Is Headless CMS the Future of Content Management? Debating the Pros and Cons

Content Management Systems, or CMS for short (such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal), have been staples of traditional use cases for decades as places to build and manage online content. These platforms tightly integrate the backend content storage and its front-end interface. Yet, as business demands necessitate servicing content across many digital touchpoints, these systems are proving inflexible and slow to change.

The main problem with most CMS platforms is not technical at all. The problem is they are monolithic, which makes scalability and repurposing of the CMS across different channels a pain. According to one Storyblok survey, 57 percent of users can not use only one CMS to handle their content. Traditional CMS is stiff enough that it's hard to serve content across various platforms. This increased inflexibility also increases development time and high costs for companies exporting content to many digital environments. Gartner confirms this by stating that businesses are moving away from traditional CMS systems because they struggle to meet the demands of omnichannel customer experiences.

A headless CMS solves the problem by decoupling the content management back end from the front-end presentation layer to deliver content seamlessly across any digital platform. Separating the core app from the device-specific business logic and presentation components provides much more flexibility and scalability to a mobile application, which is essential considering today's multi-device world. According to a WP Engine report, 85 percent of IT and marketing professionals identified increased agility and performance as the main reason for adopting headless CMS.

Adopting a headless CMS can solve the problem of rigid content management systems, empower organizations to provide a consistent customer experience across all channels, reduce time to market for new digital initiatives, and improve overall operational efficiency.

What is a CMS?

CMS allows users to generate, modify, distribute, and maintain website content. It is software that helps people to create and manage websites with their assets, designs, and text. Anyone can use a CMS to create a website from scratch, even with little or no programming skills. It has tools for publishing, editing, and search functionalities.

The CMS does all the infrastructure work so users can focus on user-facing aspects of their site. They don't have to establish a system for building web pages, storage, and other functions. They can also use CMSs as a database for document management and other purposes.

What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS only has a backend. Contrary to conventional systems, a headless CMS stores and manages content in the back end and delivers it through application programming interfaces to the front end of the user's preference. The 'headless' architecture provides more flexibility to control what and where content is delivered.

For example, its application is to write content once without developing new content for a website, mobile application, or other voice-assisting devices. Issues emerge more from the perspective that in traditional CMS structural arrangements, the front end is the last design domain and is limited in imaginative and operational freedom. However, with the overall adoption of headless CMS, what is realized is the aptitude of the developers to create superior front-end customer experiences ex novo without regard for the ensemble.

However, while most of this appears to be a 'no-brainer' and therefore 'beneficial' for a business to deploy a headless CMS, there is also the flip side of the coin – the disadvantages, which would depend on the development resources, cost, or firm scalability of the headless CMS.

A headless CMS is gaining popularity, as shown by its rising interest in Google Trends.

Pros of Headless CMS

A headless CMS has numerous and, in some cases, instantaneous benefits. It is flexible and can help brands manage emerging technologies.

1. Flexibility across multiple platforms

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of a headless CMS is its ability to provide content across channels. Users engage with information shared on websites, mobile applications, smartwatches, IoT applications, and many others. A headless CMS could be a SaaS without the standard UI we often associate with a CMS. It uses APIs to spread information through websites, applications for portable devices, and smartwatches.

A headless CMS allows users to distribute content across platforms and devices efficiently. This is critical because businesses with omnichannel distribution retain the majority (89 percent) of their customers on average, compared to 33 percent for companies with lackluster omnichannel efforts.

This flexibility allows developers to create custom front-end experiences tailored to each platform without worrying about content management limitations. That means that marketers can distribute content less complexly, having been relieved of the chore of duplicating the same message across different media.

For example, Nike uses a headless CMS to deliver content to its website, mobile apps, and digital kiosks in stores, ensuring a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints. Similarly, Lufthansa adopted a headless CMS to create a unified user experience across its website, mobile applications, and voice-activated services, allowing the company to respond rapidly to changing customer demands and emerging technologies.

Agencies like Perth SEO Studio know how to work with these multi-platform content initiatives. Using social media, they ensure a business is coherent with its messages while adhering to SEO best practices. That also improves its overall awareness across all the various channels, including the search network and voice search.

2. Developer control and customization

Traditional CMS platforms often come with preset themes, layouts, and modules. While these are useful for businesses looking to get up and running quickly, they can also restrict how much you can customize your site's front-end experience.

With classic CMSs like WordPress, developers must know specific coding languages such as HTML, PHP, and CSS. A headless CMS helps developers save time by minimizing the challenges they face with proprietary platforms. Because it is API-driven, it lets developers use the technology or programming language they want for the front end and presentation layer, allowing developers to avoid the many restrictions of a proprietary platform.

