With emerging technologies like IoT and Artificial Intelligence, traditional content management system (CMS) no more are a fit for digital experiences. The trend of headless CMS is growing in demand as these CMS meets the content delivery at ease to these smart wearable devices.  The headless CMS is vast adopted in enterprises and expected to be the normal CMS system in use by many enterprises.

 

What is a Headless CMS?

 

A CMS that is a backend content management system that uses RESTful API services to render content seamlessly on any device are termed as Headless CMS. These CMS omit the head (referred to any website) from the body (referred to backend content repository). This approach makes the headless CMS desirable over the traditional CMS where the head remains any one constant point for accessing the content. The Headless CMS emphasizes on the content repository for content storage and delivering the structured content on any of the devices irrespective of the platforms such as website or mobile devices. 

 

The Headless CMS uses RESTFUL APIs to render content on any devices. Hence, a CMS based on Headless approach is unique and caters to the current emerging technology-based devices. Businesses that are adopting Headless CMS benefit from the cost and effort that is saved by deploying just one CMS to render content on many devices. GraphCMS, Strapi, and Directus are some of the top Headless CMS currently making noise in the market. 

 

Benefits of Embracing Headless CMS

 

Unlike the traditional CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla that restricts companies to render content based on templates built for web browsers, Headless CMS out stands this drawback. This CMS is used in the business to deploy content in a way that suits for any platform or devices as needed by business. This advantage is a major differentiator that makes businesses prefer Headless CMS today over the traditional CMS. The other key benefits that set Headless CMS most preferred are discussed here. 

 

1. Eliminates content redundancy: With one CMS platform in place, content developers can develop content and reuse the content to leverage on multiple device channels. You do not have to create new content every time based on platforms. Headless CMS simplifies delivery content principle as ‘write once, render n number of times’. 

2. Quick to market: As you need not write up content based on channels and content reuse in place, time to market for content delivery by using Headless CMS is quick. 

3. Omnichannel content delivery: RESTFUL API service in Headless CMS invokes content to any device platform that is based on IoT or to any websites and on any device platform. Thus, Headless CMS leverages omnichannel support for content delivery. 

4. Security: As web technology evolves so are the web security threats. With Headless CMS, content is managed by Content Delivery Network (CDN) and not on any database. Hence, Headless CMS adoption eliminates security vulnerability threats such as SQL injection and denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. 

5. Monetizing content: Since the Headless CMS calls a RESTFUL API for rendering content on devices, same content can be called by using API and build on top of this content to monetize for any marketing and sales pitch content. 

 

Limitations of Headless CMS

 

1. Although Headless CMS is the way to go to catch up with emerging technologies and devices, still Headless CMS is not much appreciated by the marketing teams. Without the user interface to edit or preview the content, marketing teams prefer the traditional CMS with the head (web page) to view the way that the content appears on the website when deployed.

2. The cost involved to migrate from existing CMS to Headless CMS is high. The Headless CMS leaves many gaps when you migrate content from traditional CMS due to non-availability of the WYSIWYG interface. 

3. Headless CMS does not come with additional tools that a marketing business needs for full fledged CMS. You need to separately craft tools such as MarTech in the Headless CMS to make the CMS friendly to adopt by marketing professionals. 

 

Conclusion

 

Headless CMS is like a Silver line for the CMS in the current and future business trends. The Headless CMS offers several benefits in terms of go to market timelines and content delivery on any devices. The Headless CMS with multiple capabilities still includes certain limitations such as compatibility to preview content in the UI screen. The holdups of Headless CMS leave room for debating if the Headless CMS is an apt mechanism for content management for business.