What Is a Headless CMS?

Touchpoints, devices and front-ends to manage have multiplied, bringing obvious difficulties in duplicating or adapting templates and content. Headless CMSs answer precisely the need for a more flexible and universal content management system, one that removes the constraints built into every monolithic system. So what exactly is a headless CMS? In short, it's a content management system without a coupled front-end(the so-called "head"), made up of one or more APIs plus the back-end technology needed to store and deliver content.

To understand what this definition implies, let's take a step back and define traditional content management systems. A classic CMS lets you create and upload content through a back-end, then publish and display it on its own front-end with no additional components. Put simply, your editors write in the back-end of the same system your website visitors are viewing. They're also called monolithic systems precisely because they are single, solid, self-contained structures that need nothing else to work (more or less). While very convenient, this setup can prove limiting because it works best for managing a single website, whatever its size. Once you start managing several sites and applications at once, you risk juggling multiple CMS installations and moving shared content from one to another. A headless CMS, by contrast, focuses solely on managing pure content, offering an admin back-end to create it, collaboratively too, and organize it properly. A headless CMS doesn't natively provide its own front-end, or presentation layer, giving access to all its content via APIs. While this may sound limiting, headless CMSs are in fact a way to meet companies' need to engage customers at every stage of their journey with atruly multichannel digital experience. As we said at the start, the digital landscape has evolved and will keep evolving, so the rigidity of monolithic systems is becoming a limitation. Companies need structured content that can be easily published across multiple platforms, while traditional CMSs are still tied to frameworks built for classic web page content. By managing pure content without an attached presentation layer, headless CMSs can instead serve it to any device from a single instance. The same record created in a headless CMS can be used seamlessly across desktop, mobile and app products, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, virtual reality, augmented reality, smartwatches and other media that don't even exist yet! For more specific examples, our colleague Guido wrote a short summary of some of the advantages of a headless CMS over WordPress.

A "decoupled" CMS shares some similarities with a pure headless CMS, because it's also front-end agnostic. Like headless CMSs, decoupled systems don't use traditional databases and connect front-end and back-end through API calls. Although back-end and front-end work independently of each other, in a decoupled CMS the front-end architecture is still tied to a single deployment environment. This means the back-end is still limited to one front-end, so quickly moving content across multiple platforms can be problematic. Headless CMSs, on the other hand, aren't anchored to a predetermined front-end, giving you more flexibility to publish content on any platform. A pure headless CMS separates content from the presentation layer, so it can be served to any device and platform. That makes headless CMSs perfect for anarchitecture made up of multiple microservices.

Users now consume content across many different devices and applications, no longer just desktop and mobile web experiences. So it becomes essential to make sure that every touchpoint between the user and the brand works well, looks good and is technically solid. With an API-first approach, you can create and structure content just once in the headless CMS and push it via APIs to any channel, device or touchpoint. This method greatly speeds up production, delivering a faster time-to-market than traditional systems. When the pure headless CMS also runs in the cloud, you cut maintenance and security costs considerably: no database means no database-related vulnerabilities. With a world-class SaaS, dynamic content is stored and managed by the CMS in a completely secure way.

A headless CMS offers unmatched flexibility compared to the other categories on the market, and with it some compelling benefits for anyone looking for pure content management without constraints of any kind. The flexibility of a headless CMS means that:

• developers aren't forced to write in the CMS's language and can choose based on the project;
• with a few scripts, it's easy to move all the content from one platform to another, so you never risk vendor lock-in;
• editors can produce content without working within the limits imposed by a CMS or a single front-end, while developers can add strong validations to keep the project stable;
• brands can easily integrate their marketing tools and analytics services via APIs;
• content is pure, so it doesn't have to be adapted in the back-end for the touchpoint where it will appear.

Technology should serve the project, not the other way around, so managing content with a headless CMS clearly isn't always the right (or feasible) solution. The freedom, scalability and flexibility of a headless CMS can be an obstacle for newcomers, because they require specific know-how, careful architecture design and significant development expertise. If you have a project that would thrive in a multichannel context, and the technical means to implement a microservices architecture, moving to a headless CMS should be a priority.

If you want to see real-world headless CMS use cases today, our Portfolio section is packed with examples across many industries and levels of complexity, thanks to years of experience developing DatoCMS, one of the world's leading SaaS headless CMSs. If you have more specific questions, don't hesitate to contact us. We love talking about the future!