Deciding Between Traditional and Headless CMS
Selecting a CMS impacts your organization's operations, web presence, and potential growth down the line. However, for your stakeholders not necessarily in the weeds with technology, understanding the difference between a traditional CMS and a headless CMS can be complicated. Therefore, this tutorial aggregates the most essential factors in making a decision between the two, explaining pros and cons in non-technical terms.
What is a Traditional CMS? Familiarity and Ease of Use
A traditional CMS is the long-standing method of digital publishing. Because everything is in one packaged solution, a traditional CMS allows content creators and marketers to easily create, edit, and publish content within an interface that is typically easy to use and familiar. Organizations exploring a Strapi CMS alternative might consider traditional solutions for their built-in templates and visual editors, enabling those without technical expertise to quickly manage digital content without relying too heavily on developers or IT support teams.
Why Use a Traditional CMS?
The biggest advantage of a traditional CMS is the ease of use. With the content management layer and presentation layer operating from the same backend, even someone with no technical acumen can easily manage the site's content and corresponding updates. In addition, traditional CMS platforms have been around for quite a while and possess built-in communities for required documentation and support. Generally, this works best for smaller organizations or teams with few resources that just want something simple that can be up and running quickly with no real training or implementation versus something custom that could be running on a much larger scale down the line.
Where Does a Traditional CMS Fall Short?
Traditional CMS systems are easy to operate but sometimes too easy, too rigid for organizations looking to do more, offer highly personalized or multi-channel experiences. It's often reliant upon built-in templates which can make creative freedom and customizations difficult. If stakeholders want to offer a digital solution beyond just a website, a mobile app, for example, IoT devices, or new channels that haven't been created yet, a traditional CMS is not flexible or responsive enough to make that happen.
What is a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS is one that decouples back-end content creation and storage from front-end delivery, so content can be pushed to any channels, applications, websites, wearables, and more digital experiences. Since stakeholders can push structured content with varying opportunities to different places, developers and designers more easily have access to what shows up and where for the desired user experience. Headless refers to the lack of a designated front-end "head," thus offering more opportunities for business growth and change.
The Benefits of a Headless CMS
Solutions that are headless CMS are beneficial for flexibility, scalability, and multi-channel publishing capabilities. When content belongs to no specific outlet or design, it allows for organizations to publish content more quickly and on any channel. This can reduce time to campaign launch, time to new market penetration, and time to competitive pressure response, an opportunity for stakeholders to gain tactical advantage in a fast time frame with subsequent proactive opportunities.
What are the Potential Drawbacks Involving a Headless CMS?
However, while there are great advantages to using a headless CMS solution, many of these require more developer or technical team involvement from the start to set up. Since many of these platforms do not have templated opportunities or visual editors, non-developer stakeholders may find the systems more cumbersome to navigate on their own in the beginning. In addition, there may be a learning curve for stakeholders as content strategy has more structure and collaboration involving planned communications from marketers to developers and back.
Internal Factors About Your Organization
Deciding if your organization is ready to implement a traditional CMS compared to a headless CMS comes down to resources currently available and the anticipated benefits for digital experiences in the future. If stakeholders in your organization believe that a more straightforward approach to launching a CMS will be most effective while simultaneously getting all necessary functions immediately, then a traditional CMS is the way to go. Alternatively, if your organization believes that developments and changes will take place down the line and cross-channel functionality will benefit users in the future, then a headless CMS is the way to go. The determination can overwhelmingly be simple based upon strategic goals, potential for growth, and a clear understanding of audience needs and expectations.
Financial/Cost Consideration and Potential ROI with Traditional and Headless Options
Cost of implementation comes at a factor for comparison as well. For traditional CMS options, costs are lower on the surface. They typically require less investment of money or time to implement; it's a plug-and-play with what exists. However, for headless options, there may be greater costs initially due to integration and technical setup. However, stakeholders should acknowledge that headless solutions may not require further investment efforts down the line. Maintenance is often easier which gives a greater sense of return on investment when one realizes time is money when quickly adapting to market needs. Essentially, think of the long-term benefits of going headless before agreeing to either option.
Team Skills/Corporate Culture
Finally, take stock of team skills and corporate culture. If content marketers rarely depend on developers for content publication and vice-versa, a traditional CMS is probably the most seamless choice. If, however, technical integration relative to development and content is common and needed to help align practical day-to-day abilities with digital aspirations, a headless solution fosters this corporate interaction and culture. If your digital approach is ambitious enough to span multiple channels, it makes sense that the same goals could be applied at the team level as well.
Future Change Forecasting Relative to Innovation and Agility
As digital channels continue to spread in all directions at a rapid pace, stakeholders must foretell their organization's interest in innovation and agility going forward. A headless CMS allows your organization to position itself to adopt any tools that come to market down the line seamlessly and, therefore, remain agile and competitive. While the traditional route may seem more comfortable now, it could position your organization in a less flexible light down the line should another opportunity for market advantage arise that you didn't see coming.
