Know when to use a headless CMS and when it's not worth it
Headless CMSes aren't a silver bullet for every circumstance. Evaluate four use cases for a headless CMS and four scenarios when a headless CMS isn't worth the investment.
Many vendors advertise headless CMSes as the future of content management, but content managers should assess their options before jumping on the headless bandwagon.
A headless content management system organizes and stores content without making assumptions about how or where it is delivered. It runs in the cloud, encompasses a back-end content repository with related services to quickly generate digital experiences and lets users model content for integration with AI tools.
It's no longer enough to produce a compelling website and ensure content looks good across devices. Useful, engaging, personal and manageable digital experiences require a sophisticated content ecosystem.
Yet, a headless CMS is not a prerequisite for these experiences. When considering a headless CMS, content managers shouldn't let marketing hype persuade them. Instead, they should focus on specific scenarios to understand whether a headless CMS is the right fit.
Reasons to use a headless CMS
Organizations adopt headless CMSes for different reasons, including improved scalability and content personalization. The following real-world examples illustrate four reasons to go headless.
1. Scalability
A headless CMS separates front-end UX design from the implementation of back-end content management capabilities. When it's time to publish and scale content quickly, front-end and back-end development teams can work independently while coordinating activities.
For example, Montefiore Medical Center, a medical center in Bronx, N.Y., adopted Acquia Content Hub to quickly design and develop a new website in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, healthcare organizations needed to quickly publicize the latest patient safety protocols and explain new processes for telemedicine. Yet, medical advice changed frequently, and healthcare organizations struggled to keep up with new information coming from multiple sources. Content Hub offered the organization agility as it separated back-end development from front-end experiences.
Information architects and back-end developers focused on the mechanics for content management, such as aggregating healthcare information from trusted sources, storing content in a shared repository and categorizing items in consistent ways. UX designers created the presentation environments, ensuring they worked well on mobile phones, tablets and full-screen web browsers alike. They also used Gatsby, a content presentation tool, to generate interactive experiences.
Multiple teams relied on predefined templates that specified content types, metadata tags and content elements. A headless CMS enabled teams to scale quickly and simultaneously manage dependencies.
How a headless CMS differs from a traditional CMS
2. Personalization and interactive experiences
A headless CMS offers the underlying repository to structure content flows for personalized, connected experiences, which can benefit any organization with a digital presence.
During the pandemic, most fitness companies created digital experiences to replace physical experiences. Homebound gym members could digitize their exercise activities with online classes, and mobile apps could capture data from fitness trackers and wearables. This gave customers with digitally connected exercise machines at home more tailored workouts that monitored performance and offered motivational videos.
When gyms reopened, customers expected to engage across all kinds of connected equipment -- blending at-home, outdoor and in-gym experiences. This required fitness companies to expand their digital capabilities beyond web publishing and pushing alerts to mobile apps.
Many fitness companies developed interactive venues capable of engaging members across a range of experiences with their own connected exercise equipment. Organizations must do more than simply store content within an underlying repository and distribute it on demand across multiple devices. Headless CMSes can capture, organize and personalize content for workouts and wellness.
One fitness franchise relied on a headless CMS platform, Contentful, to create end-to-end information flows. Initially designed for app developers, Contentful has RESTful APIs that bring content from disparate sources together so users can create targeted digital experiences. Contentful manages structured content with well-defined tags and metadata.
With a headless CMS in place, the fitness franchise expected to directly engage with members in the gym or elsewhere. It maintained a large collection of videos, tagged by ambiance, workout goals and members' interests, and then shared snippets on demand to connected devices. The franchise used data from fitness devices and information about customers' capabilities and objectives to personalize fitness plans and offer in-the-moment motivational alerts.
3. Coordination of sales, marketing and content management workflows
Organizations that coordinate their sales, marketing and content management workflows with a headless CMS can enhance the customer experience and, in turn, gain a competitive advantage.
A headless CMS embedded within a sales enablement application can accelerate the sales process.
For example, marketing groups can produce promotional materials and generate leads, but sales representatives must connect with buyers, create conversations and add essential insights to close deals. Yet, salespeople often struggle to assemble the relevant information that sparks customers' interests and addresses their concerns.
