Motivation moving towards Headless CMS
According to Yotta’s 2020 e-commerce report, over 60% of retailers plan to take their stores headless. But what exactly does going “headless” mean?
In summary, it is a detaching summary; it gives the website’s or another website’s back end more flexibility and control over its front end.
There are a number of benefits that headless adoption brings:
- URL optimization. There is no longer an extended dependency on the backend URL structure, so it is now possible to customize the URL and make it more SEO-friendly.
- Website Performance. Platforms like Shopify or WordPress follow the MVC/MVVP model, which makes the presentation layer highly coupled and limited by the backend technologies. Transitioning to headless unleashes your site’s performance potential, leveraging modern frameworks like React + Next.js or Vue + Nuxt.js for frontend development
- Mobile optimisations. Many customers are using stores, and it is crucial to have smooth. With modern frameworks, this is crucial. Modern frameworks make this easier than
- Content Management. Separating content management from commerce functionalities elevates content quality and accelerates publishing. With a headless CMS, you can set up workflows that simplify content editing, reduce errors, and enhance content quality, leading to customer satisfaction.
Beyond these advantages, transitioning to headless introduces modern architectural principles like MACH, opening doors to new business possibilities. This strategic move avoids vendor lock-ins and shifts part of the responsibility to SaaS platforms, allowing you to focus more on your core business instead of maintaining software.
Financial Insights from the Forrester Report
The information below is based on a Forrester Report that closely examined the Contentstack Headless CMS. While the specifics may vary, these findings could provide an understanding of the potential financial efforts needed to adopt a Headless CMS.
Key findings from the report:
- Increase in profit by $3 million over three years.
- Eighty percent reduction in content-related development time. This saves the composite organization $507,000 over three years.
- Ninety percent reduction in time to publish. This saves the composite organization $2 million over three years.
- Software licensing fees. The composite organization pays $24,000 in initial fees for the implementation and onboarding services. The composite organization pays $298,500 in annual software license fees.
- Implementation cost. A team of developers deploys the platform with support from Contentstack solution architects. This costs the composite $501,000.
The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $5.5 million over three years versus costs of $1.4 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $4.1 million and an ROI of 295%.
Navigating Integration with Headless CMS
In this section, I’ll outline a holistic approach to integrating with a Headless CMS. While we won’t dive deeply into technical details, I’ll provide a high-level strategy for structuring your code within the next.js app. The primary focus is to ensure streamlined maintenance in the long run.
This example is based on next.js, but the approach is similar to other JS frameworks.
Next.js empowers developers with an array of essential tools and capabilities, simplifying the seamless implementation of a decoupled frontend using SSR SSG or ISG.
