6 Advantages of Using a Headless CMS

6 Reasons to use a headless CMS

There are many advantages to using a headless CMS for your next website, below we have highlighted 6 leading advantages.

1. Flexibility to build the way you want

   Choosing a CMS is not always a straight-forward solution and depends on a combination of things like existing architecture, a team’s technical capabilities, and company goals for the website. What’s great about going headless is that a headless CMS is responsible for the backend, but not for the presentation layer. Because a headless CMS allows content to be pushed to any presentation layer, you have the flexibility to connect with whatever frontend framework is best for you and your team. This approach also provides you the opportunity to pull in data from additional systems, as well as reduce the effort to update the design or migrate to a new frontend (or backend) system in the future.

2. Lower learning curve

   A headless CMS can control everything on the website like text, page layouts, graphics, and SEO without code. It only has one job, managing your content. So the interface can be streamlined and optimized for marketing teams, instead of development teams. Developers can leverage native tools and frameworks they’re familiar with to connect to a well documented headless API, and marketers can appreciate the best-in-class management experience provided by a CMS.

3. Reusable content for omnichannel output

   Today, we access our data everywhere: smartwatches, laptops, mobile devices, and tablets. With a monolithic, single channel system, repurposing data for other applications is burdensome for both developers and marketers who have to manage consistency across multiple platforms. Going headless removes this burden so that a single content item only has to be uploaded once and can be reused with several different presentation outputs.

4. Offload CMS security and management

   One of the biggest downfalls with open source content management systems is the security and version updates. So much time and cost is spent supporting the platform, instead of building new functionality. Patching and updating monolithic systems is expensive, time-consuming, and adds layers of additional security risks. Going all-in on a hosted website platform, like Squarespace, is often not the best choice for many businesses. One of the best parts about going headless is that updates and framework support don’t have to be handled in-house. Instead, they are handled by the platform so your in-house development team can focus on building stellar user experiences with the framework and hosting infrastructure of your choice.

5. Future-proof development

   It takes no time for a platform to become outdated, so going headless offers more scalability. By having your frontend and backends separated, your team has the freedom to update or restructure content, redesign pages, refresh the entire experience, or even move platforms seamlessly without migrations or massive refactoring.

6. Improve website performance

   Monolithic platforms are slow. Period. They require complicated caching architecture to be tolerable, headless websites on the other hand are built in a performant-forward manner. Using a static site generator allows teams to leverage a content management system, while still serving static web assets which are fast and performant. Static site generators can easily be hooked to a CI/CD pipeline and can even be hosted on serverless infrastructure providing additional cost savings. Even more complex application frameworks like React or Angular can be more performant than a monolithic system because the initial display can be loaded quickly and then filled with content from the CMS, versus a monolithic system that requires a tedious bootstrap process to load the completed webpage.

Conclusion

Content is king and headless content management systems are the best way to quickly produce high performing content managed websites.They also empower your teams to create great experiences, and can even help to retain great talent. Don’t let your website become a tech tragedy. Go headless and future-proof your company’s web architecture!