Peloton, for example, leverages a variation of headless CMS known as composable to have complete flexibility in designing and delivering content across its mobile app and website. That allows their development teams to create a fast, responsive user interface using frameworks like React while the content team manages information separately, improving overall workflow. Spotify also benefits from headless CMS, allowing its developers to use a custom tech stack to tailor user experiences across various devices, including web browsers, mobile apps, and smart TVs.

In other words, developers have complete control over the front end with a headless CMS. They can pick the technology stack that fits their project requirements, whether React, Vue.js, or Angular. This high level of freedom is suitable for developing really unique and individual pages and user experiences, avoiding the limits of templates of most CMS systems.

Furthermore, developers can focus on creating fast, responsive, and mobile-first designs by separating backend content management from front-end design. They aren't limited by a classic CMS's features (or lack thereof). They can implement the latest tools and technologies without worrying about CMS compatibility.

3. Future-proofing

Since technologies are rapidly developing, content management solutions will be required in the future. Many traditional CMS platforms are pretty stable, but they face issues with scale when new platforms or points of contact appear. On the other hand, a headless CMS is specifically designed to accommodate new technologies within its frameworks.

So, if your company is fixated on technology, headless CMS is the way to go. Many firms embarked on headless architecture earlier to freeze decisions and gain from applying it in the long run.

Companies like Tesla use headless CMS architecture to ensure their digital platforms remain future-proof. By decoupling the content from the front-end presentation, Tesla can adapt to new technologies and platforms as they emerge without having to rework their entire CMS infrastructure. Similarly, Netflix utilizes a headless CMS to stay agile, allowing the company to deploy new features and content formats to different platforms, including smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles, while easily integrating with third-party services.

Another reason to go headless CMS is that understanding that it prepares your apps for what comes next is great. It isolates your programming and 'head-end' from your front-end or what can rapidly become in design. With headless CMS, you can restructure your content anytime without affecting the backend, which makes it easier to rebrand and carry out new projects across platforms when necessary.

In other words, with headless CMS, you can keep up with technological innovations without concerns about whether your content will display correctly. It ensures that your content is always ready for distribution on any platform, app, or device without issue. It integrates securely with third-party software and platforms and new technologies and innovations.

4. Scalability

Businesses can quickly scale to new devices and platforms by managing content separately from the presentation layer without rebuilding their entire system. You can upgrade and customize all resources anytime you want, and there won't be any downtime because the front end is separate from the back end. A headless CMS optimizes and upgrades the site without backend and security issues that will compromise front-end performance.

Additionally, headless CMSs separate the maintenance of data and code, unlike classic CMSs that incorporate data into code. Instead of managing a huge codebase, a headless CMS uses APIs to distribute data, reducing security risks. You can easily secure the administration portions because the code and the user interface are distinct. That allows you to give access only to specific IP addresses. That can help the website's scalability as headless CMS can extend to other platforms, such as an online marketplace.

Amazon uses headless CMS to distribute content across its vast network, including voice-based services such as Alexa. The decoupling means Amazon can scale its content delivery without impacting its system's performance or security. Red Bull is another example, using a headless CMS to efficiently distribute content to its global audience across web, mobile, and social media channels.

5. Greater speed

Research shows that the average bounce rate for website pages that load in less than two seconds is six percent, soaring to 38 percent for pages that load in five seconds.

Building a website using a classic CMS affects website speed due to the extensive use of themes and plugins. A delay of one second in load time can result in seven percent fewer conversions, an 11 percent loss in views, and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction. That likely means poorer SEO performance for search engines, leading to low site traffic. A headless CMS helps you develop sites that load faster because it has a separate front end. Because your headless CMS website has less code than one using classic CMS, it is "lighter."

Sephora, a leading beauty retailer, improved its website performance by adopting a headless CMS. This separation of the back and front-end design of the site allowed Sephora to significantly reduce load times and increase user engagement, thus improving customer satisfaction. The faster load times also help companies like Betterment that use headless CMS eschew the extra code that must be loaded on the front end to create a more efficient and user-friendly experience.

6. Improved software architecture

A headless CMS is perfect for companies that build web platforms and offer website services. It is excellent for building best-practice environments with high levels of security and integrity. It lets you create better software architecture from scratch.

For example, Audible depends on a headless CMS to handle many digital assets and guarantees that its infrastructure scales beyond measure in terms of storage and processing power. Audible can develop modular components that can be reused across many platforms without affecting the backend systems using the headless approach. Likewise, The New York Times uses its custom headless CMS to handle its huge content library, keeping users secure on devices and platforms while always rocketing.

