As customer expectations evolve, so have digital channels and platforms, resulting in the need for more flexible solutions. While customers expect to have a seamless experience across all devices or channels, enterprises are pressured to provide highly personalized content and solutions. As traditional CMS fail to keep up with the pace and fulfill those modern demands, headless CMS promises to deliver dynamicity, becoming the need of the hour. When it comes to headless CMS, nothing beats the potential and personalization aspects of Adobe Experience Manager, an industry-leading content management system.
Here we talk about headless CMS, how it is different from traditional CMS, the benefits of headless CMS, concerns while choosing CMS, and the key capabilities of AEM headless CMS in providing exceptional web content experiences.
What is a headless CMS?
A headless content management system (CMS) is a tool in which you decouple where content is stored (back-end) from where it is presented (frontend), communicating with each other via APIs. In simpler words, the headless CMS separates the content from the presentation layer and allows you to manage content using APIs.
Headless CMS allows you to create content once and reuse it everywhere, delivering the omnichannel experiences at scale quickly and easily to multiple touchpoints in one click.
A headless CMS eliminates repetitive tasks by unifying content in a single hub, making it easier to scale and display through virtually any application without losing quality and delivering a better personalized experience to users.
A headless CMS vs traditional CMS vs hybrid CMS
Through the right tech stack, like Adobe Experience Manager(AEM) for headless content, enterprises can personalize content without overburdening developers for coding and delivering on time. But before understanding AEM as headless CMS, let’s dive deeper into why enterprises choose headless CMS rather than traditional CMS.
| Traditional CMS | Headless CMS | Hybrid CMS |
| Traditional CMS is a monolithic, predefined, structured CMS with inseparable frontend and backend where content and its presentation is managed from one place. | In headless CMS content is separated from the presentation layer, and a channel-neutral Content Delivery Network(CDN) delivers content to all channels and devices via APIs. | The frontend and back-end are separated as well but a hybrid CMS includes frontend at the presentation layer. |
| Traditional CMS is easy to use and provides easy onboarding of content for editors. It provides pre-built themes and templates. | Headless CMS is flexible and eliminates the vendor lock-in using APIs. It supports fast omnichannel content delivery by creating custom workflows and interfaces. A headless CMS can easily connect with SEO tools and CRM platforms. | Hybrid combines capabilities of both traditional and headless CMS and supports content reuse, CDN, omnichannel delivery, user-friendliness, and headless flexibility. |
| Traditional CMS requires coding and consumes more time. | With the use of well-defined APIs, you can consume content fastly, like a SPA (Single Page Application), IoT, or mobile applications. |
Why does your organization need a headless CMS?
Today’s modern consumers have dynamic needs, most of which cannot be accomplished via tightly-bunded traditional CMS. Taking into note trends and market insights, a headless CMS is the right choice for most growing businesses. A headless CMS offers tailored editing and publishing access to content authors. A business that operates on multiple platforms and wants to deliver omnichannel experiences can adopt a headless CMS-efficient framework. Some of the primary concerns while choosing a headless CMS are:
- Performance characteristics like load time, latency, and cache ability of the website.
- Delivering personalized content across channels becomes a slow process.
- If your current traditional CMS developers lack the ability to choose a frontend stack and your system demands intensive coding hours.
- If traditional CMS is slowing you down and you want to adopt a more agile and streamlined approach.
What are the benefits of headless CMS?
Digital experiences are getting more advanced, and customer expectations are rising. To stick around in the competitive landscape, businesses must quickly build responsive, reliable, and interactive content. Headless CMS enables users, marketers, and developers to publish content more quickly. Let’s discuss some of the benefits of headless CMS:
#1. Excellent omnichannel experiences
Today’s consumer bumps into various interfaces throughout the day, including mobile devices, laptops, IoT smart devices, and voice controls. A headless CMS keeps aside the frontend and uses APIs to publish content everywhere, saving the time and effort of manually republishing it across multiple platforms. A marketer does not have to create new content for every platform; hence they can focus on creating memorable and personalized experiences and delivering them at the right time and place. Such successful omnichannel experiences can lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention rates, increasing overall ROI.
#2. Flexibility in content editing and delivery
With the use of APIs, the same content can be published or updated across different applications, such as SPAs, mobile apps, IoT, social channels, etc., without programming. In headless CMS, marketers have access to editing tools and templates to publish content and campaigns to relevant frontend presentation layers.
#3. Headless CMS is developer-friendly
A headless CMS provides flexibility and freedom with the ease of development. It is developer savvy, agile, easy to learn, and supports integrations with cutting-edge technologies building digital experiences.
#4. Agile content delivery with reusable content
Headless CMS uses low-code or no-code CDN via APIs allowing you to push the same piece of content to multiple platforms all at once. Since you create content in fragments, you reach wider audiences, ensuring brand consistency and seamless experiences.
#5. Higher scalability
A Headless CMS architecture is much more scalable and offers a pre-built frontend with highly optimized static pages and assets. This reduces costs, complexity, and risks to delivering web pages quickly, increasing the scalability of headless CMS.
