Lots of Content? You May Need a Headless CMS

There’s a new way to build websites and it’s providing a major advantage to sites that house significant amounts of content. If your organization relies on a content-heavy site or app to conduct business, stick around and learn about headless CMS. 

What is a Headless CMS (Content Management System)? 

Before getting into the advantages, we’ll start with the ground-floor difference between headless CMS and traditional CMS. In short, a headless CMS separates content creation and storage (back end) from what your audience actually sees in the browser (front end). Traditionally, a website’s back end and front end are tied together: What is seen on the front end is a result of queries being made to databases on the back end. With headless CMS, application programming interfaces (APIs) are called and that data is cached, allowing content to be delivered to any front end, such as websites, mobile apps, web apps, and internet-connected devices. 

Imagine you are at the grocery store. Headless CMS would be the equivalent of all your groceries being in your cart and you can go straight to checkout. In addition, all your groceries could make it to checkout whether you were using a cart, a basket, or carrying it in your arms. If it were traditional CMS, you would need to walk around the store and find each individual item before getting to checkout. Plus, in most cases, your groceries can only fit in either a cart, basket, or your arms. 

Benefit #1: Speed Up Content Delivery 

As you can see from the grocery store analogy, headless CMS is a much faster way to get to the endpoint of having content displayed to the user. An organization that conveys its value through things like galleries, videos, and articles can count on this content being delivered as instantly as possible in the world of development because it is essentially already “there” instead of needing to be loaded in, as queries are made to find individual pieces of content in a database. Providing your audience with what they want to see in the blink of an eye is an impressive way to help users quickly come to the conclusion that your organization can solve their needs.   

Benefit #2: Improve Performance 

If you currently have a content-heavy site, you may have faced the challenge of scoring low on performance scales. Not only does this affect the user’s experience but it could be hurting your SEO. Page speed optimization plays a crucial role in how your website ranks. Google’s goal is to deliver relevant results on sites that provide an easy user experience. If your website houses a lot of content, then you have ample opportunity to be found for relevant searches. By improving the performance of how that content is delivered through headless CMS, you are that much closer to turning opportunity into reality. 

Benefit #3: Create Once and Deliver Everywhere  

Here’s where we get to the “head” in “headless.” The CMS does not have its own front end (aka “head”). That means it can deliver content to any front end you need it to. If you are an organization that delivers content through multiple channels (also known as omnichannel delivery), you can manage it all within your headless CMS. Whether users are visiting your website, opening your mobile app, or asking their smart home device, all of these platforms will make calls to APIs from the same place. So, headless CMS not only makes for a faster website, but it speeds up your organizational processes as well. 

When You Need Headless CMS 

The benefits in this article may be numbered but are in no particular order because every organization is unique in its needs. Whether your primary challenge is slow load times, impeded SEO efforts, or excessive time being spent on content management, it may be time to investigate headless CMS. Wolfco is here to help you learn more.