Explaining Headless CMS to your Boss - 8 things to explain

Technologies are changing our way of doing business, our point of view, and even our lifestyle. Do you still listen to music by using Winamp? Do you store your data on a floppy or dial-up internet connection? Hopefully not. To manage their content, nowadays, people are moving to Headless CMSs.

CMSs are moving away from traditional, database-driven systems to API-driven, decoupled, or headless ones. Consequently, if your content management system looks like a bloated dashboard of plugins, ads, and unnecessary information, it is time to suggest to your boss the necessary update. To do so successfully and with enough information, I prepared a list of some Q&A your boss might have.

The term “headless” represents the concept of separation between the front-end and back-end, where CMS works as a content repository that makes content accessible via API for display on any device. It’s built for two purposes: an editor interfaces for managing content and an API for developers who access the content and build applications.
Thanks to this approach, a Headless CMS doesn’t care about how and where your content gets displayed. It only focuses on storing and delivering structured content. The rise of Headless CMSs led to a rapid paradigm shift in web and mobile development methodologies.

Content gets into a database after creation or update. On traditional CMSs, content is written to the database through a visual layer (HTML & CSS). Using the content database, developers develop web page templates. Traditional CMSs such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla follow the same distribution process for their content. 

However, a big difference with Headless CMSs is that you get your content decoupled from the presentation layer. ​​The decoupling approach unties content from CMS; now, content is web-driven, and API delivers it through a raw data format to any application you want to go - whether a website or a mobile app, a smartwatch or a TV.

As a result of decoupled CMS’s improved security, performance and flexibility, scalability, and localization capabilities, the global Headless CMS Software market grows.
Headless CMS is ideally suited for organizations and businesses whose aim is to create a better customer experience. The three key factors that drive the growth of the CMS industry worldwide are:

Regardless of the industry, every business can benefit from the adoption, but decoupled CMS is highly beneficial for businesses that deal with content and e-commerce elements.

Migrating to Headless CMS drives down costs in various ways:

Nowadays, being present on one platform is inefficient. If you want to reuse your content for a mobile app, newsletter, or a 3rd part API, being stuck on WordPress may make it difficult to publish content.

When you switch content to Headless CMS, all future redesigns of the site are much cheaper because you only deal with design and changes in HTML and CSS, and the content remains the same and provides a lot of flexibility. For example, if you have listed clients, you have worked for on the current site powered by Headless cms. And in the next version of the site, you want to have a separate page for each of these clients; it can be only half an hour of work for one front-end developer. For example, compared to WordPress, where that would mean you have to create a new type of content, re-add all the clients to it, and corrupt the PHP template, HTML, and CSS.

When a company decides to use a Headless CMS, it doesn't need a Contentful expert, a Sanity guru, or a BCMS developer. They'll just need a Front-end developer. When having a website built in WordPress, a company needs a skilled WordPress developer who knows well both PHP, WordPress, and the front-end in general.

By using headless, you can make changes as often as you want without interrupting work for back-end developers or the experience for customers. A headless system allows you to run experiments without disrupting the user experience so that you can respond almost immediately to market demands. For example, marketing teams can set up new sites within days rather than months when covering new geographical regions. With a headless solution, the time needed to roll out an online store for a new location can be significantly reduced compared to traditional monolithic systems.

Headless CMS is a cross-platform software designed to work on several computing platforms simultaneously, which results in platform independence. It allows using any programming language or framework to implement things on one machine and use them on another device without (or with minimal) changes.

A tech stack is the combination of technologies a company uses to build and run an application or project. The technology stack consists of programming languages, frameworks, a database, front-end tools, back-end tools, and applications connected via APIs. Being able to replace technologies allows adapting to any kind of project.

