Personalisation has become one of those words everyone uses, but few people agree on what it actually means.
For some teams, it means showing “related content” or surfacing what is trending. For others, it is about tailoring experiences to individual users across visits, devices and channels. Both approaches get labelled as personalisation, even though they represent very different levels of capability.
This matters, because many organisations believe they are already personalising effectively, when in reality they are still delivering broadly the same experience to everyone.
Why personalisation feels harder than it should
Content teams are under pressure to do more with less. Audiences are fragmented, attention is limited and expectations are shaped by platforms that set a very high bar for relevance.
At the same time, the technology landscape is confusing. CMS features, plugins, analytics tools, CDPs and AI platforms all promise personalisation, but rarely explain what kind, or how mature it actually is.
As a result, teams often struggle to answer a simple question: how personalised is our content experience today?
A practical way to assess where you are
We created this short quiz to help teams understand their current personalisation capability across five key areas:
- How content is displayed and recommended
- The data and technology underpinning your site
- How email and on-site experiences connect
- Privacy, consent and registration foundations
- Organisational and analytical readiness
There are no trick questions, and no right or wrong answers. Most organisations operate at different levels across different areas. The goal is not to achieve a perfect score, but to create a shared, realistic view of where you are today.
Take the quiz
The quiz should take less than five minutes to complete. Answer honestly based on what is live and working now, not what is planned or aspirational.
Most organisations operate at different maturity levels across different areas. This assessment reflects current capabilities based on your responses and is intended to guide discussion, not act as a formal audit.
What to do with your result
Your result reflects your current capabilities, not your ambition. Many high-performing teams start with very simple approaches and build incrementally over time.
What matters most is identifying one or two practical next steps that will make your content more relevant, easier to discover or more likely to bring people back.
If you’d like a second opinion on your results, or want to explore what is realistic for your organisation, we are always happy to talk things through. Get in touch for a chat.
Personalisation works best when it is treated as a journey, not a switch you flip.
Want to move faster without adding complexity?
If your results highlighted gaps between where you are today and where you want to be, the challenge is usually not intent. It’s time, tooling, and how hard personalisation feels to implement in practice.
Accelerate is a WordPress plugin built by Human Made to help teams improve content discovery and engagement without rebuilding their stack. It focuses on practical, incremental personalisation using the data you already have, from better recommendations to smarter newsletters.
If you want to make meaningful progress without jumping straight to enterprise platforms or heavy custom builds, Accelerate is a good place to start.
Find out more about Accelerate and see what’s possible with your existing content.