What is the approach of headless CMS in AEM?
Enterprises looking to create omnichannel customer experiences can choose AEM headless CMS. AEM understands your unique business requirements for headless content management while building a foundation for future growth. AEM offers you a cloud-native, modern CMS, which is a combination of headless capabilities based on three main AEM headless CMS features that are:
- Content Fragments: Content fragments are code-free structured content created by authors using AEM Content Fragment Model Editor. This content then, later on, allows you to create, design, curate, and publish content in multiple locations and over multiple platforms using JSON and GraphQL. Content fragments are stored as AEM assets.
- Content Fragment Models: Content Fragment models are the data and content structure you create and manage in AEM. It serves as the basis of content fragments where an author can create content using AEM headless CMS architecture.
- Content API for delivery: Content API delivery helps modify your content headlessly using two APIs, GraphQL, and REST API.
How AEM headless CMS capabilities provide exceptional experiences?
AEM is a headless CMS offering flexible and customizable architecture to provide developers and marketers with the tools to create seamless experiences throughout the customer journey. AEM understands every business’s need for headless content management while building a foundation for future growth. Whether you want to market faster, reach wider audiences, personalized content at scale, and more. AEM headless CMS capabilities cover it all. Let’s discuss some of the headless CMS capabilities AEM offers:
#1. Structured content fragments
To gain a competitive advantage, many businesses work efficiently to get their content quickly to consumers. AEM headless CMS improves the speed of building experiences and accelerates time to market by using content fragments across the entire customer journey.
#2. Content delivery through APIs
You can streamline content management and asset transformation using robust APIs like GraphQL and REST APIs for content delivery. AEM enables developers to launch faster and spend less time maintaining SPAs using ready-to-use, open-source components for SPA elements.
#3. Managing multiple content variations
AEM helps you manage and create personalized, consistent brand experiences across the web, mobile apps, social channels, voice, in-person, and more. You can manage multiple content variations by connecting a master content structure to connected live content copies, saving time.
#4. Seamless UI
The modern UI supports advanced search and filtering and out-of-process extensibility to customize these UIs according to your specific needs. A business can incorporate Adobe Live Search, powered by Adobe Sensei, to deliver search-as-you-type experiences, delivering personalized product recommendations at a lightning-fast speed.
#5. Efficient workflows
AEM enables developers to build easy workflows by integrating agile CMS with a modern DAM (Data asset management system) that provides a foundation for managing all your content. You can quickly find assets, build templates and designs, reuse existing content across all channels, and deliver a personalized experience at scale.
#6. Analyze your marketing performance
Implementing Adobe Analytics with AEM enables you to provide an ability to link data and content together. Adobe Analytics offers tools and insights to improve optimization, seamless experience, contextual personalization, and advanced segmentation. The integration promotes your content and data to analyze what is right for your marketing efforts. You can identify audience groups and push customized content to their preferred touchpoints, increasing sales.
#7. Dynamic personalization by exporting content
AEM headless CMS capabilities natively export experience fragments to Adobe Target for A/B testing or multivariate testing. Adobe Target then ensures consistent user experience on a single customer profile view across all platforms. It provides personalized content at scale by building a unified progressive profile of a customer, even when they use different information to log in from different channels.
#8. Third-party extensibility
AEM headless CMS allows you to customize websites according to your business needs through a third-party extensibility framework to easily build customized extensions. Adobe Developer App Builder extends AEM capabilities providing dynamic content without load time lag and on single-page apps. The integration allows you to migrate large amounts of assets from an external DAM into Adobe Experience Manager Assets. Developer App Builder allows you to use event-based triggers when an asset is modified, added, or removed.
#9. Easy integrations
AEM allows you to integrate with third-party tools for personalization, A/B testing, tracking insights, and more. You can implement Adobe Experience Clouds like Adobe Commerce, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Sensei, Adobe Journey, and Adobe Real-time Customer Data platform and boost your business’s productivity and flexibility capabilities.
#10. Greater security and availability
AEM runs a more secure headless CMS, and your content publishing tools cannot be accessed from your content database, nullifying the occurrences of cyber attacks. Moreover, AEM headless CMS is serverless, the content is provided to the website even when you’re offline.
#11. Faster editing experiences
The headless visual editor in AEM enables content authors to optimize and personalize the experience by making content edits through a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. In AEM, headless CMS content authors can preview, define editable sections, and automatically generate changes for components and related experiences.
#12. Efficient content pipeline
With an AI-powered headless CMS of AEM, you can automate metadata tagging, search, and content creation renditions so marketers can quickly find, create and manage personalized content at scale. This allows brands to provide omnichannel experiences through an efficient content pipeline.
Implement AEM headless CMS by certified experts of Ranosys
Headless CMS is a great way to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences and gain a competitive advantage. With AEM headless CMS, you get the capabilities to build faster and deliver exceptional digital experiences. If you need assistance with implementing headless CMS effectively and boosting the flexibility, agility, and scalability to achieve organizational goals, you can connect with our certified Adobe Experience Manager experts to explore more of its business-driven features.
