What is a headless CMS?
Technology can be complicated. If you are a business owner with an interest in your online presence, you may well be aware of the CMS that powers your website.
There is a good chance that the CMS is WordPress, as it is known to power 62% of all websites according to https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management.
Here is where it can get a little complicated, WordPress is what is commonly known in the industry as a Traditional CMS.
A traditional CMS, such as WordPress, has a backend admin area where you can login and manage your content, easily adding new web pages; you can add new content such as products if you are using an ecommerce solution like Woocommerce, for example.
A headless CMS can achieve the same functionality, and more. I will attempt to untangle some of the complications surrounding headless CMS in this article, but first let’s take a step back and talk about the benefits of using a CMS to power your website.
I’ve briefly referenced a traditional CMS but let’s dig a little deeper into what a CMS is and what it can do for you and your website.
A Content Management System (CMS) is used to create, update and delete content from your website. The great thing about a CMS is that it allows people with little to no development experience to amend the content that appears online.
This is ideal for managing blog or news sections on a website, where you may want to release a page on your site that references a breaking or emerging news story. This helps keep your website and its content more relevant to your users.
A CMS will allow you to upload and store images and documents for use on your website too. The images can then be used to add context and interest to your web pages, however the ability to store documents also affords you the opportunity to have a centralised location to keep your documents should you require that functionality. This can help with business organisation and collaboration.
CMS’ have evolved over time and developers have extended CMS functionality with the use of plugins. Plugins can help with many things; SEO optimisation is one of the top benefits of using a traditional CMS such as WordPress as it has plugins such as Yoast SEO that have been around for a long time and add a number of SEO features ‘out of the box’.
While this can be extremely helpful, on the flip side, due to the immense popularity and ubiquitous nature of WordPress and plugins such as Yoast, they’ve become a huge target for hackers. Therefore, it’s become vital to keep the CMS and Plugins up to date.
So, a CMS helps you to manage and create your website content, and plugins can extend your site and give you a leg up on things like SEO, security and image optimisation.
All good stuff I hear you say, but what is the difference between a Headless CMS and a Traditional CMS?
Both types of CMS can offer the functionality I mentioned above. So why do we now favour a Headless CMS over a Traditional CMS?
A Headless CMS (We use Craft CMS by the way) easily offers access to its data via a graphQL API - removing the jargon, it means you can pull your data from one CMS into multiple platforms. A website or an app or both, with a headless CMS you have a single place to manage all of that data.
With a Headless CMS you are free from the theming that is enforced via a traditional CMS. In WordPress for example - you select a theme, enter the content into the relevant inputs and then the website will look a particular way. With a Headless CMS approach, the website’s data and the way it looks are completely separate.
This offers more flexibility to present the website in any way the web designer can imagine. Want to break the mould? This is your chance. In addition to layout benefits, you are free to define the type of data you want to record in the CMS. For example, a restaurant may want to define CMS entries based around the dishes they serve.
A Headless CMS allows you to define areas to add details such as -
- - ingredients
- - allergens
- - cost
- - image gallery
- - drink pairing recommendation
- - time taken to cook
- - country of origin
You aren’t just limited to, featured image, title and content.
You could take it further and produce different frontends for different audiences with the same data from your Headless CMS if required.
The headless CMS is naturally more secure by default. The url of your website’s backend CMS admin page is completely different to the frontend url, helping to shield it from would be ne'er do wells, or hackers as they are sometimes known.
A traditional CMS such as WordPress that is used to power many websites is also always going to attract the most attention from hackers. So just going off sheer numbers, the Headless CMS is going to be less of a target, due to the grip that WordPress has on the market. There is simply more to gain for a hacker by targeting the WordPress eco-system.
Good news for those using a Headless CMS.
Using a Headless CMS is a viable choice now. There are plenty on the market -
- Craft CMS (our preference)
- Sanity
- Strapi
- Contentful
- Ghost
- Payload
The Headless CMS ecosystem is growing all the time, and you can view the most popular choices here.
Often people can be put off by a cost being associated with using a Headless CMS compared to WordPress which can be installed and used for free (not including hosting costs).
WordPress users can overlook the cost of plugins that are required to deliver the functionality they require from their website. The installation of a large number of plugins can then lead to code conflicts and website performance degradation. This can lead to further development costs and a hit to SEO performance.
Craft CMS actually has a generous free tier which gives access to the all-important GraphQL api where we can grab all the data to display on the website pages.
The headless approach can bring fantastic website performance benefits that can make a real difference to a website's SEO performance.
Used in conjunction with a static site generator such as Next.js, a headless CMS can create blazing fast websites that can help propel a website up the Google rankings due to the fantastic performance metrics that can be achieved.
If you are interested in the possibility of using a headless CMS to power your businesses website or application, please get in touch and we’ll talk through the options available to you.
