The Gist
- Flexible development. Headless architecture supports using varied technologies for front-end design.
- Enhanced SEO. Faster page loads from headless CMS can boost search engine rankings.
- Cost-efficient scaling. SaaS models in headless CMS offer scalability and reduced operational costs.
The past few years have shown tremendous growth in the adoption of headless architecture, especially with new implementations of both content and commerce platforms.
Over the last year, a majority of the new site builds I’ve worked on have been headless. And it’s not just headless architecture pure plays like Contentful and Contentstack supporting this trend. Most of the traditional CMS platforms support this headless architecture. Sitecore’s XM Cloud product requires it. Optimizely, Adobe and Acquia all have enabled headless architecture with their products.
But the headless value proposition is usually explained in technical terms that don’t necessarily resonate with marketers or business stakeholders. Having the flexibility to use different technologies to build your front end sounds good but is usually explained as a technical benefit. The performance improvements that headless architecture can bring can also benefit SEO and the customer experience, but rarely is it explained how.
The benefits are hard to explain from the perspective of the platform because even the term headless is a misdirection. It focuses on the platform providing the content and the data and almost glosses over the fact that the most important part of your marketing stack is in fact the “head” or front end of your website.
The Problem With Traditional Platforms
The reality is that before headless architecture, the technology stacks behind most content and commerce platforms had stagnated. They restricted how you could build your front end, requiring specific frameworks including Java, PHP and .Net, forcing development approaches into server-side rendering (SSR) paradigms that limit your ability to scale and optimize the experiences you built.
These platforms also become bloated, adding features like personalization, analytics and marketing automation capabilities which could be used to create more tailored experiences for visitors. These features added complexity and cost, whether you leveraged them or not.
Sitecore’s traditional platform DXP is a great example of this. To support its robust marketing features including personalization, analytics, email marketing and more, it required 10 additional databases and 10 additional app services that needed to be managed. And many customers only used a fraction of the available capabilities, with some often choosing to use additional tools that better fit their business needs.
Related Article:Â 25 Best Free or Premium Headless Content Management Systems (CMS)
Innovations in Front-End Architecture
While this was happening, front end technologies began to evolve at a rapid pace. The gap between how a traditional CMS-driven website is built and how modern web frameworks support web development has widened, leaving many capabilities and techniques out of reach for traditional CMS implementations. Here are a few of the innovations to which headless architecture reopens the door.
Related Article:Â Headless CMS: The Epic Battle With Monolithic Platforms
The Rise of Front-End Frameworks
The 2010s saw a proliferation of JavaScript libraries and frameworks built to support richer and more complex user experiences. With the backing of tech giants like Google and Facebook, frameworks like Angular and React exploded in popularity driving the adoption of single-page application architecture.
At the core of this headless architecture lies the concept of component-based development. These frameworks abstract the display and behavior of web applications into reusable and modular components. Each component encapsulates a specific piece of functionality, such as a button, form, or navigation bar, along with its associated HTML, CSS and JavaScript logic.
This component-based approach not only enhances developer productivity but also facilitates a more dynamic and responsive user experience. By dynamically updating content without reloading the entire page, these frameworks provide a smoother and more seamless browsing experience, akin to native applications, ultimately improving how users interact with web applications.
This modular nature of components extends beyond web applications, as these same frameworks are supported across various platforms, including mobile. With frameworks like React Native, developers can leverage the same components to build native mobile applications, leveraging their expertise and investment in web development to create cross-platform solutions efficiently.
While it was usually possible to integrate these frameworks with traditional CMS platforms, there were usually limitations and challenges. The component model these frameworks support was usually completely different from the traditional CMS component model, preventing reuse and creating the need for duplication. Front end framework components also did not typically support traditional CMS capabilities like inline editing, making them more difficult to manage by content authors.
Related Article:Â Has Headless Lived up to Its Hype?
