How Does a Headless CMS Work? Explained in Simple Terms
Managing text and media content across multiple websites, mobile apps, and other platforms can quickly become complicated if you're not using the right content management platform to store your documents. That’s where a Headless Content Management System (CMS) comes into play, delivering a powerful and streamlined way to simplify how content is created, stored, managed and delivered from a single location, using a single API.
Let’s break it down in clear, easy-to-understand terms.
By implementing a headless CMS to your content delivery you simplify the process of creating, storing, and distributing content across various platforms by following a modular workflow:
1. Creating and Storing Content
With headless CMS, you create, manage and store content in the backend, much like in a traditional CMS, but the difference lies in how the content is served and distributed. In a traditional CMS the backend where the content is stored is tightly coupled with the presentation layer (frontend) that often comes bundled within the same application (e.g. WordPress). Storing content in a detached backend in structured, reusable formats like JSON or XML, makes it universally adaptable and deployable to many channels, and because it’s not tied to a specific design or template, this content is ready to be displayed anywhere.
There are many SaaS headless CMS platforms that offer a convenient, easy to use user interface, that feels familiar with the visual editors you already know from WordPress or Drupal but offer more flexibility in defining and structuring content types allowing you to define custom fields such as text, numeric or even media fields to store images and videos.
2. Delivering Content Through APIs
In a headless CMS content is delivered exclusively via an API, usually the most popular REST API but some headless CMS can use GraphQL or gRPC.
An API establilshes endpoints that deliver data and serves as a middleman between the backend and the frontend. When a request is made from the frontend (such as a user visiting your website or opening an app), the frontend app talks to the API and retrieves the necessary content and delivers it for display. This separation allows developers to build custom designs for each platform while pulling from the same pool of centralized content.
3. Displaying Content Across Platforms and Apps
Once your content is stored in the backend with the headless CMS, it's served via an universal, standard API and can be delivered to a wide variety of platforms—websites, mobile apps, smart devices, IoT devices, streaming apps or even something as niche as an in-car infotainment system. This flexibility is one of the defining features of a headless CMS, enabling true multichannel publishing.
Why Choose a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS gives you the advantage of flexibility and scalability which is particularly important for businesses that deliver content for various types to a diverse audience in different languages and to different parts of the world, because most headless CMS utilize Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content from a server that is geographically nearest to them.
And because the backend is not tied to the frontend and content is delivered via an API, you can easily share the same content across websites, apps, social media platforms, IoT devices, and even email campaigns. This decoupling of backend from the frontend allows for greater flexibility and reduces time required to work on your content.
Headless CMS also offers greater developer freedom, because developers aren’t limited to pre-designed website templates, plugins or frameworks but can create and modify they own custom add-ons and functionalities. With headless CMS as your backend you can use any modern frontend framework like React, Vue, Angular or Next.js or even serve static HTML pages generated from the API server. This allows you to to create custom, high-performing frontends tailored to your platform’s specific needs.
And because headless CMS is cloud-based it offers improved performance and horizontal scaling, allowing for serving high traffic load and handling traffic spikes efficiently, reducing load times and improving the overall user experience. This is especially valuable for high-traffic platforms or global websites.
Challenges to Consider
While a headless CMS offers many advantages, it isn’t the right fit for everyone, especially if your team isn't experienced in web development. There are some potential drawbacks to keep in mind:
- Setting up and maintaining a headless CMS requires technical knowledge and involves steep learning curve.
- It may be too complex for smaller projects like a blog website or single-page company website.
- Because the backend and the frontend are separate systems, you will have to manage them separately and coordinate teams and tools to maintain your content delivery ecosystem.
Final Thoughts
A headless CMS represents a modern, forward-thinking approach to content management. By separating the backend from the frontend, it empowers organizations to deliver seamless multichannel experiences while maintaining centralized control over content. While it requires a bit more technical expertise upfront, it offers the flexibility, scalability, and adaptability making it an excellent choice for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly digital world.
Whether you’re planning for today’s web or tomorrow’s emerging platforms, a headless CMS can give you the tools to deliver content exactly where and how it’s needed.
Popular Headless CMS Platforms
To learn more about headless CMS you can refer to the websites of some of the well-known and established headless CMS SaaS platforms:
Each platform offers different features, but they all operate on the same principle: decoupling the content creation from the content delivery.