The Benefits of a Headless CMS

Author: Sarah Braumiller

Headless Content Management System (CMS) is a big buzzword right now. As content is becoming richer every day, many sectors are talking about what benefits they might gain by going headless. From being flexible and scalable, to speed and ease, to having omnichannel experiences, there is certainly no shortage of marketing materials on any given CMS selling you on how they beat the competition. It all sounds great, but what does it mean and what do you gain by changing over to a Headless CMS? Let’s dive into this and explore how a Headless CMS can benefit your company. And don’t worry – we’ll decode some of the jargon along the way. 

Let’s define what a Traditional CMS and a Headless CMS are. 

A Traditional CMS (also called a “Coupled CMS” or a “Monolithic CMS”) will put the data layer and presentation layer together. As you build out components’ structures and their data, there is a presentation layer that contains that component’s code. When that component gets attached to a page within the CMS and that page is published, all the content and code get published with it and a page is compiled at publish time and served to your user. 

On the other hand, a Headless CMS (also called a “Decoupled CMS” or an “API-first CMS”) separates the data layer from the presentation layer. Your CMS is solely for your data/content. The CMS doesn’t even know about the code or how it is styled. When you publish your content, the JSON within the API gets updated. Because it is exporting structured JSON by way of an API, the Front End can fetch and consume that API using any language, technology, framework, and/or library. 

Why is it “Headless”? What does that mean? 

Headless is a software term for having no User Interface/Front End. In a Traditional CMS, the page, components’ structure, component’s data, and code are coupled and published together. When you publish your pages and components in a Headless CMS, the API is updated with the new field and/or value. Thus, the code and the data are completely separate entities. 

How is a Headless CMS more flexible and scalable? 

A Traditional CMS is tightly coupled and combines everything into one: your content repository, the templating system/front end, any custom code, and any backend architecture and/or tools. On initial review, this seems great – one singular place to manage everything for your application or website. However, you shortly start to realize that if any change needs to happen, it requires multiple spots along the lifecycle. Because a Traditional CMS does so much, there may be performance issues. The code base and CMS can become very bloated if not maintained well. To top it off, editors and marketers cannot work independently of developers. 

With a Headless CMS, this changes the game. The CMS is now only for your data, content, taxonomy, etc. Developers will consume that CMS’s API, and they can create any UI. This means that based on one CMS and its shared data, we can have any number of company sites, all with a different look and feel. It means that we don’t have to pick one language; we can truly customize it for whatever our use case is:  

• Have a React Server Side Rendered site, yet need an additional marketing site run by a different marketing team with their own developers who are more comfortable in VueJS?  
• Need to show something as a three-panel component in one site, and a carousel in another?  
• Started with a website, and now you’ve grown where you need to think about developing a television app or push notifications?  

A Headless CMS will allow developers to pull off any of these scenarios because there are no technical limitations that a Traditional CMS typically places on the developer. 

Is a Headless CMS faster? 

Speed is a huge benefit of a Headless CMS approach, for many reasons. The CMS is faster because it’s not trying to be everything for everybody. For example, publishing becomes much quicker because it’s not tasked with compiling content and code for full pages. Its only concern is the content. In some Traditional CMSs, the system is so complex that content authors and marketers are forced to place a ticket for the simplest of tasks, like typos. That ticket then needs to be triaged and put into a sprint for the developer to pick up at their next available moment. In a Headless CMS, the CMS is specifically designed to empower editors and allow them to make any content updates themselves. This means you can make that update in minutes, versus weeks. The low turn-around time makes marketers and content authors happy, and developers can focus on solving problems and puzzles with their code, instead of updating content. 

Marketers and content authors won’t have to worry about how their data looks on different platforms. Once the content is updated, publishing will deploy the content to the API, and developers can consume that API on any platform. On the other hand, development can become faster. Developers can use any language and tools they want, and this means that a company doesn’t need specialists. If you have two or more teams working on different sites sharing the same content, they can work in parallel. When the CMS is ready and there’s content to consume, the developers can start building.  

Even the end-user will notice a difference. You’ll have a dedicated front end, in which you can create more performant experiences. The app or site only contains the code and can be optimized for speed. When your site or app is faster, the search engines will reward your site with higher rankings.  

How does a Headless CMS help with Omnichannel Experiences? 

Omnichannel experiences can be quite a challenge for marketers. There’s a big effort in ensuring content is consistent and displays well for all channels – desktop/mobile, television, wearables, VR, email, push notifications, and social media sites.  

 Within a Traditional CMS, it delivers a single-channel experience well. This means that you might have different components for push notifications versus desktop. This starts to create content silos, which can duplicate the same content for each channel. Over time, this can lead to inconsistencies in your content. 

Alternatively, a Headless CMS gives content editors and marketers a much more flexible structure for their content. Content creators can distribute content to a new channel easier and more consistently. You can cover all of your existing channels and moving into a new channel in the future is easier, which means you achieve a much higher ROI than you would with a Traditional CMS. When you can pull off a consistent, well-maintained experience for any platform or device that your user wants, you will have a much better chance at keeping your user on your applications and sites. 

Are there any drawbacks to a Headless CMS approach? 

It greatly depends on what your company looks like and what your needs are. Some of the advantages mentioned above can also be drawbacks for smaller companies. If you’re a small company with no developers, a Headless CMS solution might not be the best fit for you, yet. A Headless CMS has no built-in presentation layer, so if you’re looking to grab something out-of-the-box, this might not be the option for you.  In addition, high flexibility could mean that your architecture is more complex, so having a plan and establishing clear documentation from the start is recommended. That being said, for enterprise-level companies, the benefits by far outweigh any drawbacks. 

Wrap Up 

In today’s world, we need to ensure we can present content on any platform. It is also extremely important to get to market faster. A great CMS can help eliminate much of the hassle that marketers and content authors face. A major benefit of the headless CMS approach is that the same content can be published to any platform. This keeps your content consistent from wherever it is accessed.  

Here are some questions you can ask, to see if you’re ready to make the jump to a Headless CMS:  

• Are you a large/enterprise-level company? 
• Are you updating content frequently? 
• Are you sharing content between multiple apps and/or sites? 
• Are your developers fixing content issues? 
• Do you need to support scalable enterprise content management needs? 

If you find yourself answering yes to any of these questions, contact us! We’d love to talk with you about your current pain points and how a Headless CMS can benefit your company. Still have questions? Just reach out – we’re always more than happy to help.