What is a headless CMS, and how can it help you?

Since headless CMSs have received more and more attention in recent years, you've probably already heard of the term. As you can imagine, we at ContentChef are great enthusiasts of this type of content management system and want to share the love whenever possible. That's why we take the opportunity to introduce you to the topic in this blog post. In particular, we'll talk about what a headless CMS is, what advantages it provides, and how it can help you as a business owner or developer.

What is a headless CMS?

Let's kick this off by answering the first question: What is a headless CMS, and how does it differ from other CMSs like WordPress or Joomla?

The systems mentioned above are what we often call traditional CMS or coupled CMS. They typically consist of a secured back-end – where you enter data – and a front-end – where your users can view the data. Hence, the front-end and back-end parts are closely connected and are, in a way, co-dependant. But this comes with a few disadvantages, such as front-end developers and designers having to strictly follow the CMS's rules and being limited in how they can build the user interface of their products.

In contrast, a headless CMS architecture completely decouples the front-end from the back-end/data source and acts as your central content repository. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as a decoupled CMS. As a result, teams can build their digital products to their liking, ensuring to create intuitive and outstanding UIs for their users and customers. Additionally, a headless CMS allows you to deliver content to different destinations. For example, you can create content once and then display it on your website, mobile app, and IoT device. Pretty handy, isn't it?

How can a headless CMS help you?

Following the headless approach is the perfect choice if you want to display content on any device and endpoint. Let's discover what advantages businesses, developers, and designers can enjoy when working with such content management systems!

Faster time-to-market

Naturally, companies strive to deliver tailor-made content to users and customers frequently to increase trust and revenue. Typically, you retrieve data from a headless CMS by creating and deploying content APIs. As a result, you can quickly display the data you need, where you need it, without having to deal with the operational burden of more traditional content management systems.

Deliver tailor-made digital experiences to any channel

As mentioned earlier, headless CMSs enable you to create content once and deliver it to any endpoint, such as your website, mobile app, or e-commerce website. All of these channels may require different parts of your stored content or need data to be structured in a specific way. With a headless CMS, you can retrieve data precisely as your UI requires, enabling you to build truly unique and customized digital experiences.

Be ready for the future

By choosing a headless CMS, you can make your content management future-proof. Since the front-end of your product isn't tied to the data source, you can redesign your digital product and make changes to the presentation layer to fit your customers' needs at any time. You have the freedom to connect new channels to your CMS and further develop your company as needed. Ultimately, you won't have to worry about content migrations in the future, as you always remain scalable and flexible with headless content management.

Accelerate development time

Probably every developer loves a good and powerful API that is straightforward to use and gets its job done efficiently. Since you usually retrieve all content via APIs from a headless CMS, you have the power to decide which data should be received when and how. As a nice side-effect, working with a headless CMS also saves you learning a new template engine language and enables you to work with front-end frameworks and libraries that you already know and love.

Focus on your craft

Designers and developers have full freedom to decide which tools they want to work with or how the user interface of their digital product should look and function. As a result, designers can think outside the box to create innovative user experiences that your customers will love. Besides, front-end developers don't need to fix problems related to the back-end of the CMS. Instead, they can concentrate fully on their actual tasks.

Work with real data, anytime, anywhere

Working with hard-coded dummy data in apps and websites during development can later lead to several problems and bottlenecks. You may be missing out on replacing some well-hidden text elements or leaving typing errors that go unnoticed for weeks! Since preparing and retrieving content from a headless content management system is effortless, anyone on the development team can work with real, accurate data – anytime and anywhere.

Why choose ContentChef as your headless CMS?

ContentChef is our very own headless CMS that we developed to conquer the hurdles of monolithic CMSs that we encountered while working in the digital industry. In a nutshell, ContentChef is an API-first CMS that accelerates the delivery of content across multiple channels.

You can build custom content structures using our flexible schema language or use the UI-based schema builder in the admin interface if you're unfamiliar with writing JSON. To make things even more straightforward, we've created various SDKs so you can stick to your preferred front-end tech stack and retrieve content through REST APIs. Additionally, since our cloud CMS is a fully managed SaaS, we take care of managing APIs, servers, and deployments. Our headless CMS is based on a serverless architecture that runs under AWS and, therefore, always remains scalable, performant, and resilient. Why not give ContentChef a try? Sign up for a 30-day trial and experience the benefits of a headless CMS for yourself!