You can find all kinds of headless systems out there, from headless CMS to headless eCommerce.
In simple terms a headless system is decoupled from frontend, which means data and backend are totally independent from the frontend of your website/application.
In a headless environment, frontend (public facing side) and backend (Admin/content editing/Data delivery side) run as separate independent services and they talk to each other via APIs. In an essence both systems run as fully self-contained services.
It may sound like a more complicated setup, but there are huge benefits to using headless architecture.
Below are some benefits which headless CMS provide over traditional CMS.
Frontend agnostic
Unlike a traditional CMS, where CMS is responsible for both content management and content rendering, a headless CMS is decoupled from frontend, which means it is only responsible for managing content. The actual displaying/rendering of that content is done by the frontend of your website/application. This architecture allows developers to use frontend technologies of their choice. Developers can make an informed decision to choose the right frontend technology for specific needs to provide optimum performance.
In a headless environment, UX professionals and developers can choose the latest frontend tools like Vue/NUXT, React, Angular etc to provide a flexible and tailored user experience.
Omnichannel
A headless CMS provides content over API calls, which means you can access this content from any application or device using APIs. In other words, you can treat your CMS as content management and distribution centre for multiple channels.
Using omnichannel approach you can provide a seamless experience to all your users, whether they access your content from a website on computer, a mobile app, a smart watch or even a smart fridge.
In today’s world where we access the internet through an array of devices, a headless CMS can provide you with the ability to manage content for all these channels from one place.
Highly scalable
Headless CMS are highly scalable due to their decoupled architecture. You can publish as much content as you like and serve it to extremely high request load/traffic environments.
Because CMS is decoupled from frontend, you can run CMS on entirely different server with beefed up specification to process content requests quicker. This way you can have a high-performance system where frontend and backend are served from different servers with their own dedicated resources.
It’s also easier to upgrade or customize headless CMS without any downtime or any impact on performance.
Future proof
Because headless systems are decoupled and delivers content over API, it is easier to simply replace one outdated part of the system rather than entirely rewriting whole application.
If in the future your UX/frontend becomes outdated, or you need to upgrade the look and feel of your application, you can simply refresh your frontend or use a different technology for frontend without ever touching a single line of code on CMS.
Enhanced security
Headless CMSs are more secure option than traditional CMSs. Since frontend and backend are decoupled, it gives an extra layer of security against anonymous attacks faced by public facing frontend.
Headless CMS serves content over API and does not provide direct access to backend or database, hence reducing chances of an attack on your database. You can add extra security on sensitive data by securing some parts of API with authentication and rate limiting.
Moreover, headless CMS is a smaller part of a wider application, which means it’s a smaller area of attack and provides far less exposure for attacks.
Lightweight and quick
Traditional CMSs are monolithic in architecture which means that they are responsible for content management and content rendering as well as 3rd party integrations and business logic, making them much bigger systems.
Unlike traditional CMSs, headless CMSs are only responsible for content management which makes them much more lightweight and quicker CMSs in comparison to traditional CMSs.
Microservice architecture
A micro service environment is where you run your application as a group of smaller services, where each service is an independent software or module. These services form an ecosystem where all services come together and deliver a seamless experience to users as if it is one big system.
For example, in a microservice environment you can have a headless CMS, headless eCommerce, frontend, and maybe a custom module which generates product recommendations to a user based on their purchase and search history.
Now for starters, we can host each once of above services on a different server if we want to, that way we can ensure that each service gets dedicated resources. We can even set autoscaling on any of the services which can ensure that during peak request periods, services can deliver high performance.
Biggest benefit of all is that because these services are independent of each other, the failure of one service does not impact other services. Ex:- if a recommendation service has an issue it will not affect rest of the service, so customers can still see content and still purchase from our website.
Summary
Despite sounding far more complex than traditional CMS, headless CMS brings a lot of benefit to the security, usability, speed and adaptability of a website.