Users can model new content types quickly to improve the user experience with headless CMS. Content modeling allows you to create content modules and components that you can modify, reuse, and show in various formats outside of your website instead of having content permanently attached to a set position on a specific page. Although your data is within your site, the information is on the headless CMS and within its structure. These content models drive the user interface and user experience.

Cons of Headless CMS

The right CMS is crucial for your online presence. Of course, like with any architecture, headless CMS architecture has disadvantages despite its several benefits. Below, we present the disadvantages of implementing a headless CMS for decision-making.

1. More technically complex

The flexibility of headless CMSs is appealing, but it increases the complexity. Classic CMSs typically include user-friendly interfaces. They have drag-and-drop editors and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality that lets marketers or content creators manage content without technical assistance. These features are "idiot-proof" classic CMS platforms.

A headless CMS requires more technical chops, as displaying the website or app content involves custom development. That can make it harder for non-technical users to make changes without relying on developers. Headless CMS platforms do not have a front end, so users cannot preview their content before publication. Formatting issues can be a major challenge for some users.

For businesses that don't have an in-house development team, this could mean increased costs because you must hire developers or agencies to help with technical stuff. They can help mitigate this complexity by offering customized solutions that make headless CMS easier to manage and optimize for SEO performance.

2. Higher development and maintenance costs

A headless CMS requires a developer to build the front end, so a business must pay upfront costs for the work. You're creating the front-end design and functionality from scratch, which is unnecessary for classic CMS platforms.

A headless CMS is a backend-only system, so it does not have prebuilt themes or templates. On the one hand, that gives you more creative freedom with the look of your site or app. On the other hand, it means you must design the entire user interface, most probably requiring the services of skilled front-end developers. The initial costs may increase as you pay separately for the CMS, front-end development, and hosting service for your site or app.

Moreover, headless CMS is also costly to maintain compared to traditional CMS models. Front and backend updates are performed independently, which could be a little more cumbersome over the long haul. That is quite different from other traditional CMS platforms, which are normally marked by easier general updates.

However, while these cost expenses may initially appear huge, they are an investment that would warrant long-term flexibility and scalability. That makes business people appreciate the fact that start-up costs should be viewed from the growth and future returns of the investment made. For everyone who needs some help in this, it is better to address professional SEO services, which would indicate the best painting strategies and techniques of development and proper maintenance methods.

3. Lack of built-in features

Legacy CMS usually has numerous inherent instruments such as skins, templates, SEO settings, and kernels suitable for non-technical people but helps improve the content. By contrast, Headless CMSs are less like prebuilt cars and more like a canvas. Though there is nothing like customization in today's generation, this also poses a disadvantage, where a business organization may need to add these components themselves, which will take lots of resources.

For example, a typical CMS includes various integrated SEO tools marketers can use to boost their website's ranking. However, SEO applications are not intrinsic to headless CMS, so businesses must develop or source these tools.

That is where the help of agencies that give advice and help select the materials can be very useful. They can help businesses implement custom SEO strategies that integrate seamlessly with a headless CMS, ensuring that content is distributed across multiple platforms and optimized for search visibility.

4. Complex setup for non-technical teams

One of the largest benefits of headless CMS platforms is that they allow for flexibility and scalability when using components; however, setup may be slightly overwhelming for teams that do not have a strong technical background. In contrast with most other CMS platforms that include an already designed set of templates, themes, and a generally simplified graphical user interface for creating and developing the content and structure, headless CMS needs a more complicated setup procedure. It can mean where APIs should exist, how content will be formatted on the back end, how the website will consume it, a mobile application, or any other digital access points and interfaces.

This setup may become a problem for non-technical teams since their approach fails to organize code in a way that can efficiently fulfill specific purposes. While one of the key advantages of using a headless CMS is its ability to empower content creators and marketing professionals to manage and publish content without relying heavily on developers, that benefit typically comes after the initial technical foundation is laid. The backend has to be designed so that the content can reach those places, and the system's API has to accommodate dynamic content.

As this process is rather sophisticated, it is generally wiser to engage a development team or a dedicated agency to undertake this job. These experts can design and structure the content scaffolding of your CMS, set up the needed APIs, and describe the wires that link your CMS to front-end frameworks. That's it; once it is launched, one can hand over the power to the marketing/content teams, and they manage the system individually throughout the steps, including designing and uploading the content like landing pages, product promotion, blogs, or even a knowledge base.

Ultimately, while headless CMS solutions offer great long-term flexibility, businesses must recognize that they require an initial investment in technical expertise to realize their full potential. Once past this hurdle, however, non-technical teams can easily manage content across multiple channels.

