Headless CMS for the Enterprise

In today's digital age, customers expect to be able to find your business on the go. And they also want a way to interact with it as seamlessly as possible. One of the biggest challenges that large enterprises face is their need for flexibility across various devices. For example, you have a Content Management System (CMS) for your business that needs to be updated and improved regularly. And, no matter how many resources you throw at this project, it's never enough! You're constantly juggling different development timelines with limited resources while keeping up with the latest technology trends.

That's where Headless CMS comes in - it makes sense if you think about it: The Head represents the frontend (the actual website) while the body represents the backend (which contains all of your content). In other words, instead of being bound to one platform, you can use a Headless CMS to store and deliver content on any device.

What is the concept behind Headless CMS?

Headless CMS is an API-driven approach for Content Management Systems. The Head represents the front end, i.e., the website, while the body represents the content repository, i.e., the backend. Both of these parts connect via a RESTFul API (JSON, XML). The Headless CMS's entire focus is storing and delivering content on any platform desired, i.e., Websites, applications, and Web Applications. In a Headless CMS, the frontend and backend are separate. This way, you can keep everything cleanly organized so that it's easier for developers or designers who work with different teams not to have to wait on each other to complete their tasks.

What is the need for Headless CMS?

Headless CMS is known as Decoupled CMS. Before jumping on why we need Headless CMS, let's first understand how traditional CMS approaches content delivery on websites and devices. In a traditional CMS, the frontend and backend work as a single unit. You create content, optimize and publish it all on the backend. Besides content, all essential code structures, plugins, design elements, and custom application code is stored in a different repository. So this means that the code and content are stored separately.

In short, this means that traditional CMS puts all your Images, HTML, CSS in one extensive system. This co-existence of the content repository, code, and database files can be scary if something goes wrong.

With the evolution in display technologies like Mobile applications, Web applications, Digital and Interactive displays, the traditional CMS has failed to keep up. An old CMS will only render content in the browser to a webpage. This restricts the organizations from displaying the same content on other digital platforms.

Enter the Headless CMS.

In a Headless CMS, the content is not siloed and can be used anywhere the marketing team, or business needs dictate.

What are the advantages of Headless CMS?

Organizations are engaging audiences on multiple platforms, and the content created for the website will also appear on other devices, mobile applications, and other interactive displays. A Headless CMS is an essential update in the content management ecosystem world to solve that specific problem.

Organizations that need to update their products and services constantly shouldn't have to make the same changes on ten different platforms. Headless CMSes ensure a centralized place where the changes are done and are automatically reflected on all the platforms.

Some of the other benefits of Headless CMS are:

• Multichannel approach for content delivery
• Quick content deployment (Via APIs)
• Updating content partners and business partners via REST API.
• Content first approach.
• No dependency on developers for using content on a new platform.
• Better security.

What are the benefits for Enterprises using Headless CMS?

Headless CMS has provided enormous benefits to organizations adapting to new technologies and platforms to reach their customers. With a multi-channel content delivery approach, Headless CMS can help engage with the audience on multiple touch points. Digital Interactive displays, Emails, VR devices, and other mobile applications are well covered.

Content hub: Headless CMS helps organizations make changes to their content on all the platforms at once. There is no need to repeat the same task of updating the new content on all the different media. This feature helps the editors update the image and copy once and see it change on every platform. Also, in return, the marketing process becomes organized and consistent throughout all markets.

Speed up development: Headless CMS also enables organizations to collaborate and work simultaneously with other team members. This gives a necessary boost to a business that constantly needs to launch new products, update old product information or create new landing pages for campaigns. If an organization needs to launch a new service or product in the market, they can start doing it in the CMS and start creating content without dependency on developers to create a template first. This diminishes the launch cost and lets you focus more on the marketing tasks at hand.

Flexibility: Headless CMS works as a separate module (Head & Body); if the backend has any technical difficulties, the frontend will not be affected by that, even in scheduled maintenance. This decreases the down-time of the website to zero. Headless CMSes can also take advantage of microservices more efficiently, and that reduces single points of failure.

Learning Curve: While working with traditional CMS, marketers have always felt the system's rigidness for posting and optimizing new content. The feedback of various organizations using Headless CMS confirms that it is easy and fast to understand as the content repository is only for storing content. Other backend files are not cluttering the space.

With more and more platforms adopted by organizations to reach their audience, the need to work with multiple CMS platforms has also increased. This leaves a lot of stress on a team where they need to publish the same content on various platforms. Headless CMS solves these problems for marketers and lets the team focus more on the marketing efforts and driving results rather than fighting the tools.

The Headless CMS is an approach to content management systems that has been gaining a lot of momentum in the past few years. Its API-driven interface offers businesses a more flexible way of managing their website and other digital assets. This means you can keep everything cleanly organized so that it's easier for developers or designers who work with different teams not to have to worry about maintaining multiple systems at once!

The NextJS Headless CMS stack is emerging to tackle these scaling problems. The NextJS stack is an open-source framework built on top Node. Along with enterprise-scale deployment platforms such as Vercel, WPEngine Atlas, WordPress VIP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Cloudflare, Headless content management systems like NextJS stack will help companies scale up quickly and meet Marketing deadlines.

We have witnessed the benefits of Headless CMS and eCommerce firsthand, and we will share more with you over the next few weeks.

If you have questions about digital transformation that you’d like for us to cover, please email contact@solveforward.com or @solveforward on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you!