Increasing Performance With Static Generation Approaches
Back in the 1990s most websites only served static content. Content was published as flat HTML files to web servers that simply returned the requested web pages. This was actually very efficient as web servers are great at retrieving files, but the process of creating and publishing that content was more difficult. This challenge gave rise to Content Management Systems, which allowed for content to be more dynamically assembled by the web server, making it easier to manage the content publishing process.
But that dynamism came with a performance cost. By performing server-side rendering (SSR), web servers needed to evaluate business rules, source content and data from various sources and assemble the resultant HTML before returning the content to the visitor. As marketing features were added to CMS, web servers often needed to do even more: manage personalization rules, support AB testing and capture interaction data for analytics. To overcome the challenges in doing this at scale, most platforms adopted robust caching strategies, though this had limited effectiveness, especially when content was updated, and caches needed to be rebuilt.
The performance impact of this approach can also negatively impact SEO. According to Google, faster-loading websites are generally more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than slower-loading websites. Often, the additional time checking caches and other rendering rules added time to requests even if there were no changes to content or rules to apply. This performance tax led many to look back to the roots of the static web for alternatives, and static site generators began to rise in popularity.
Instead of taking the server-side rendering approach described earlier, static generators evaluate those business rules, sourcing content and data at build time, long before a visitor ever arrives at your website. It then outputs the results as static content, which your webserver can efficiently handle. Visitors don’t need to wait for any rules or evaluation to run as the webserver just returns the requested file. This is much more efficient than SSR techniques and will typically lead to high Google Lighthouse performance scores.
Although performant, for content sites that are updated frequently, having to rebuild your entire website every time you want to publish new content may not be acceptable. To solve for this problem, frameworks like Next.js support Incremental Static Regeneration, which allows the webserver to update content when it changes without impacting performance.
With this technique when content is published, the next request for the page will return the old content, while the webserver begins to regenerate the page in the background. The next request after the regeneration is completed will return the new content. In all cases, the visitor is always being served static content and never needs to wait for the content to be generated.
Optimizing Dynamic Content and DataÂ
Static generation techniques won’t work for every scenario. Sometimes the data is too dynamic. Pricing and inventory data is the prototypical example of this. While leveraging REST APIs and AJAX to fetch and load this kind of data after the page has loaded, new approaches have emerged that provide a better experience and make it easier to blur static and dynamic rendering techniques.
One approach to optimize dynamic content and data is to leverage HTML streaming. This technique enables the server to start sending HTML to the client as soon as it’s ready, rather than waiting for the entire page to be rendered. This incremental loading approach significantly reduces time to first byte (TTFB) and allows users to start interacting with the page faster, even before all JavaScript bundles are downloaded and executed.
Frameworks like React have introduced features that make it easy to incorporate HTML streaming and the user experience with concepts like Suspense. Suspense makes it easier for developers to handle asynchronous data fetching and rendering in React applications. With Suspense, components can specify loading states and fallback UIs, enabling a more graceful handling of asynchronous operations such as data fetching. By suspending component rendering until all required data is available, React Suspense enhances perceived performance and user experience, especially in scenarios with complex data dependencies.
Taking a step further, frameworks like Next.js are introducing features like partial pre-rendering to strike a balance between static generation and server-side rendering. Instead of pre-rendering entire pages statically, Next.js allows developers to specify which parts of a page should be pre-rendered at build time and which parts should be rendered dynamically on each request. This fine-grained control over pre-rendering enables websites to achieve optimal performance and SEO benefits while still catering to dynamic content and personalized user experiences.
Moving More to the Edge
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have long provided a band-aid to performance for traditional CMS platforms, accelerating delivery of assets like images and files while providing faster routing to delivery servers through their proprietary networks. Over the last 5-to-10 years, usage of CDNs has become table stakes for websites that care about performance. But more recent advancements have moved even more functionality to the edge.