Headless or classic?

The decision to go for headless or classic CMS depends on the project requirements and your technical capabilities. Consider the following scenarios.

• Simple Websites: A classic CMS is probably your best bet if you need a basic web or blog site with little or no customization. It is easy to use and costs less than a headless CMS.
• Complex Sites and Omnichannel Delivery: Suppose you need a dynamic website, mobile app, or content delivered across various platforms. A headless CMS is your best option, as it is flexible and scalable and can save you big bucks in the long run.
• Businesses with in-house developers: Suppose you're a SaaS or tech company with an in-house development team you can tap. You should consider using a headless CMS to build user experiences customized to your requirements.
• Businesses with no tech expertise: Suppose you have no in-house developers on the payroll. In that case, a classic CMS might be more suitable. However, you could outsource development if you anticipate the need for omnichannel delivery or regular front-end updating.

Is headless CMS the future?

Headless CMS is gaining popularity, but is it the future of content management? The quick answer is that it depends on your business needs and goals. A headless CMS may be a good choice if a classic CMS is too rigid or too restricted for your project requirements. Headless CMSs give developers the freedom to directly provide content across various platforms with the help of an API. It is also more popular among iOS, Android, and the web backend platforms.

For companies that require high levels of flexibility, scalability, and customization, a headless CMS is likely a sound investment. The ability to deliver across any platform in the future proves your business in an increasingly multi-device world.

That doesn't mean every company will need this customization or complexity, so a headless CMS might be overkill. It adds additional cost and technical burden for small businesses or those with few development resources.

You should also consider that personalized content is the norm now. More and more headless CMSs are adding AI and machine learning algorithms to give their users personalized experiences. With AI, your business can understand user data to give them ideas about the content they should like to interact with based on preferences, behavior, and demographics.

Another consideration is the increasing popularity of JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) development architecture used with headless CMS. By building static websites with JAMstack, developers get to better, faster, more stable, scalable websites with content from headless CMS supplied through APIs. The result is performance improvements and a cleaner development workflow.

Whatever you choose, one thing is certain: the rise of the headless CMS marks a significant shift in how businesses think about content management. As content evolves beyond websites and mobile apps to new platforms like IoT and voice assistants, more companies will likely gravitate toward the flexibility headless CMSs offer.

However, businesses need to consider SEO in this new content landscape. Irrespective of the CMS you settle on, focus on ensuring your content is visible to the search engine. SEO agencies are specialists in helping businesses make sense of the complexity of traditional and headless CMS platforms while offering tailored SEO solutions to increase content visibility in every digital touchpoint.

TL/DR: Choose a headless CMS if your business:

• Requires flexibility across multiple platforms: You must deliver content to websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, voice assistants, and other emerging technologies, ensuring a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
• Prioritizes developer control and customization: Your developers need full control over the front end to create custom user experiences without being constrained by the limitations of traditional CMS templates or proprietary systems.
• Wants to future-proof its content management: Your business aims to stay agile and adapt to new technologies as they emerge, such as AI, machine learning, and JAMstack, without being tied to a monolithic CMS structure.
• Needs scalability for rapid growth: You anticipate scaling content delivery to new platforms or devices and want to avoid system rebuilds or downtime, ensuring smooth and secure performance as your business expands.
• Relies on speed and performance for conversions: Fast load times are critical to your user engagement and SEO performance. A headless CMS can optimize your website or app for speed, leading to better user retention and higher conversion rates.
• Requires personalized content delivery: You will use AI to personalize content using user preferences, behavior, and demographics, keeping users engaged.

Avoid a headless CMS if your business:

• Has limited development resources: If you have a small team or minimal technical expertise, managing the complexities of a headless CMS, such as API integrations, would be too resource-intensive.
• Doesn't need omnichannel content delivery: Your business primarily focuses on web content and doesn't require the flexibility to distribute content across multiple platforms or devices.
• Is cost-sensitive: For smaller businesses, the additional cost of implementing and maintaining a headless CMS means higher technical expertise and sometimes revenue investment into infrastructure.

Going Headless Is a Choice

A CMS provides a quick and flexible way to update your website. While the kind of CMS you choose largely depends on the project, it's generally safe to follow some guidelines.

Let's say you want to create a small corporate website, a static landing page for a book, or a portfolio with a few pages. In that case, using a classic CMS might be your best option. However, a headless CMS would be better if you build a site or app with an advanced user experience and complex features, such as supporting omnichannel experiences. Whether choosing between classic or headless CMS, ensure your decision will help you solve your pain points and achieve your business goals.

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