What is a headless CMS?

Traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress have been around for about 20 odd years. However, in the current modern world we are living in lots has changed since back then. In today’s mobile era we have seen a growth in communication channels including the Internet of things (IoT), digital assistants, and virtual reality. With this shift there is a question that needs to be answered, are you ready for this change, and more importantly, What about your CMS?

Old traditional CMS’s were built for your standard website, they were great and they gave us the comfort of having all the content, the editing interface templates, and custom code all in one seamless single environment.

In today’s world that may not be enough, as content needs to be displayed on multiple content devices in different formats, this is difficult with your old-style CMS as they were never designed to cope with that.

So let me introduce you to a new breed of CMS, the headless CMS. This type of CMS makes it possible to make content available through any channel.

With a headless CMS, it allows you to focus on what’s important by managing the content and delivering it to any channel. It manages to do this while at the same time it doesn’t try to control your presentation; it only provides the content through its application program interface (API).

The API makes your content available on any channel and on any device, it also allows you to create your website or mobile applications using any programming language, while still using your own tools and development process.

Okay, that all sounds fancy, but how is it better and what are the benefits?

1. A Headless CMS is faster, more flexible, and easier to develop on. This is because you can pick and choose your programming language for a start, coupled with the fact that it is API driven, it allows you to build your “head” (presentation layer/front end) end to end. One single piece of content can be reused and combined with several different presentation outputs.
2. Headless CMS costs less, with little technical involvement required in a headless CMS (once set up correctly of course). It allows your teams to create new functionality without the wait. If your company, for example, needed to create a new bunch of mini-sites, they could go straight into the CMS and start creating without having to wait for developers to build the old traditional CMS templates. Not to mention your upfront costs are less as you can start will smaller solutions and then scale when you need as opposed to the huge big install of the old CMS style.
3. Headless CMS are more scalable. As the back end and front end are separated, you are not gated behind backend performance issues or downtime if there is needed maintenance. Not only does this give you unlimited hosting options, due to the API, but also unlimited deployment environments also.

Above are just some of the many benefits of a headless CMS while it has its many advantages there are still many cases where your old-style CMS would sometimes be a better option. That being said, our development team has had fun getting our hands dirty with these newer technologies.

Looking to create a headless CMS? Saigon Digital can help you build your headless CMS by using our bespoke development services.

Author: Forrest Alward

Learn more about us at: https://saigon.digital/ | Contact us: +84 332 36 4293

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