If you’ve been using Optimizely for several years, there’s a good chance the platform you’re running today can do considerably more than the one you originally bought.
That’s partly because Optimizely has continued to develop, but also because your organisation will have changed too. Digital priorities move on, customer expectations change, teams acquire new skills, business models evolve, and the problems you’re trying to solve today may be completely different from those that were around when you originally built your digital platform.
If your digital platform is working adequately and reliably, it’s easy to forget to ask: what else could it do for me?
It’s absolutely possible to continue running Optimizely perfectly successfully while missing opportunities to get more value from the platform. That doesn’t mean you need to re-platform, buy more technology, or adopt every new capability Optimizely releases. It means periodically looking at what your organisation needs today, what your customers need from you, and what your platform could help you do better.
Where to start? Start with what’s changed in your business
When you’re reviewing your technology investment, it’s tempting to begin with the actual technology. Which Optimizely products do we have? Which features are we using? What’s been released recently? What aren’t we taking advantage of?
They’re useful questions, but they shouldn’t be the first ones.
Start with what you’re actually trying to improve.
Perhaps your customers are struggling to find the right products or information. Maybe content takes too long to produce and approve. You’ve possibly talked about personalisation for years without doing anything about it. Conversion might have plateaued. Or your digital teams could be spending too much time on repetitive work that could potentially be automated.
Your business priorities might simply have changed considerably since you implemented Optimizely – new markets, products, services, audiences, routes to market, or organisational structures.
Starting with your challenges gives you something meaningful to investigate. Only then should you ask how Optimizely can help you.
Optimizely is much broader than a CMS these days, spanning content management, content marketing, commerce, experimentation, personalisation, analytics, customer data, and AI. But you don’t need to use all of it. You need to understand whether capabilities you already have, or capabilities that have emerged since your original implementation, can help solve problems that matter to your business and your customers.
Think back to when your current Optimizely platform was designed. The decisions you made will have been based on a particular set of requirements, customer behaviours, business priorities, internal processes, and technical constraints.
Some of those assumptions will still be completely valid. Others may not.
If the environment around your Optimizely platform has changed substantially, continuing to use it in exactly the same way you did three or five years ago may mean you’re missing important opportunities. You don’t necessarily need to rebuild anything, but it’s worth looking again at the assumptions that shaped your original implementation and asking whether they still make sense today.
Are you using Optimizely in the same way you always have?
Once you’ve been using a technology platform for a while, you naturally develop familiar ways of working with it. Your editors know how to publish, your developers understand the architecture, your marketing team knows which tools it uses to get the job done, and everyone gets very good at operating within the version of Optimizely that’s become part of everyday working life.
The downside is that your view of what’s possible can become anchored to what you already do.
Optimizely, meanwhile, has continued to develop across the platform.
CMS 13, for example, is a major evolution of Optimizely CMS, with a new content management experience, visual authoring, headless delivery, and deeper integration with Optimizely Graph. For organisations running older versions of CMS, that makes an upgrade an opportunity to consider not only the underlying technology, but whether the way content is created, managed, and delivered should evolve too.
Customer data is another area worth revisiting. Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) can bring behavioural and customer data together to support more informed personalisation and audience activation, while experimentation now encompasses both web and feature experimentation.
Search and content discovery are evolving too. Optimizely Graph supports semantic search, allowing results to be ranked according to meaning and context rather than relying solely on exact keyword matches. For organisations with large or complex content estates, that opens up opportunities to make it easier for people to find relevant information using more natural language.
And AI is developing particularly quickly. Optimizely’s Agent Platform is moving beyond a simple AI assistant towards agents, workflows, and virtual teammates capable of taking on specific tasks and recurring work across the platform.
That doesn’t mean all of those things are right for you, which is why simply auditing Optimizely’s features and producing a list of things you’re not using won’t be particularly useful.
Instead, take the problems and opportunities you’ve identified and work backwards.
If producing and managing content is becoming a bottleneck, could you improve the way your teams use the platform? If customers struggle to find relevant products or information, is the opportunity in search, navigation, recommendations, personalisation, content structure, or the underlying experience?
If different customer groups behave differently, could you do more to understand those differences and respond to them? If significant decisions are still based largely on opinion, could experimentation provide better evidence? And if your teams are spending time on repetitive processes, could automation or AI remove some of that work?
Sometimes the answer will be an Optimizely capability you’re not currently using. Sometimes it’ll be something you already have but aren’t exploiting fully. And sometimes you’ll discover that what you have is perfectly adequate and the opportunity lies elsewhere.
Where else could your Optimizely investment deliver value?
In 2025, Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Optimizely. Based on interviews with Optimizely customers, Forrester created a composite organisation and modelled a 446% return on investment over three years. The study also modelled an 8% increase in conversions, productivity improvements of up to 40% for developers, and 35% for content marketers.
What these figures illustrate is that the value of a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) like Optimizely doesn’t just come from what customers see on the website – it can also come from making your teams more effective, reducing unnecessary development effort, improving processes, and getting more from the technology you already have.
We’ve seen the same in our own Optimizely work. When we re-platformed Karndean Designflooring’s international B2C websites, B2B retailer portal, and associated services from Sitecore to Optimizely, the work delivered a 56% year-on-year technology cost saving, alongside 30% faster editorial workflows.
But the value didn’t end with the re-platform. As part of our ongoing partnership with Karndean, we subsequently carried out research with customers across the UK, US, and Australia to understand how people actually searched for and evaluated flooring online. Those insights informed redesigned customer journeys, improved search and navigation, changes to product taxonomy, a new product finder, and more targeted experiences for B2B audiences.
