The popularity of headless architecture has risen hand-in-hand with the scope of digital experience. As companies add more customer touchpoints, integrations, and content to their digital strategy, they quickly bump into the limitations of platforms that were designed for static websites and one-size-fits-all ways of working.
Headless platforms have become increasingly popular in recent years. These solutions split up or “decouple” backend functionality from frontend presentation, making it possible to use one backend engine to power all your digital channels and much easier to keep the experience consistent across every touchpoint.
As a marketing term, “headless” is most often associated with content management systems (CMS) and eCommerce platforms, as these traditionally provide the frontend templates for your website. Still, a headless architecture can be found in all different types of software, including search, payments, and digital asset management (DAM). The quickly growing market of headless solutions has helped the approach to spread beyond online retail, where the architecture was first adopted, and into use cases like learning platforms, streaming services, and B2B publishing.
This article examines how modern headless platforms, particularly CMS, differ from traditional solutions and the key principles, benefits, and challenges of this approach.
#What is headless architecture?
A headless architecture separates the backend and frontend code. Headless platforms provide backend functionality and user tools but don’t dictate the frontend experience.
Traditional CMS solutions like WordPress were designed with three layers:
Content organization, with a system to structure content and a database to store it.
A user interface with tools for developers and content managers to create, edit, and update content.
A means of displaying content that typically relies on page templates and website themes.
A headless CMS takes care of the first two layers but is completely neutral about the technology you use for the third. Developers can use their preferred frameworks to quickly build frontend applications tailored to business needs. The CMS shares content, data, and logic in a neutral format via APIs, and each frontend application can choose what information to use and how to present it.
Instead of thinking of content as belonging to a specific web page, with a headless CMS, teams organize content into repeated blocks of data, or content models, and define the relationships between these models.
This modular structure is what makes it possible to reuse headless content in a variety of ways across different webpages, brand and regional sites, mobile apps, marketplaces, chatbots, digital displays, and any other frontend “head”.
#Headless architecture vs. monolithic architecture
In a monolithic architecture, the backend and frontend are part of the same code base. Websites built with monolithic platforms use templates and themes specifically designed for the platform’s logic and features.
This coupled architecture allows monolithic CMSs to provide out-of-the-box website templates, and, because content is typically tied to a specific page, a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) style page builder that many people are familiar with. This makes them a perfectly good solution for teams that just need a small website with simple content that isn’t changed very often.
Where teams run into trouble with a monolithic CMS is when their needs go beyond the platform’s predefined use cases. Adding unique features, new channels, or integrations can take layers of workarounds and plugins that hurt site performance and are hard to maintain. With everything in one monolithic code base, even a small change to the website risks a waterfall of errors. So, as these customizations build-up, the pace of change tends to slow down.
With a headless architecture, the backend and frontend are completely separate and can be developed and deployed independently. Teams can make frequent, iterative improvements to the website without worrying about accidentally breaking platform functionality.
With the old technology, it was taking weeks or months, whenever we wanted to make a simple change in the content, whether it was the layout, creating a new input or a new section within the page, etc. Now the turn around time is only a couple of days, which is a big improvement.
#Headless architecture vs microservices
All headless platforms decouple the frontend, but there is a wide variety in the backend structure.
Applications with a microservices architecture break up functionality into distinct pieces or services, such as user authentication, content modeling, or asset management. Each service works autonomously and shares information with other services via a standardized API. Changing how one service works under the hood won’t impact others as long as it still shares the agreed-upon date, so services can be developed in parallel, and updates can happen on a rolling basis without versioning.
A major benefit of a microservices architecture is the ability to mix and match services from different business systems.
For instance, you might choose to use a DAM solution that specializes in video instead of the asset management that comes with your CMS or swap out the site search in your commerce engine with a dedicated search tool that offers advanced personalization. This allows companies to create their own tech stack of best-fit tools, with the freedom to easily add, remove, or replace the services in their stack as needs change.
