While headless CMS is not a new concept in the digital space, today it’s an increasingly attractive proposition for businesses looking to move their digital transformation efforts forward in an impactful way.
The digital landscape—and consumer needs across this landscape—extend across any device where content can be published, from digital signage alongside the motorway to the apps on your smartwatch to the information coming back from your smart speaker when you ask for today’s weather forecast. Gone are the days when development teams had to code content experiences unique to each of these digital use cases.
A headless CMS provides more flexibility to deliver content from the CMS to whatever front-end experiences require that content via APIs.
With greater flexibility also comes speed, which is top of mind for the digital transformation executive.
The separation of the presentation layer from the CMS platform lets teams move faster, while the separation of content creation and presentation helps authors and developers work independently, accelerating time to market.
According to a recent survey on the challenges of digital transformation, 75% agreed that one of the key struggles businesses face is the time it takes to see success.
Headless technology is obviously helpful in this endeavor, driving speed to market as well as cost efficiencies and savings over time.
But from the perspective of the executive charged with successfully driving digital transformation for their organization, choosing headless CMS is only the starting point—choosing the right headless CMS is key.
Let us explain.
Headless CMS promises digital transformation, as follows:
- Headless CMS frees up the organization to pick their own front end, helping to "future-proof" their digital presence as more interfaces are developed over time—which is part of a digital transformation expert's job to ensure.
- Dev teams can work with their preferred frameworks, making them more efficient in what they offer the org—which is part of a digital transformation expert's job to ensure.
Why Brightspot headless CMS is the right solution
A headless CMS like Brightspot not only promises transformation in all the ways described above. It delivers it.
Brightspot, used headlessly, carries additional depth, flexibility, modularity and functionality that other headless offerings simply don't have.
- From the editorial side, Brighspot’s content authoring capabilities, especially when looking at headless technology, are unmatched. An extremely robust rich-text editor, workflows, smart permissioning, easy search, collaboration tools—all in an intuitive UI. Not to mention, Brightspot enables preview for headless implementations, allowing editors to see what something's going to look like on the front end before hitting publish. Further, Brightspot offers headless-exclusive ability for editorial teams to do their own data modeling via custom content types. All of this can be utilized and/or customized to meet a specific organization's use case.
- From the development side, Brightspot utilizes GraphQL for its headless APIs, which come with all manner of benefits (bring your own data and code, retrieve all data in a single request without needing multiple endpoints, etc.). Plus, Brightspot—like GraphQL—has a self-describing type system so devs can easily discover what data types and fields are accessible from the Brightspot content delivery application.
- Brightspot’s robust modular content capabilities empower a "create once, publish everywhere" framework that’s ideally suited for headless implementations, whereby variations of the same blocks of content can easily be reused and reformatted as needed. Make your content investments work for you by reducing duplication and extending the reach and performance of individual content elements throughout your whole digital ecosystem.
- Brightspot’s API-first, integration-ready platform makes connecting systems within as well as outside your tech stack seamless. If a vendor or third-party service has an API, Brightspot can integrate with it.
- Brightspot headless does not equal headless-only; organizations can choose a headless approach for some portion of their portfolio and non-headless implementations for others. At the heart of the content experience, however, sits a unified CMS that is flexible and powerful enough to serve all needs.
Brands and organizations need to move fast to deliver what audiences want as well as stay ahead of the competition. Headless CMS can help accelerate toward that objective, but the right headless CMS helps solve for today’s challenges as well as the phases beyond on your digital-transformation roadmap.