Getting more from Optimizely isn’t necessarily a technology project. We can help identify where the opportunity sits – whether that’s in the platform itself, customer research and UX, search and discovery, experimentation, personalisation, content operations, or the way different systems and data work together – and then help implement the improvements.
Small changes can deliver significant results
Our work with the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) is a good example of when a few targeted changes can make a big difference.
The LTA already had valuable audience and analytics data showing significant seasonal changes in behaviour around the summer tennis calendar. Rather than replacing the underlying platform, we used those insights to identify where the existing experience could better reflect what visitors were actually trying to do during this peak period.
We redesigned journeys and developed new templates and functionality within the LTA’s existing Optimizely platform. We also helped its internal team make use of rule-based personalisation and created a stronger foundation for continuing to adapt the experience in future seasons.
We saw an 83% increase in page views from the homepage, a 40% decrease in homepage bounce rates, a 32% increase in average visitor session times, and a 6% uplift in summer event ticket sales attributed to improvements in event discovery.
Taking time to understand the audience better and make more effective use of the Optimizely estate that’s already there can reap significant rewards.
Look at the customer experience, not just the Optimizely platform
Your customers don’t experience your CMS. They experience whether they can find what they’re looking for, understand what you’re telling them, and complete what they came to do. That means some of the biggest opportunities within your existing Optimizely estate may in fact sit in the experience built on top of it.
Search is a good example. Technically, your search functionality can be working exactly as designed but still give your customers a poor experience. The issue might be terminology, metadata, product taxonomy, filtering, the way results are presented, or simply a mismatch between the way you categorise information and the way your customers think about it.
The same applies to navigation, content, forms, checkout, account areas, and customer journeys. Technology can enable improvements to all these areas, but it can’t tell you by itself what your customers need.
That’s why our Optimizely work doesn’t stop at implementation and development. We combine platform expertise with customer research, UX and experience design, analytics, experimentation, and optimisation to understand what needs improving before deciding how technology should solve it.
So, when you’re looking for more value from Optimizely, consider both sides – what can our platform enable us to do, and what would actually make the customer experience better?
What do Optimizely’s latest AI capabilities mean?
AI is perhaps the clearest example of why it’s worth periodically revisiting what’s possible within the platform.
Optimizely’s AI capabilities have developed rapidly from the original Opal assistant into a broader Agent Platform, with agents and workflows able to support specific activities across content, experimentation, commerce, analytics, and other parts of the Optimizely ecosystem.
But you may not need it all. You should look at where you have a genuine problem or constraint. Where is content production unnecessarily slow? Where are people repeatedly carrying out manual work? Where is useful data difficult to turn into action? Where does experimentation take longer than it should? Where could your teams make better decisions if they could access or interpret information more easily? That gives AI a genuine job to do.
For a content team, that might mean using an agent to analyse existing CMS content and help create new content that follows the same structure, reducing manual set-up and rework.
For an experimentation team, agents can already analyse experimentation projects for governance issues or help with the implementation of feature flags.
And Optimizely’s new Virtual Teammates take the idea further. Rather than waiting for someone to prompt them for an individual task, they can be configured around defined roles and recurring work, such as monitoring conversion performance, identifying personalisation opportunities, analysing marketing performance, or tracking SEO and AI search visibility.
When it comes to identifying a worthwhile piece of work that could be done better, faster, or more consistently, and then deciding whether the technology can genuinely help, we can help you make that assessment. We can identify where AI and agentic capabilities have a credible role within your existing Optimizely estate, and work through the platform, experience, data, integration, and governance implications of putting them into practice.
So, where’s the real opportunity?
If you take a proper look at your Optimizely estate, you’ll probably identify more opportunities than you can sensibly pursue. You don’t need to turn all of them into a major transformation roadmap.
Instead, prioritise them around what matters to your business and your customers. Where’s the greatest friction? Which changes support your current priorities? Where could you realistically improve revenue, conversion, engagement, or efficiency? Which improvements could you make relatively quickly, and which require wider organisational or technical change?
Our work with The Wine Society provides a good example of how different, incremental improvements can build on each other. The Wine Society’s move from a 25-year-old legacy ecommerce platform to Optimizely created a new digital foundation, but the value came from much more than simply changing the underlying technology.
User research, behavioural analysis, usability testing, improved journeys, better search and navigation, a simplified checkout, and greater use of Optimizely’s wider capabilities all contributed to the result. The new platform delivered a 37% increase in conversions, a 69% increase in mobile checkouts, and a 21% increase in website sales. The later implementation of Optimizely’s AI Product Recommendations delivered a further 5% increase in orders.
Taking another look at your Optimizely estate doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it. You’ve already invested in a very capable digital platform. The opportunity is to make sure the value you’re getting from it continues to develop as Optimizely, your organisation, and your customers change.
That might mean planning an upgrade to CMS 13, making better use of customer data, improving search and discovery, introducing more systematic experimentation or personalisation, redesigning a customer journey, changing an inefficient content process, or applying AI where it can remove a genuine constraint.
How we can help
DotCentric can help across all of those areas. We’ve worked with Optimizely for more than 15 years and launched more than 75 Optimizely solutions. As an Optimizely Gold Solution Partner, our work spans platform development and upgrades, architecture and integrations, experience strategy and design, customer research, experimentation, personalisation, and optimisation.
That breadth means we can look at your existing Optimizely estate as a whole – the technology, the way your teams use it, and the experience your customers actually receive – rather than assuming the answer is simply more technology.
What matters is periodically asking whether you’re getting the best possible value from the Optimizely investment you already have and, if not, where the next worthwhile opportunity lies.
If you’ve been running Optimizely for some time and want an independent view of where you could be getting more from it, talk to us. We’d be happy to chat things through.
