Increase ROI and Lifetime Value of Your Investment in TYPO3

Today, businesses manage many websites beyond their main brand website. Their success depends on customer or partner portals, intranets, and websites for each of their products and campaigns. Each new site needs to be maintained and continuously updated to ensure secure and reliable data handling and—don’t forget—a great user experience.

TYPO3 offers one of the longest support cycles of any content management system. This makes it a better long-term investment when you choose it for your critical web projects. In this article, we’ll look at how Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) for TYPO3 CMS gives your website longevity and stability, increasing the ROI and the lifetime value of your investment.

Do you want to ensure your websites remain productive and deliver value much longer than the average expected website lifespan of just over 2.5 years? The TYPO3 Core Team releases LTS (long-term support) versions every 1.5 years. These versions are actively maintained and supported for 18 months. They receive security fixes and critical updates for an additional 18 months, resulting in a total of 3 years of free support by the TYPO3 community.

You can extend that support a further three years with an Extended Long Term Support agreement, doubling the period your site will be stable, secure, and delivering value to you and your customers. 

TYPO3 v9 LTS came out in October 2018, and it will be supported until April 28th, 2020, with new updates and releases coming out every six weeks. This planned maintenance phase ensures reliability and predictability. After that, TYPO3 v9 sites can obtain ELTS for an additional three years until 2023. ELTS is currently also available for TYPO3 6.2 and TYPO3 7.6. 

Once the free community support period expires, you can update to the next supported version. Alternatively, you can keep things running smoothly with an ELTS support contract. You gain peace of mind if your organization has complex content management needs or decision-making processes. 

> Read: Extended Support for TYPO3 CMS

Advances in technology and connectivity have been challenging the market to update and improve content delivery to consumers. As digital versions of more and more services are being offered and continuously enhanced, people have come to expect user experiences to keep pace. In a nutshell, websites and services need to be fast and easy to use on more devices and channels than ever. 

As you attempt to compare content management systems, you might find yourself lost in the weeds of feature list comparisons. From a higher vantage point, you may be able to see the big picture more clearly. Key areas to consider are factors that affect security, interoperability with other services, and the future of your websites. For example: How does the open-source community or company behind a CMS plan and work on releases? Is there a roadmap? To avoid “falling behind by standing still.” How often are new versions released? How has the product kept pace with significant technology changes in recent years? 

As you grow, your content needs to be shareable across multiple websites, multiple regions, in multiple languages, and across devices. Moreover, it needs to be stable as well as protected against security breaches. How can you choose a CMS for your immediate needs that will also take you reliably into the future? 

Regulatory frameworks like GDPR require you to run supported software. ELTS—Extended Long Term Support—extends the horizon for continued legal compliance, extended security, and compatibility. 

As author Rachel Foucard in her article on choosing a CMS, “You should be looking at most of your web projects as a long-term investment. You’ll need it to grow and adapt with you while staying relevant for three to five or more years.”

> Read: 7 Steps to Choosing a CMS

When we think of enterprise software, we think of longevity and legacy. Enterprise organizations are large; they move more cautiously and work to avoid unnecessary risks. Developing a new product or taking a business process online always comes with associated risks, but also offers potential rewards. Enterprise organizations avoid taking chances with software, hosting, or CMSs that do not provide assurance and confidence in reliability and performance. 

Cost-savings and ROI improvements are increased enormously for TYPO3 multi-site implementations, in which one TYPO3 instance can be running dozens or hundreds of websites. Multiply the value of a CMS with a longer supported life cycle by the number of sites running from that single instance. 

The University of Vienna uses TYPO3 CMS for their websites and portals. Like many higher education organizations today, the university has sites for each department, for student groups, recruiting, administration, and more. All in all, the University of Vienna hosts 1300 different domains in 32 languages. All of these running on a single (!) TYPO3 installation. 

Site upgrades are rarely a 1:1 software update, no matter the size of an organization. Each upgrade is usually a time to re-imagine and update site design, user experience, and take advantage of new functionality and capabilities. Those changes all require investment in resources and time. 

ELTS provides flexibility and an extended planning horizon around upgrades. You can effectively run a website, or networked multi-site installation for six years with full technical support, bug fixes and functionality improvements guaranteed. And you have enough time to plan for the comprehensive redesign you’ll need when implementing a significant system upgrade. 

With ELTS, your organization can get more out of your CMS investment. You get the maintenance, support, and peace of mind you require for much longer. Instead of planning managing costly and disruptive upgrades every three years, you can put your resources into improving the user experience and online services instead.

The TYPO3 Project supports every LTS (Long-Term Support) release for three years. The community’s core developers and other volunteers extend, improve, and keep the system secure. Purchasing ELTS buys you a further three years of peace-of-mind and legal compliance. It doubles the time you’re increasing the ROI on your web project—from three to six years. 

If you want to extend the life cycle, lifetime value, and the ROI of your web application built with TYPO3 contact us today.

If you’re a digital agency, let’s talk about giving your clients the value of ELTS.