Stakeholder Communication and Buy-In is Crucial
No matter which option you choose, communicating with stakeholders and getting buy-in is critical. Everyone must be on the same page with determining what's necessary for strategic goals, how they will operate content within a CMS, and what they need from the implementation to see success. Strong alignment ensures that no matter which direction a CMS ultimately goes for your operation, implementation will be smoother, acceptance will be easier, and multi-channel content opportunities will stay uniform across user experiences.
Transitioning from One Option to Another
For those organizations already with a traditional CMS but considering going headless or already with headless CMS options but looking to go traditional stakeholders should be cautious. Transitioning must not disrupt the current flow of operations, so excessive training, interdepartmental collaboration, and detailed pros and cons research of both options will set your organization up for success both now and later.
Hybrid Solutions Offer the Best of Both Worlds
Surely some stakeholders would question whether one can have the best of both worlds. More often than not, hybrid CMS solutions come into play that provide a certain level of structured, easy to use, intuitive functions along with headless access. These systems enable ease of access on the front end for content creators while still offering the advanced publishing capabilities cross-channel that headless systems desire; thus, a middle ground is often quite nice.
Don't Fear Making the Choice
Making the choice between a traditional and headless CMS does not have to be a scary process. By evaluating organizational needs, taking into consideration the implications of what's needed for access to both systems and fostering strategic collaboration across teams, all relevant stakeholders should not have an issue making a decision that would best fit current and future needs. When the proper system is selected, it is inherently empowering for the entity to continue offering dynamic experiences online now and in the future for sustainable growth and competitive viability.
Content Volume, Complexity, and Diversity Should Be Considered
One factor that should help in making the decision between traditional CMS and headless CMS options is content volume, complexity, and diversity. For example, if a company has a lot of straightforward content with not much complexity to communicate template blog posts or simple web pages a traditional CMS is the way to go. If an entity has complex content, diverse content, and a lot of it videos, podcasts, interactive games, dynamic product catalogs then a headless CMS will better serve management of such projects.
Security and Maintenance Considerations
Another factor to keep in mind with CMS solutions is security and maintenance. Typically, a traditional CMS has security features and updates already in place and a more centralized management approach, which doesn't tax internal teams as much from an operational perspective. A headless CMS might be more secure per se, but it needs more extensive management to ensure security or could pose slightly more security risks, meaning more work for internal IT departments or third-party partners.
User Experience and Content Delivery Performance
Similarly, stakeholders must consider potential user experiences and performance across channels relative to what different CMS options can provide and what they mean for accessibility and distribution. For example, a traditional CMS generates an expected performance. As a result of a more standardized, template-enabled implementation, traditional CMS solutions provide a more accessible and standard look and feel.
Therefore, visitors will appreciate consistent branding and easy navigation; however, this may come at the cost of personalization. The more a traditional CMS seeks to be accessible across browsers, devices, and features, the more it may also fail in load time, responsiveness, and effectiveness when people access the same material via their mobile application versus their laptop geo-specific browser versus some technology inaccessible today but existing in five years.
Conversely, a headless CMS can be relative because the presentation layer of what's presented has nothing to do with how the material is managed. In other words, there exists no physical presentation layer that restricts how the user experience can align without personalization. Instead, developers can create whatever they want for whatever they want to be rendered for maximum effectiveness and universality across locations and technologies.
Therefore, companies seeking to establish unique experiences across various competitive arenas will find that headless solutions will be much more effective. Accordingly, their content will load faster, move more seamlessly, and respond better to transformation adjustments made purposely for such endeavors.
In addition, the more opportunities for developers to make presentation adjustments at various developments, the better. This means that even unknown digital touchpoints in the future with nascent technological advances can remain solid and relevant when they finally come to the online world. Therefore, improvements are not only encouraged but required from an ongoing advantage perspective for consistency of engagement and loyalty over time.
Ultimately, this shows that performance characteristics are directly related to user experience expectations. Headless solutions create better-performing deliverables that load and respond well while also allowing for personalized experiences that engage users even more. But stakeholders must match such solutions with performance-based responses and engagement intentions to see if headless programming is the best way to go.
For those organizations that want increased flexibility of choice for the unknown future, improved responsiveness for unplanned courses of action down the line, and great outperforming improvements across various digital realms will benefit from headless CMS solutions. Yet if the biggest concern is speed of turnaround without caring for what may happen down the line or opportunities else down the line or simply one or two channels of distribution with direct success from the start, traditional CMS solutions work better. Thus, differentiating between these aspects of user experience expectations and opportunities for performance helps guide stakeholders to successful choices based on current organizational needs.