Companies like Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase and even Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer an edge run time that supports CDN powered edge functions. These functions allow you to define custom code and replicate it across a CDN network, ensuring that visitors are routed to the nearest server when running that logic, minimizing latency and ensuring it runs as fast as possible for that user. This technique can be an efficient approach to implementing authentication and authorization, handling redirects and even adding personalization and AB Testing to your site.Â
Several content management solutions have also looked to the edge to accelerate their delivery of content, particularly in supporting headless architectures. Both Sitecore’s Experience Edge and Adobe’s Edge Delivery Services are great examples of this approach.
With these services, instead of publishing content to a database, content is primarily replicated on a CDN. This both improves the performance of your website, but also makes it much more scalable. Instead of needing to consider replication strategies for databases, you are free to deploy your head application in multiple data centers and the content will always be close by.
Shifting the Operational Burden
Leveraging the capabilities of the Edge is part of a larger trend of serverless computing and a push to reduce the operational cost and complexity of managing these types of services. Most content platforms started as installed software, leaving it to customers to stand up servers, install and configure the platform and work through approaches to support dev ops and orchestrate deployment processes that minimized down time.
Azure, AWS, and other cloud services made it easier to deploy more complex platform topologies with better controls for scalability and failover. That being said, cloud environments still have a significant need for resources to manage and monitor deployed solutions. Many vendors even offered custom managed services to support platform deployments in the cloud to offload some of the operational burden of support.
More recently, many of these platforms have been being re-architected to support Software as a Service (SaaS) models, reducing the dependencies on customers to manage and scale their own infrastructure. Sitecore’s XM Cloud, Adobe’s AEM as a Cloud Service and Optimizely’s upcoming SaaS offering are great examples of this trend.
Many companies prefer Software as a Service (SaaS) due to its cost efficiency, scalability, accessibility and ease of maintenance. SaaS reduces initial costs and offers predictable expenses through subscription models, while also allowing businesses to scale up or down easily. Additionally, the adoption of SaaS aligns seamlessly with MACH architecture principles — Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless.
But platforms normally draw the line at their own services: the authoring tools, API’s and content storage needed for their services. The “head” still needs to be built, deployed, and managed. To reduce this operational burden, serverless front end cloud platforms like Vercel and Netlify have emerged to provide managed hosting for many of the modern web architectures described in the article.
These platforms manage the complexity of deploying and scaling applications built across many popular modern frameworks. They offer seamless integration with continuous deployment workflows, enabling rapid and reliable updates. They also optimize performance through features like global CDN distribution, serverless functions, and built-in analytics. This allows development teams to focus on writing code and creating user experiences rather than worrying about infrastructure. By abstracting away the operational intricacies, front-end cloud platforms accelerate development cycles and enhance the overall agility of web projects, thus complementing the broader shift toward serverless and SaaS models in the industry.
Why Headless Architecture Really Matters
These are just some of the many innovations in web architecture and development that have emerged over the several years. I chose to highlight these as they clearly demonstrate the fundamental differences between modern web architecture and how traditional CMS websites are built. The big deal with headless architecture is not just that you can access your content using APIs—which was likely always possible — but that you can now fully leverage the benefits of modern web architecture, both now and in the future.Â
Innovations within CMS platforms themselves have significantly bolstered the headless movement. Once not possible with pure API integrations, many headless vendors have added visual page editing capabilities, giving content authors the same experience they had with traditional CMS tools to author content, drag and drop components and manage the web experience without needing to understand the technical details behind the implementation.
Another critical advancement is the focus on composability, which enables the integration of best-of-breed services and microservices into a cohesive digital experience. Many CMS vendors are adding composable features that can be easily integrated into a headless architecture. Sitecore has introduced decoupled component and form builder tools that give marketers the ability to enhance the experience without the involvement of technical teams. And almost all platforms have composable features that enable personalization and AB testing, usually taking advantage of modern web architecture and edge services to ensure they don’t impact performance.
This composability allows businesses to tailor their tech stacks precisely to their needs, enhancing both flexibility and innovation. By supporting these features, headless CMS platforms are not just keeping pace with modern web architecture but actively driving its evolution, making it easier than ever to deliver sophisticated, high-performing digital experiences.
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