A headless CMS embedded within a sales enablement application can accelerate the sales process. Sales teams can curate content from the company's marketing materials, individualize links for each customer and present selections on personalized webpages. These teams rely on a headless CMS, such as Oracle Content Management, to automatically recommend relevant materials. To achieve this, the tool synchronizes various workflows and matches metadata with the stages of a sales process.
Marketing groups, in turn, can support this workflow synchronization and enhance the sales process. For instance, they can automatically or semiautomatically include metadata as they produce promotional materials, store them within the underlying content repository and distribute them across multiple channels. From the marketing perspective, the sales enablement application serves as another channel.
Sales enablement teams need marketing specialists or business analysts to curate content and synchronize metadata with steps in the sales process. Headless CMSes can help, as they offer a central repository from which sales and marketing teams can manage their information architectures and metadata.
4. AI adoption
Many organizations store documents, images and multimedia clips in separate repositories. Often, each repository has its own content categories, APIs, search protocols and security architecture.
However, since the development of generative AI tools, many organizations want to use the information and insights embedded within these repositories to power chatbots across their content ecosystems. GenAI chatbots can pull, synthesize and summarize data from disparate sources to answer questions from employees, business partners and customers.
As a first step, content managers should organize, structure and tag content across their organizations to make it accessible to AI tools. GenAI uses large language models (LLMs), which organizations can train to understand the words and phrases within their content ecosystems.
Headless CMSes offer a framework for structuring access to content, regardless of the repository that stores it. They let content managers embed contextual clues, such as metadata, within their content ecosystems. Content managers can also incorporate a knowledge graph -- a graphical representation of items and their relationship to other items -- to define relationships and meanings among content elements. Altogether, this data can enable LLMs to power the organization's chatbots.
Reasons to not use a headless CMS
Despite the benefits of a headless CMS, it's not right for all organizations. The following scenarios illustrate when organizations might not need a headless CMS.
1. Simple publishing requirements
Digital publishing organizations create and distribute original content on their websites and mobile apps through a single content stream.
In these cases, the business relies on editorial workflows, which include the following:
How the business creates, reviews and approves new content items.
How it automatically or semiautomatically tags content with relevant metadata.
How it publishes content to websites and mobile apps.
Many web content management platforms offer the essential capabilities to manage these workflows for a single content stream without investing in the back-end complexities of a headless CMS.
2. Sufficient CMS templates
Many CMS and digital experience platform (DXP) vendors have developed editing tools, like page-oriented templates. These tools enable nontechnical workers to independently update content and modify rich media. They can also change the look and feel of existing webpages, create new pages and use templates to launch related microsites. Additionally, these templates can adapt to the screen sizes of different devices.
Many traditional CMSes, such as WordPress, sacrifice greater flexibility for ease of use and are often easier to implement than a headless CMS. Headless CMSes require developers to build the heads, or front-end components, of the CMS. If an organization's current DXP or CMS offers templates that work, then it doesn't need to invest in a headless CMS.
3. Limited IT staff
If organizations lack resources for IT support and want an out-of-the-box environment that lets them customize options on their own, a headless CMS may not be the right fit.
In this case, cloud-based apps and DXP tools can likely meet these organizations' objectives. To choose the right system, content managers should first evaluate their business requirements.
4. Budget constraints
Switching to a headless CMS requires investment in both the new platform and front-end development. Organizations with tight budgets might need to delay adoption until they have more resources. However, if they want to undertake a new project, such as a GenAI initiative, their current CMS might work.
Organizations can optimize their existing editorial and content production workflows to better support business goals. For instance, they could focus on how they organize and tag information for web search engines, such as Google and Bing, and identify how they develop and maintain taxonomies in their traditional CMS. They can also add additional tags that further describe their content. These actions can make their enterprise content more accessible for AI-powered language modeling.
Editor's note: This article was originally written in 2021. It was updated and expanded in 2024.
Geoffrey Bock is principal of Bock & Company and advises organizations on content technologies and the future of business in the digital age.
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