Many natively headless CMSs were built from the ground up with microservices, exposing all content and functionality through APIs. CMS platforms that started off as monoliths and later went headless have typically added a content API on top of legacy code, with the backend functionality still tightly intertwined and difficult to integrate with other systems.
#Pros of headless architecture
Flexibility
A headless CMS lets you build your content model, workflows, and customer experience around your business's needs instead of around a monolith’s strict set of templates and features.
The API-based approach gives you a nearly unlimited choice in how content is stored, structured, enriched, and delivered. Allowing teams to efficiently build and manage unique, complex content-driven applications.
Omnichannel
A headless CMS lets you use the same content in different ways across websites, mobile apps, in-store displays, and any other touchpoint by structuring content data and sharing it through an API. Developers can efficiently build new applications with their preferred frameworks, and content teams can push out updates to all channels simultaneously, making it easy to keep the customer experience consistent across channels.
Scalability
The modular approach of a headless CMS lets you share common components across channels with the flexibility to use custom content and features as needed. Simplifying the management of multiple brands, markets, and multilingual websites.
The decoupled architecture also lets developers use the latest best practices to build high-performing frontend applications, with the agility to make fast, iterative improvements without risking critical backend functionality.
Extensibility
API content delivery lets you combine data from different business systems to power the frontend experience. With a microservices-based headless CMS, extending the backend UI with services from other tools in your ecosystem is possible. Giving teams a central source of truth to manage all content data, without having to jump between systems and copy-paste information.
Faster time to market
Developers can reuse components to quickly launch new features, channels, and into new markets. While editorial teams can use modular content blocks to build out unique page layouts, without developer assistance, and get content live in minutes.
Going for a sustainable, state-of-the-art headless content platform was very important to us. With Hygraph, we are able to centralize the tech stack allowing us to easily launch into new markets just by replicating the environments and migrating the content.
#Cons of headless architecture
No out-of-the-box website
With a headless CMS you’re responsible for building and hosting the frontend. There isn’t a ready-to-go website template that you can simply customize and certain features that are expected in a CMS that handles frontend delivery, like SEO optimization and personalization, will need to be set up in the applications you build.
Some companies choose to take this on in-house, using frameworks like React and Vue.js to build applications. Some use a frontend-as-a-service platform, like Alokai (Vue Storefront) and Vercel, that provide core infrastructure and frontend components. While others choose to work with one of the many agencies that are experienced with headless architecture.
Learning curve
If teams are used to working with a page-based CMS, switching to thinking about content in a modular way can take some getting used to.
This was more of a challenge when headless solutions were first coming to market, when developer tutorials were scarce and a lot of the platforms had minimal features for business users. Today, most enterprise-level solutions are well documented and many of them have a very user-friendly UI for non-technical teams.
Still, factoring in time for user training and learning new ways of working is important when making the switch from monolith to headless.
Implementation cost
Setting up a headless CMS is more complex than getting started with a monolithic one. With time and resources needed to develop frontend infrastructure, create your content models, and set up integrations with your tech stack.
While the upfront investment may be higher, the payoff comes in the flexibility a headless CMS gives you to manage complex needs, scale with ease, and quickly adapt to changing customer demands.
#How Hygraph CMS enables headless architecture
Hygraph is a headless CMS that empowers developers and content teams to easily create, manage, and deliver complex content at scale. Hygraph gives businesses the tools to simplify global content distribution and quickly expand into new markets.
Single source of truth. Data from across your tech stack can be unified into a single GraphQL endpoint.
Flexible content modeling. Developers can easily define complex data structures and quickly build high-performing, content-driven applications with any frontend technology.
User-friendly interface. Content teams can create and update content independently using an intuitive UI, Hygraph Studio, with advanced user permissions and custom workflows.
Thousands of global digital teams (including Samsung, Telenor, Epic Games, and 2U) monetize their content by powering mission-critical applications with Hygraph. If you’d like to learn how Hygraph can accelerate your digital content strategy, we’re happy to have a chat.
Blog Authors