Going headless: what do content editors and developers have to gain?

Editors and developers both have something to gain from switching to a headless CMS. The impact of the benefits on their daily work and projects success can be very significant.

Benefits for developers

Developers will gain:

• Full control of the tech stack.
• A better DX.
• Relief from managing security and infrastructure stability.
• Faster development time.

Composable freedom

The architecture of a project with a headless CMS is usually composed of many specialized and interconnected pieces. The backend is separate from the frontend as well as all other third-party services involved. This great freedom introduces some initial challenges, but this is not problematic if approached in the right way.

The freedom to compose the stack to your liking is a major benefit. Being able to select the your favourite technologies improves the quality of work, efficiency, and DX. You love JavaScript, but is your legacy CMS forcing you to use PHP for page rendering? Surely, you will struggle more to develop your project. With a headless CMS, this problem simply ceases to exist exist.

Frontend SDKs offered by headless CMS providers facilitate the implementation considerably

Functions that are usually delegated to the backend of an application, such as searching and handling form requests, are achieved by combining custom scripts on serverless functions and specific third-party services. In this way, you can choose the service most appropriate to your needs for each of the individual functions. This architecture can also be used with a monolithic CMS, but it is much more natural to achieve with a headless CMS.

The ability to surgically update or replace specific pieces of the stack without having to touch other parts helps to achieve low technical debt.

Scalability and security of the backend

In the case of a SaaS, the infrastructure is managed by the CMS provider, and the services are used for backend functions. If you don’t want to manage this part of the stack, you won’t have to worry about having people on the team with very specific skills to take care of it.

From a scalability point of view, you will not have to suffer from the classic database bottlenecks of legacy systems. Sudden increases in traffic to your site will be manageable with great ease, granted the design has been implemented with the right caching strategy.

With regard to security, DDoS attacks on the frontend will not impact the CMS by slowing it down or blocking it due to the detachment of backend and frontend.

Moreover, there is also the stability benefit to consider. Upgrading plugins in a legacy CMS can be a daunting and delicate task. A problem during the upgrade can mean the collapse of the backend and frontend simultaneously. This cannot happen in a headless SaaS context. The risks of breaking something in the frontend during package upgrades remain, but with a proper CI/CD process these problems are avoidable.

One last major advantage worth mentioning is that the infrastructure can be placed in different regions, providing a very fast backend to editors in each region. For example, Storyblok currently supports 5 regions .

Scalability and security of the frontend

For the frontend, developers can create their own infrastructure, but the most common choice is managed hosting.

Selecting a provider will be easier in comparison with that for a legacy system, because the options are fewer in number and of high quality. Especially when dealing with very large projects with high traffic volumes, managed hosting for a monolithic CMS can be very expensive.

These modern platforms come with many features that effectively support the development of a web project. One such feature, which marks a big change from the old stacks, is the availability of preview links for individual branches, automatically generated with each deployment, ready to be shared with QA, marketing, and anyone who needs to review new project developments.

Benefits for editors

The benefits for editors can significantly impact their daily work and can be grouped into two main aspects:

• Empowerment and autonomy through greater independence from developers for updates and through multi-platform publishing.
• Efficiency through improved editing experience.

Independence from devs

With a headless CMS, empowering your editors is much easier. The aspects that make this possible are:

• Content modeling with the right level of flexibility. Editors must be able to create pages autonomously by using a precise and limited set of fields where appropriate or modular atomic components where needed.
• An easily accessible and navigable library of components. Making it clear to editors what components they can use on their pages may seem like a simple and obvious concept, but it is a very important aspect of efficiency.

Multi-channel publishing

Publishing to multiple platforms simultaneously means being able to manage content on a single CMS, and delivering it to multiple systems at once (e.g., a website, a mobile application, an Alexa skill).

Working on multiple platforms at the same time can be accomplished with headless CMS because content is distributed via APIs .

This is very difficult to achieve in a legacy stack because monolithic systems are usually designed to publish to only one destination.

A better editing experience

Headless CMS roadmaps are devoted to improving the editing experience. The most important benefits on this front come mainly from:

• Content modeling features: This is one of the pivots of the editing experience because it influences both the degree of autonomy of editors and the speed with which they can create new pages. Implementing regulated flexibility means giving the right degree of options to editors so that they can freely manage content without being able to break anything visually or functionally on your project.
• Visual editors: having a real-time preview of the page you are building helps you get better results faster, and make fewer mistakes. Storyblok introduced this innovation to the headless CMS landscape with its visual editor .
• Collaboration features: in this respect, Headless CMSs have a more mature view than legacy, however much this feature is not strictly related to the technologies with which they are developed. These features are especially crucial for larger teams, and are indispensable for enterprises. Storyblok, for example, has a commenting and discussion system , workflow management , and a real-time collaboration tool .

Also, it is worth noting that the editing experience on different projects in a headless CMS is very consistent. In legacy systems, on the other hand, the UI can change a lot depending on the plugins used in the individual project, and this can cause a steeper learning curve for editors.

How to get the most out of your team

Adopting a headless solution brings with it concrete benefits. Many are derived directly from the tool itself, while others depend heavily on the quality of the implementation.

The right degree of content modeling flexibility, the use of custom fields, and other extensions of the headless CMS interface can greatly affect the end result.

Communication between editors and developers is critical during every stage of project development. The former must clearly share their needs with the latter, who must find effective solutions to the proposed problems. A relationship of constant discussion will help to achieve an excellent end result.

The quality of implementation is as important as choosing the right tool.