Guide to headless CMS

When it’s time to replatform and implement a modern and flexible content management system (CMS), you’ll be hearing a great deal about “headless” CMS architecture. No longer simply a trend, a headless CMS is a strategic choice for your company’s content, one that affords your content creators and developers greater power, freedom and agility. When determining if a headless CMS makes the most sense for your business, you should first understand its advantages and its challenges, and also consider the other CMS options that are available.

The role of a CMS is to create and publish content—along with house design assets (including visual layout and code). Using a traditional CMS means your content is confined to the location locked in to its coding (e.g., WordPress for a blog, or Drupal for a corporate website). You may have a great site, but you lack the ability to share its content in the display you want when a potential customer checks her smartphone or accesses a page on a tablet.

To solve this problem, many organizations are turning to headless CMS platforms. A headless CMS provides only the back end, where content is created and stored. For the front end, your business can use any design that best fits your requirements, and your content shows up accurately across multiple channels—whether it’s OTT, mobile apps, wearables or even voice.

A headless CMS offers a host of important benefits, including incredible speed, flexibility and much more control over content delivery to each channel/device.

With a headless CMS, the CMS is responsible for back-end functions only, while front-end presentation of that data is the responsibility of your development teams. With a headless CMS, the content published is made available to any application via API data services. This is commonly known as Content as a Service (CaaS).

Above everything else, it’s content that motivates initial site visits, downloads, signups and further conversions. Today’s users expect to be able to access content immediately, on any device, in their preferred format.

With a headless CMS, content delivery is paramount. Content and copy composition may be done in parallel with layout and design, or sequentially.

As the number of channels and devices continues to grow, it’s even more important to create content that can easily be personalized, delivered and reused.

With a legacy CMS, your content is tied to your design, and that means the latest devices are often unable to read your data. Headless is in demand because, with your content. separated from your design, you can quickly and seamlessly deliver content anywhere, in any way it’s required.

The move toward digital microservices may have begun with the Unix philosophy, but it’s a trend that has only progressed in agility and increased in popularity since then. The natural divide of content and technology responsibilities in a headless CMS lets the microservices shine, while allowing developers to use the latest and greatest tools and techniques available (which include serverless technologies, such as AWS Lambda).

Omnichannel delivery drives today’s consumer experience, and it’s a nonlinear journey. A customer might switch from one device to another, then backtrack or even open two of the same applications at once. Not only does a headless CMS make this kind of journey faster and easier, but it also allows you to capture that experience from end-to-end and find new ways to support it.

Having the ability to push content across platforms has never been more important. It has also never been easier, thanks to the headless concept of unhooking content from design—a true Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. With Brightspot, for example, we’ll take care of the CMS while you focus on how your content is displayed.

By serving up content suited for specific experiences, a headless CMS also allows you to provide a collective content experience, also known as a “content mesh.” In this scenario, each platform’s strengths can be harnessed, while maintaining a cross-referenced consumer experience. With a traditional CMS, this can be challenging, since there may be several different types of content management at play, each separate from the others. Your developers may become frustrated by the amount of duplicate work they have to perform in order to get the same or similar content flowing to different channels (e.g., a tablet and a smartphone, or a laptop and a smartwatch).

Because headless is designed as content-first and front-end agnostic from the start, it avoids channel-specific concepts like “pages” and tools that work for those (e.g., drag-and-drop functionality). Thinking of content independently of presentation allows you to focus on what you want to say before thinking of how you want to say it.

Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, decided it was time to replatform at the end of 2017. They sought a new CMS to streamline all back-end functions, enabling them to focus on front-end design. They wanted a solution that would give the company complete control over the look and feel of all of its sites.

Over the course of five months, Televisa’s front-end developers and editorial teams worked side-by-side with the Perfect Sense team to learn Brightspot. After migrating all of Televisa’s content and creating a headless model site launch (Las Estellas), a total of nine sites were replatformed to Brightspot in just five months. A custom-built tool called Style Selector now gives Televisa the ability to preview and control every output of Brightspot code. Today, Televisa manages nine sites—eight of which are headless—from one powerful, multi-site CMS, which saves the organization both time and money.

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