Over the recent years, headless CMS is making its place in the world of content management systems. Today, about 74 million live websites are using CMS technologies. Both traditional CMS, as well as headless CMS, offer extensive benefits to the users. But, the flexibility and scalability headless CMS offers is something we cannot ignore.
In this blog, we will discuss the top seven reasons to invest in a headless CMS.
What is a Headless CMS?
Before we begin, let us learn what a headless CMS is and how it is different from the traditional CMS available today.
Like other CMS, a headless CMS is a type of content management system that organizes and manages your content without a dedicated front-end system. It uses an API to send your content to your website.
Furthermore, you can also use this API to distribute content to your CRM, email marketing software, mobile app, landing pages, and other types of content assets.
A headless CMS is more flexible when compared with a traditional CMS. It offers you excellent real-time collaboration.
Why Your Business Needs a Headless CMS?
In today’s digital age, multi-channel marketing plays a significant role in attracting and retaining your customers. Content is no longer restricted to websites anymore. Marketing is spread across scores of other mediums – videos, podcasts, ebooks, and whitepapers to name a few.
A headless CMS can help you achieve this digital transformation seamlessly because of its versatile architecture. There are many companies who have already started adopting headless CMS to manage their content.
Here are the top seven reasons why businesses prefer a headless CMS.
1. To Have a Content-Driven Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is one of the best ways to promote a business. It helps you attract, engage, and convert your audience into your customers when selling on Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. to name a few. Whether it is an article, a video, a podcast, or an ebook, content plays a major role in your marketing strategy.
With the help of a headless CMS, you can bring all these content assets together under a centralized database. While managing your assets is simplified, a headless CMS also offers you the flexibility to deliver them to desired places without any extra effort. It helps you maintain a consistent brand image across various platforms.
2. To Personalize Your Content Delivery For Deeper UX Implementation
The manner in which your customers interact with your website, in other words, the user experience you provide determines their journey with your business. Headless CMS offers you the ability to adapt to new design requirements to deliver content without going through the hassles of designing screens and coding template blocks.
It helps you showcase the relevant information to your customers in a comprehensible manner. By giving complete control to design and content modules, a headless CMS maps these modules together to present exactly the kind of information the user wishes to see.
3. To Create an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Offering a seamless customer experience across all channels is one of the best methods to retain your customers. A headless CMS can help you serve personalized content on multiple channels based on your customer’s preferences.
As a headless CMS is hosted on a cloud, it is much easier for you to implement marketing campaigns. Lastly, due to the ease of integration it offers, you can connect your CMS with various third-party applications to tailor a custom experience for your customers.
4. To Build a Global Ecommerce Store or Multisite
The eCommerce industry is a booming industry, especially in the current uncertain times. Your website acts like a magnet to attract and convert your customers. Having a robust website that automatically scales itself and offers custom content based on audience preferences and demographics is certainly a blessing in disguise.
A headless CMS offers you everything you will ever need to build a successful eCommerce store that serves a global community.
5. To Manage or Merge Multiple Websites
Managing a number of websites serving similar content consumes a lot of time and effort. With an effective headless CMS in place, you can manage and update any number of websites via a centralized content database.
You can use the APIs to distribute the content blocks on these sites as per your requirements. Thus, you can have beautiful websites serving tailored content to your audiences up and running in no time.
6. To future proof your tech stack
Technology is a rapidly-evolving industry. Newer frameworks are constantly being introduced and implemented. In order to stay at par with these developments, it is mandatory for a system to have developer flexibility.
As a headless CMS works with APIs, you have the freedom to choose the desired framework for the front-end. Also, migrating your website from one platform to another will not affect the CMS and its performance.
7. To shorten your time to market
Due to its innate flexibility, a headless CMS can be built following agile development methodologies. You can design your website, blog posts, landing pages, and other microsites in no time.
Furthermore, you can reuse the content resources you build and repurpose them via customizations and personalizations. You do not have to spend time duplicating content items for various platforms. As a result, you can publish your website while continuously working on the newer updates.
What Features Should You Look for in a Headless CMS?
There are quite a number of headless CMS platforms out there. It can certainly be challenging to find one that fits your requirements. We have made a list of features that would help you narrow down your choices.
1. Content Delivery
A headless CMS relies heavily on APIs for delivering content blocks. An ideal CMS should be able to fetch responses from the API in considerably less amount of time, probably in a few seconds.
In addition to this, it should also be able to receive information from the user and write the same in the content database, when required. The API should also be able to carry out functions, such as filtering, sorting, and pagination with ease.
Lastly, the CMS should also help you keep a record of the previous versions of your content.
2. Content Management
An ideal CMS should allow you to create content models for your posts, website pages, email marketing, and other content requirements seamlessly.
In addition to this, it should also allow you to store your content assets in easily accessible folders. Besides, it should also help you in optimizing your site for SEO
3. Privacy and Security
Headless CMS, being hosted on the cloud, should adhere to the compliances, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA amongst the others. The CMS should be robust in infrastructure and have the ability to scale as and when required.
In addition to this, it should be able to keep logs of the content versions and take regular backups. Lastly, it should be able to provide your team with role-based access permissions.
Top Headless CMS Options for Ecommerce
Here are a few top headless CMS options for your eCommerce business.
- Shopify
- Magento Commerce
- Contentful
- Sitecore
- BigCommerce
- OroCommerce
- FoxyCart
Wrapping Up
These were some of the best reasons why you should adopt a headless CMS for your eCommerce business. Headless CMS is here to stay. Start delivering an excellent experience to your customers by adopting a Headless CMS today!