Structured Content Will Save Your Website (and Your Sanity)

The daily tasks of content editing are often straightforward. The site works, you enter content. But what if there was a better way to handle your edits that makes life easier now and five years down the road?

To put it differently, imagine after a site migration, you're now learning that most of your assets were pasted in a rich text editor. Others were used from a third-party CDN that's no longer operational and no one on your team remembers where it even came from. Time to email IT? Regardless, you end up with a Frankenstein of a mess, missing content, and blank pages.

This is why a well-planned content model makes all the difference. As digital experiences grow more complex and organizations manage increasing content volumes, the value of well-structured content becomes more apparent. The investment in structured content pays dividends through reduced maintenance costs, improved consistency, and the ability to adapt to emerging channels and requirements.

Content architecture is a topic we frequently revisit, and it deserves a clear explanation. We've seen clients revert to simpler architectures, only to return to structured content. So what exactly is “structured content,” and how would it improve your website?

Structured vs Freeform Content

Structured and freeform content are two approaches that represent opposite ends of a spectrum rather than absolute categories. Most content management systems incorporate elements of both to varying degrees:

• Structured Content — divides content and data into discrete fields and structures, modeling the meaning and purpose of the content and data itself. For example, a listing of people on a site where each person's information is stored in separate fields for title, bio, and tags, allowing their details to be reused.
• Freeform content — also called inline or monolithic content, stores everything in a single block, often mixing data, formatting, and structure in a single stream. This could be a page where all content including images, links, and formatting is stored in a single rich text field as HTML.

In practice, even highly structured systems often include some freeform elements (e.g. rich text fields), while primarily freeform editors increasingly incorporate structured components. The key difference lies in which approach forms the foundation of your content architecture and how deliberately you manage the balance between flexibility and structure.

Is freeform content really that bad?

Not all content fits neatly into predefined fields, and freeform content does have advantages.

Authors often have full control over composition and layout, working within familiar editing interfaces that typically require little to no training. Because this approach has fewer upfront requirements, development tends to be faster. For authors, it can also feel cognitively easier in the short term, making it a convenient choice for quick updates.

However, the flexibility of freeform content comes at a cost. Over time, the burden of maintaining consistency in style, structure, and quality shifts entirely to the author. At scale, this becomes difficult to manage. For instance, if every department director is listed on multiple pages, any change to their title or photo requires content authors to track down and manually update. Now picture doing that over 10 years. This wastes time and increases the risk of errors. 

Modern editors like Gutenberg offer a hybrid approach: structured components embedded within freeform content. This improves authoring experience and mitigates some limitations but ultimately, the underlying data remains opaque to the system, limiting reuse, searchability, and automation.

The Benefits of Structured Content

When we structure our content properly, we unlock numerous advantages that simply aren't possible with freeform approaches:

1. Content Reuse: Fields such as summary or image can be reused in teasers, search, SEO. Using linked entities (e.g., people, places) ensures data consistency and reduces duplication of work: edit once, update everywhere.
2. Design consistency: Structured data enforces consistent rendering across your entire digital ecosystem, maintaining design integrity with minimal effort.
3. Build In Accessibility: Structure makes it easier to systematically implement accessibility standards across your entire application. No more relying on individual authors to remember every requirement.
4. SEO Enhancement: Structured content provides clearer semantic markup for search engine interpretation, while enabling automatic metadata generation without additional author effort.
5. Permissions and governance: Field-level structure allows fine-grained control over who can view or edit specific data.
6. Enhanced Discoverability: Unlike monolithic content blocks, structured data can be immediately filtered, searched, and analyzed making your content truly useful.
7. Channel-Agnostic Delivery: Structured content can be served cleanly to web, mobile, APIs, and third-party integrations.
8. Future-Proof Foundation: Structured data is easier to migrate between systems without the extensive cleanup freeform content typically requires.

Making Structured Content More Manageable

Structured content can feel rigid or overwhelming to authors. These strategies help reduce friction and improve the authoring experience.

Optimized User Interface and Author Support

• Use meaningful field labels and descriptions that guide authors.
• Group related fields logically with navigation aids (tabs, jump links) for complex forms.
• Allow inline creation of simple, linked content (e.g., tags, references).
• Provide contextual navigation to related content areas.
• Provide author training tailored to real workflows.
• Maintain accessible up-to-date documentation with visuals and examples.

Discovery, Feedback, and Visual Context

• Engage content authors early during discovery and post launch.
• Demonstrate the authoring experience before implementing architectural changes.
• Provide content previews to help authors visualize the end result.
• Enable efficient iterative editing through real-time preview capabilities.

Conclusion

The divide between structured and freeform approaches represents more than a technical choice but a strategic decision about sustainable content management. While the upfront planning for structured content requires additional effort, organizations that make this investment build a foundation capable of supporting growth, ensuring consistency, and enabling innovation across their digital presence.

For companies who are growing or evolving from simple websites to enterprise-level platforms carefully considering how content is organized is essential. Forward-thinking teams understand that adopting structured content, while balancing technical needs with human workflows, delivers lasting results content that stays manageable, accessible, and adaptable through years of change and development.