity of setting up integrations with other systems.

“We ran into issues with the API when trying to handle complex nested queries, which required more development resources than we initially planned.”

“Integrating Contentful with our existing systems proved to be more complex than expected, leading to delays in our content deployment.”

A. Impact on Development and Workflow

Integration challenges can slow down development efforts and create friction in workflows, especially for teams that rely on seamless data exchange between Contentful and other platforms. These issues can lead to delays in project timelines, increased development costs, and difficulty in achieving a unified content strategy across different channels.

B. Strategies for Enhancing Integration and API Use

To overcome integration challenges and make the most of Contentful’s API, consider the following approaches:

Leverage Pre-Built Integrations and Tools

Explore and utilize pre-built integrations and tools available within the Contentful ecosystem. These can simplify the process of connecting Contentful with other platforms, reducing the need for custom development and allowing your team to focus on more strategic tasks.

Optimize API Usage for Performance

Work with your development team to optimize API queries, particularly for complex or nested data requests. This can involve breaking down large queries into smaller, more manageable ones, or caching frequently accessed data to improve performance. Well-optimized API usage can significantly reduce latency and improve the responsiveness of your integrated systems.

Conclusion: Turning Challenges into Opportunities

Throughout this report, we’ve explored the key challenges that users face when working with Contentful. While these challenges can seem daunting, they also present opportunities for growth and innovation when addressed with the right strategies. By applying the insights and solutions shared here, your team can overcome obstacles and unlock the full potential of Contentful.

Remember, the real power of this knowledge lies in how you use it. As you implement these strategies, consider them as building blocks toward a more efficient and effective content management system. With a proactive approach, the challenges discussed in this report can become stepping stones to achieving greater agility and success in your content strategy.

Success Story: Optimizing Contentful CMS for a Global Crypto Leader

Challenges

• Inefficient data modeling and low page optimization
• Content management constraints due to inefficient use of Contentful CMS
• Challenges in dynamically changing the positioning of UI components on the page
• Dependency on developers for website design or content changes
• Lack of flexibility to insert and edit content in any order

Solutions

• Created a hierarchical content model to define appearance concerns and provide flexibility in building layouts and content blocks
• Balanced flexibility with enforced design limitations and carefully managed the number of content types
• Leveraged performance reports and tools like Lighthouse, GT Matrix, Wiselow, and Google to audit for various aspects like performance, accessibility, SEO, etc.
• Conducted concurrency testing to identify and resolve issues with simultaneous user access
• Utilized Contentful CMS to configure content and layout of landing and product pages using predefined content blocks and templates

Results

• Enhanced data modeling (content-type modeling) with optimized database layout, decreasing content usage from 75% to 25%
• Improved capacity utilization and page optimization
• Seamless content creation and updates without technical obstacles
• Dynamic content management, enabling real-time website updates
• Reduced developer dependency for content management
• Enhanced user experience with consistent user interface across the website
• Increased responsiveness and agility in Gemini’s marketing strategy

Contentful: Scaled and Streamlined by Expert Partners

Throughout this report, we’ve explored the top challenges users face when working with Contentful—from managing complex workflows and optimizing performance to integrating seamlessly with your existing systems. These insights reveal both the complexity of the platform and the tremendous opportunities it offers when used strategically.

But here’s the truth: Knowing what to do is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in translating strategy into action—and this is where we come in.

At Net Solutions, we don’t just offer solutions—we build long-term, transformative partnerships. As a certified Contentful partner, we understand that implementing change isn’t just about fixing issues; it’s about leveraging the platform to drive innovation and growth.

When you work with us, you’ll have a team that doesn’t just troubleshoot; we empower you to:

Overcome Complexity

Simplify content management with custom implementations that are tailor-made for your business processes, reducing friction and boosting efficiency.

Drive Performance

Improve speed, scalability, and reliability, ensuring that your content delivers a flawless experience to users at every touchpoint.

Future-Proof Your System

With deep expertise in API integration and extensibility, we make sure your Contentful setup can evolve with your business, staying ahead of the curve.

Maximize ROI

We help you optimize costs while ensuring that every dollar spent on Contentful is an investment in growth, not just a short-term fix.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for Contentful optimization, and that’s why our approach is uniquely tailored to your needs. Whether you’re looking to solve immediate challenges or want to elevate your entire content ecosystem, we’re here to help.