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iCrossing
- In partnership with Storyblok
The future is headless
With 84% of businesses reporting improved revenue growth and productivity since using a headless CMS, now is the time to start exploring whether going headless is right for you.
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Let's start with the basics. A headless CMS is a back-end content management system which stores and manages your content separately to the front-end. Content in a headless CMS is delivered via APIs (e.g. RESTful or GraphQL) to display seamlessly across any device or platform. These include websites, native apps, point of sale devices and smart watches.
The term 'headless' comes from the concept of separating the front-end (the 'head') from the back-end content management system (the 'body'). A headless CMS doesn't need to know the specific location or method of content display. Its main focus is to store and deliver structured content, and facilitate collaboration between content editors.
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Each year more and more savvy companies are moving onto headless. Storyblok's "State of CMS" report found that 36% of the 1600+ companies it surveyed had made the move.
A headless CMS provides greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness than traditional Monolithic CMS architectures like Drupal or Wordpress.
A single headless CMS can power multiple websites – ideal for companies who have multiple brands or complex corporate structures.
Going headless can provide greater scalability since platforms can quickly become outdated. By separating the front- and back-end, your team can easily rebrand content, update campaigns, restructure content, or even switch platforms without extensive refactoring. This allows for greater flexibility and agility.
Open source content management systems often require significant resources to maintain their security and keep them up-to-date. Patching and updating these monolithic systems can be costly, time-consuming, and introduce additional security risks. This can divert valuable resources away from developing new functionality.
Going headless can alleviate this burden. Updates and framework support are handled by the platform, rather than in-house. This frees up your development team to focus on creating exceptional user experiences, rather than spending time and money on maintenance and updates.
Monolithic platforms can be sluggish, necessitating complex caching systems to make them bearable. In contrast, headless websites are designed with performance in mind from the outset. By using a static site generator, teams can take advantage of a content management system while still serving static web assets that are both fast and high-performing.
Additionally, an application framework such as React or Angular can often outperform a monolithic system due to its ability to quickly load the initial display and then populate it with content, rather than requiring a cumbersome bootstrap process to load a page.
Both now, and in the future. Selecting a CMS involves tailoring the experience to fit a combination of web architecture, a team's technical expertise, and company goals for the website. One of the benefits of adopting a headless approach is that the headless CMS is responsible solely for the back-end, not the presentation layer.
By decoupling the front-end from the back-end, a headless CMS allows content to be used in any presentation layer, offering the flexibility to connect with the best front-end framework for your team. Additionally, this approach enables you to pull in data from other systems, reducing the effort required to migrate to new front-end or back-end systems in the future.
Unlike traditional CMS, a headless CMS doesn't provide a built-in front-end for displaying content, and instead, it shows content through APIs that can be accessed by any device or application. This architecture makes headless CMS inherently more secure than traditional CMS, as it minimises the attack surface by removing the front-end layer where most vulnerabilities exist. By using a static site generator like Netlify you can simply serve your website from a content delivery network (CDN).
We were one of Storyblok's first UK agencies two years ago. Since then the platform and our partnership have gone from strength-to-strength. Storyblok was recently recognised by G2 as the CMS leader, with over 30 awards in their winter 2022 review.
Let's talk
Moving too slowly in digital is the biggest threat facing your business.
If you’re ready to explore headless, we'd be happy to talk you through all this in more detail and give you a demo of Storyblok. You'll never look back. Simply fill in your details below and we'll get back to you ASAP.