A description of the benefits of a headless CMS
A headless CMS is an updated version of the traditional CMS platforms that have been used in web development for decades. As with a lot of hype around newer technologies, you may be wondering "is this really something I need to pay attention to"? The simple answer is: yes, headless CMSs really do offer a lot of great improvements over their predecessors.
While we wouldn't usually recommend making disruptive changes to your current technology stack if it's working well as is, the changing nature of the web and the trend toward omnichannel marketing is forcing many enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies around managing their content.
Here are a few ways that transitioning to a headless CMS can benefit your business:
Provide Data Across Multiple Channels
Digital marketing is no longer limited to just the desktop web browser. As the “Internet of Things” becomes more of a reality, marketers need to be able to deliver content to a wide range of digital touchpoints, including mobile and other devices.
Different developer teams will likely be working on each of these different frontends. Trying to handle all these frontends with data that is tightly coupled between a single frontend and the backend of a monolithic CMS can be problematic, to say the least.
A headless CMS easily solves this problem, by making data available via an API that can be consumed by all frontend teams independently.
Better Developer Experience
As we have discussed in another entry, frontend teams are often expected to iterate and create constant UI/UX improvements that meet users’ needs, while backend teams focus more on keeping services reliable and secure, and cannot always accommodate frontend requests in a timely manner, within coupled systems architectures.
For example, a UI change could be built out in a couple of weeks, but require breaking changes on the backend that could take months (or even years) to deliver. These delays can be painful and put a serious damper on productivity.
A headless CMS allows the frontend team to work with standard REST APIs to power their UI, and do not depend on backend systems constantly being rebuilt. This makes both frontend and backend teams much more productive, and gives them the ability to focus on what matters for achieving their respective goals.
Cost Effective, Reduced Overhead
As a result of frontend and backend teams being freed up to focus on their own goals, much less time and resources need to be devoted to system maintenance and putting out fires that arise from having overly complex systems dependencies and the inevitable bugs that crop up as a result.
Backend teams can devote their time to making lasting, impactful changes to systems, rather than fighting against the tide of ever-increasing technical debt.
Frontend teams can spend their time building out amazing user interfaces and features that meet the end users' needs, and simply pull any data they need from the REST API provided by the headless CMS.
Long Term Investment
Integrating with a headless CMS for enterprises typically requires a degree of upfront effort from backend engineers to implement and test, but once it is setup it will pay dividends for the foreseeable future. A headless CMS architecture is essentially a future-proof tool by its very nature, as APIs make drastic backend restructuring unnecessary - and the frontends that consume that data can be built with any framework the client prefers.
In short: as long as the data exists and is available to be consumed, APIs will be the method of choice for all frontends.
Highly Scalable
Due to the nature of APIs and cloud-based infrastructure, a headless CMS is inherently highly scalable. Nearly all headless CMSs are integrated with content delivery networks (CDNs), which can push your content data to clients around the world, at scale. Therefore, any frontend channel capable of consuming a REST API can gain access to your enterprise’s content with ease.
More Secure
Compared to many traditional web-based CMS platforms, like WordPress, Headless CMSs offer a higher degree of security, due to the separation of concerns. Many articles have been written in recent years about the security vulnerabilities of these older platforms.
Kuroco Has API Management Functionality Built-In
Not all headless CMSs come with API management features out-of-the-box, particularly when it comes to customization of your APIs endpoints on a granular level, and being able to track the analytics of your API usage.
Kuroco, the enterprise headless CMS, has these features built in and offers a powerful interface for customizing your REST API endpoints in nearly any way you choose. This interface is available within Kuroco's CMS administration panel and allows developers to configure their content APIs with a degree of customization not available in competing platforms.
Kuroco allows you to configure your API with different paths containing different microservice endpoints for each frontend you have. This method is similar to the 'backend for frontend' pattern, and provides a very similar solution.
You can get started today and test it out for free, or feel free to reach out to our customer support team if you have any questions!