Lear more about:

NextJS headless CMS
Gatsby CMS
Nuxt CMS

Omnichannel is a multichannel approach to sales that aims to offer customers an integrated shopping experience, whether they're shopping online, by phone, or in a brick-and-mortar store. At every level of customer interaction, omnichannel support refers to seamlessly meeting customers at every touchpoint on the channel or channels that they prefer. Companies offering omnichannel support offer a wide range of options for customers to interact with them.

In API first, programmers focus on developing their services in a reactive, agile way. The possibility of parallel development is one of the biggest advantages of API first for developers and project stakeholders.  APIs improve the end-user experience and eliminate complex relationships between content and code. You can build an experience using the web, mobile, and other, more unusual forms. All of these channels should provide excellent connected experiences for users.

Software maintainability is important because it is approximately 75% of the cost related to a project! Keeping code maintainable requires coordination across the entire organization since it relies on being able to search for, reuse, and make changes to other teams' code. Working with large codebases and large organizations can be very challenging when managing dependencies effectively.

Since the back-end and front-end are separated, any change or update in the back-end won’t create any downtime to your website or jeopardize web performance.

Content is stored in a cloud repository instead of on a server, saving resources and reducing website load time. To say it to your boos more simply, Headless CMS empowers faster time to market.

Besides front-end developers' freedom, other departments are free to do their part of the job independently. Are there always the same problems bothering your team? Is the marketing team constantly seeking a developer's help, or is a project manager planning a new product or feature and needs a flexible easy-to-setup CMS? With Headless CMS, these headaches are gone. 

Your boss needs to know that a headless content management system leads to a better user experience.  Besides better customer care, Headless CMS provides rapid answers to customer queries.

The headless architecture allows quicker reaction times, so you are prepared for the increased number of users and their requests. In the end, who doesn’t like to have happy and satisfied customers?

Remind your boss that business websites are targets of cyberattacks. Is Headless CMS more secure? Definitely yes!

The injection method is the most popular practice, directly targeting the website and the server's database, making a website crush. This kind of attack can be avoided with a Headless CMS because it separates the front-end and back-end so that the CMSwebsite isn't accessible from the public website, and hackers have nothing to attack. This means that your boss won't lose any of his online income or business.

Visual identity is a crucial part of any business because it is how companies want to be perceived in the eyes of the public. Headless CMS provides endless visual solutions. There are no templates and themes. Nothing is predefined, which allows having a unique design. Blogs, videos, dynamic images, user-generated content, or any wish is Headless CMS’s command.

So don’t forget, with a headless content marketing system, you can get a unique design that stands out from the crowd.

This can be a delicate subject. At first sight, Headless CMS  might seem more expensive than other CMSs, but the price is dependent on the features the system will offer to your company. Migrating to a Headless CMS leads to mid-and long-term cost savings. If your boss doesn’t want to invest in new digital channels or platforms, you should emphasize the benefits of the transition. On the other side, if there are ambitious plans, focus on the benefits of headless enabling IT teams to ship features much faster.

Again, investment can be cheap or a little bit expensive, depending on your needs, team size, and the kind of work you do, but in the long run, headless minimizes the need for future costs. Maintaining is more straightforward and cheaper, and there lies its advantage over traditional when it comes to the price. The remarkable thing is that Headless CMS allows you to pay only for what you need. Check out our pricing page to learn more.

Headless CMS, once set up, is all about adding and editing content. So all the time your team spent updating weird plugins, fixing crazy server 500 errors, updating themes, etc. - is now freed-up. They can focus more on scaling the website and less on fixing up and maintaining the website. From our experience running an agency and making literary hundreds of websites, clients need development help only when they want to redesign their websites.

The benefits of headless content management are that you can:

- decouple front end and backend - eliminate content silos - build your content model as you like it - focus on APIs that deliver content to any channel
The result is that your team becomes much more productive, you become less dependent on outdated technology, and your time-to-market for new features is improved. Traditional CMS such as WordPress may be the basic choice, but is it the right one? Headless CMS is a management platform that can grow with you to the heights you want by offering the features and pricing that you need.