Issue 48

How many content types are too many?

​Last issue I talked about how to know if a content type is too complex. In this issue, we pivot to a similar question: how many content types are too many?

Just like many things in the content strategy and content architecture worlds—and consulting, I might add—the answer is “It depends.”

As a result, my mind goes toward a series of diagnostic questions.

Is there a technical or platform constraint?

Sometimes, the content management system (CMS) limits the number of content types available. For example, cloud-based vendors may include a fixed number of content types in different plan offerings, and exceeding that means you jump up to the next plan or pay additional charges for the overage in content types.

Another technical constraint involves complex nesting of entries, where an entry is a parent to an entry, which is a parent to an entry, which is a parent to another entry … and so on.

Some nesting is inevitable and sometimes a good thing. The content ecosystem is enriched when entries and content types have connections to other entries.

But deeply nested entries lead to complex queries and additional API calls (which is another part of some CMS fee structures). As I mentioned in Issue 47, I like to think of a network of relationships instead of a deep tree of relationships. And I start paying attention when I see nesting 3 or 4 levels deep.

Sometimes I use content types almost as a taxonomy. If there’s no public-facing content within those taxonomical content types, you might consider switching from a content type to some sort of tagging or taxonomy functionality, depending on what your CMS or related tooling allows.

Are authors able to work easily?

If you have too many content types, content types that aren’t named clearly, or poor author documentation, authors may struggle to know what content to create where. If authors can’t use the system, you have no system.

One thing I have seen that can lead to too many content types and author confusion is when an organization has too many single-entry content types. I borrow from the programming world and call these singleton content types.

Some singletons are necessary—like “Terms of Use” or “Site settings”—but a large number of singleton entries burns through content types and may be a symptom of poor pattern recognition by the modeling team or a symptom of inconsistent content.

Sometimes content teams fall into a trap of thinking that much of their content needs to be more bespoke than it really needs to be—they have a lot of unicorn content types.

This could lead to too many singleton content types, but it may also lead to a different problem: too many similar-but-overlapping content types where most of the fields are the same but there’s a subset of fields in each content type that differ.

When that happens, depending on your CMS, you might be able to have conditional fields (which seem like a good idea but maybe aren’t?) to reduce the number of content types.

Or, you might be able to reduce from multiple parallel content types down to a single content type that references new content types for those fields that differ. This may or may not reduce your overall number of content types, but it may simplify the author experience.

Does your implementation bring complexity?

Even if there aren’t technical or platform constraints and authors get along just fine, your CMS implementation may bring complexity that has implications on the number of content types.

The first consideration here is the size of your organization. The CMS for a 20-person startup with a single product should probably have fewer content types than the CMS for a 100-person content-heavy nonprofit or government agency. And both of those probably don’t need the number of content types that a 10,000-employee global enterprise needs.

Another consideration for the number of content types is whether or not you’re using a digital experience platform (DXP) or some other sort of experience layer to build a web or app experience on top of the CMS content. If you are, you can focus the content modeling on semantic content types—that is, content types structured solely around meaningful content objects—and use the DXP to separate content from presentation.

If you don’t have that DXP layer, you may need to spend some of your content types pragmatically to model presentation elements. In this world, in addition to having semantic content types, you might use content types to represent design system components or their variants (such as a dark version/light version, or left-aligned/right-aligned, and so on) or page types.

If you know me well, you know that I don’t like to model presentation in the CMS. It’s a slippery slope that puts the flexibility and potential of “intelligent content” at risk. I talked about this in Issue 47. If you have to model presentation in the CMS, consider having what I call “content primitive” content types that hold your content and “assembly” content types where you reference content primitives and have presentation controls. Pro tip: Use naming conventions for your content types, including emoji like 📝(content primitive), 🏭(assembly), or 🎨(presentation/layout).

The last consideration is related to the first. While the first was about size, the last consideration is about the complexity of your organization. A single-product company is less complex than a multi-product company. A startup is less complex organizationally than a multi-national company with 200 divisions. A mid-size consumer goods company is less complex than a mid-size company in a regulated industry, such as banking or pharmaceuticals.

If you’re modeling for a single division in a large enterprise, your implementation will be simpler than if you’re modeling for the entire enterprise. Obviously, in any of these examples, the more complex implementations will probably require more content types.

Let’s keep talking about this

I’ve shared a few thoughts here, but I don’t think I have a perfect answer. I’d love to hear how you would answer “how many content types is too many” and what considerations I’ve missed. (I’m sure I’ve left something out.) If you have thoughts, shoot an email to model-thinking@tripleoakenterprises.com.

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper

Coming soon

If you’re like me, you can easily nerd out on the boxes and arrows of a content model, but not everyone does. So how do you help stakeholders and collaborators understand the model?

I’ll be speaking on this topic next month on Wednesday, Nov. 11 for Content Strategy Seattle with my presentation “The Content Model Makes Sense to You. Do Others Get it?” Sign up for free here.

Top of mind

• Best thing I read in the last 2 weeks: “The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.” I found this in Austinite Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work.
• Something that made me smile in the last 2 weeks: It’s a two-fer this week.
  • I facilitated a 90-minute discussion with a group of consultant peers last week. I used Claude to help me plan out the session and its timing, and I asked it to make a run sheet based on the schedule we planned out, giving the clock time for each segment. Claude made an incredible artifact that scrolled through the planned segments as the clock progressed. It was super easy to know when I was ahead, on time, or needing to move the session along.
  • I am a dog dad, but I’m not a pug owner. I found myself at a “Pug Grumble” event (grumble being the collective noun for pugs), attended by 1,417 pugs and their owners. The weather and setting were beautiful, and all the pups made for a really peaceful day.
• A pattern I noticed recently: Over the last several years, I’ve noticed more and more people use the phrase “I appreciate you” instead of “Thank you” or “Good to see you.” I saw a Reddit discussion about this and, of course, there are a lot of ideas for why this has become more common. Have you seen this? Why do you think it is?

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