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Is a headless CMS right for your business? Top things to consider

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With technology advancing daily, it’s important that your business can adapt in kind. A content management system (CMS) is no exception. Many traditional CMS systems are slow to respond to technology disruption and evolution, but modern systems—particularly modern headless systems—can give you the flexibility you need to change with your growing business and technological needs.

Once you understand the difference between decoupled and headless CMS, as well as the pros and cons of each, it’s time to consider if a headless CMS is the right choice for your business. While headless isn’t the best fit for everyone across the board, it should be seriously considered if you’re looking for a solution that: caters specifically to the needs and wants of your developers, provides you with maximum control and flexibility, enhances your platform security, and ultimately future-proofs your CMS. Find out more below.

A headless CMS can give you flexibility to change with your growing business and technological needs—but there are four things to consider first.

A headless CMS is a developer's dream

Headless is the most developer-friendly of CMS options. Even though headless CMS platforms share all of the core benefits of decoupled, the biggest difference between the two is that a decoupled CMS has a fixed or predetermined front end, whereas headless does not. This allows your development team to create a custom front-end framework that works for your project, your brand, your company, and your end users. Making headless CMS options almost limitless.

In creating this front end, developers are able to use any of their favorite frameworks and tools and are not limited by the development language and platform linked to the back end of your CMS. Keep in mind though, if you don’t have an experienced developer/designer (or a team), headless is definitely not going to be the right platform for you.

A headless CMS provides complete control and flexibility

As a content-only data source, a headless CMS can push content to any device or channel with internet access. It can publish the same content anywhere you need it to go and the content isn’t bound by a predetermined user interface. This means headless provides you with the ultimate flexibility in deciding how and where your content appears—including design, display of content, delivery of content, and content build. This gives you, and your developers, the freedom to focus on what is important: content creation and distribution over content management.

Being headless enhances the security of your CMS

Headless CMS platforms allow easy and secure third-party integrations and protect against security risks. Because of the design of a headless CMS, you can’t access the content publishing platform from a CMS database. This means you are less likely to experience a DDoS attack and be rendered offline, or unable to access systems and network resources. Your headless CMS can tightly secure any administrative, or data-holding, areas because it is completely separate from the actual displayed website. This gives you the ability to even restrict IP access to the CMS.

As an example, a popular method of hacking a website is through SQL injections—but headless combats that by running on a server without SQL or even without being connected to SQL. When a developer is truly creating a unique CMS from scratch, like with a headless CMS, nothing about your CMS is a known entity. Unfortunately, learning how to hack platforms like WordPress, used worldwide by a large number of people, can be easily found with a quick Google search.

Future-proof your CMS by gooimg headless

Technology is always evolving, and a headless CMS enables you to evolve along with it. The additional levels of security keeps you protected, while the flexibility means that no matter what new device or platform emerges—your content will be ready. Keep up your innovation cadence and integrate new technology into your stack quickly and easily as you go along—without a ton of lag time.

Ultimately, a headless CMS is only as good as the development team behind it. A headless CMS lets a developer run wild, mixing programming languages, templates, plugins and tools to create a unique, developer-friendly experience.

Using a headless CMS may not be the best solution for every team—but with the right developers, it just may be what you need to really send your business to the next level.

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