What is a headless CMS and when do organizations need it?

You might be a small business owner who has a website or a large enterprise who has multiple websites. For most of the websites that are customer facing they are driven by what is called the content management system(CMS). When we think of CMS, the first thing that we think of is wordpress and it powers a lot of websites that are out there.

Wordpress is a great technology and it served well for the past twenty years however the consumer behaviours have changed and customers expect faster load times and with technologies like wordpress it is hard to have the lightning speed performance and this is where the some other companies have build their niche which is to offer a headless CMS, this basically means that the CMS is now accessible via APIs. Now why is this a big deal, it is because the frontend and backend are completely decoupled which means front end developers can independently change their design irrespective of what CMS you use in the backend. This along with newer technologies like Static Site Generation(SSG), Server Side Rendering(SSR) and Incremental static re-generation(ISR) allow us to create blazing fast websites

So when do you need to use headless CMS. You want to have a website that not just looking modern but performs modern. Where the time to first byte is as low as it can be and has a high lighthouse score so that the number of milli seconds it takes for your site to load is greatly minimized and the customer has a lightning speed experience.

Here are some companies that you might want to look into if you are looking for headless CMS. Prismic, contentful, amplience, wordpress. Here at Yajur, we use prismic but we have also build websites where we used contentful.

Another thing to note is that these websites go well with technologies like NextJs, Gatsby, Svelte etc. The website that you are on now uses NextJs

If you want to develop a website or rewrite your website to target the current customer behaviour patters, feel free to reach out to us at nikhil.nomula@yajur.tech