What is Headless Architecture and What Does it Offer Enterprise Marketing
Headless architecture is a software development approach that can offer big benefits to enterprise digital marketers. Not all businesses—not even all big enterprises—will want to take a headless approach, but it’s a very smart option for brands who want to dramatically improve their digital infrastructure and keep up with changing digital technologies. In this article, we’ll be laying out what it is, what benefits it offers, and give some tangible examples of how it can be powerful in digital marketing.
What is Monolithic Architecture?
In a monolithic application or CMS, the frontend and backend are tied together—you get one big bundle with everything together. Generally, in monolithic architecture you have one code base and a single-tiered application. All your components are tightly bound, which means that most changes you make impact your entire system. Changes can be difficult to impossible, scaling is a big hurdle, and creating content for multiple channels is tricky (without just creating content for each channel separately and with significantly increased time and effort).
Pros of Monolithic Architecture
Monolithic architecture and traditional CMSs have been around for a very long time, and will continue to be used frequently and a good option for many. Why? They’re straightforward, fairly inexpensive, and require less technical fluency. If your digital ecosystem does not need to be complex, this can be all you need to have a solid website that works as a single, powerful unit.
What is Headless Architecture?
Headless architecture is a development approach that decouples the frontend (the user interface or what a user can see and interact with) of a web site or application from the backend (operations and business logic). The frontend communicates with the backend through an API, so they can be developed and scaled independently.
Pros of Headless Architecture
Flexibility and Compatibility: Mixing and matching components is substantially easier within headless architecture. Monolithic architecture almost always means limitations in what tools you can use, what you can integrate, what programming languages you can use. Headless technology removes many of these constraints. There is a great deal of interoperability and freedom for developers, which means another advantage—happy developers.
Scalability: Since content delivery and presentation are independent in headless, understandably, it’s significantly easier and faster to scale. You can make rapid front-end updates and make back-end changes decoupled from front-end.
Performance: Alongside the big scalability and deployment speed that you gain with headless, a headless CMS means faster load times and usually less bloat than a traditional CMS.
Security: This can be an advantage, but only when done right. Many traditional systems are out of date and have known vulnerabilities. Headless architecture tends to be updated more frequently, which reduces potential exploits. However, APIs still need robust security management and constant vigilance. Security isn’t easy anywhere, but generally headless architecture choices are more secure.
The Biggest Perk for Marketeers? C.O.P.E. Create Once and Publish Everywhere.
While all the above benefits really do dramatically impact digital marketing both in terms of process and workflow as well as performance and ROI, one of the biggest selling points for digital marketeers at enterprises is how well headless architecture lets you create once and publish everywhere. Teams have more power to create content experiences for any channel, screen, device, or digital medium because the system is literally set up with that type of content management in mind. More consistency. Less rework. More omnichannel options.
Exciting Headless Architecture Use Cases
Deploying content on both websites and mobile apps: Headless architecture helps unify content management for organizations who have the same content across websites and mobile apps. It’s also easy to serve content dynamically to users.
Learning or training platforms: Organizations can use a headless CMS as a single source of truth for content within their training platforms. It can deliver a variety of materials across multiple devices and customize content presentation depending on user need.
Enterprises with multiple brands or divisions: Having consistency in your business logic and backend environments across multiple brands or divisions can be a game changer. In our opinion, headless architecture is the best architecture for this approach. Headless architecture across your different orgs can help you increase overall brand authority while also substantially reducing ongoing development time and cost.
eCommerce: You don’t have to spend much time researching headless architecture before finding how beneficial it can be for eCommerce. Fast load times, unified customer experiences, faster time to market, easier website personalization… the benefits are big.
If you are reviewing your solution architecture or want to better understand how you might be able to better future-proof your large digital ecosystems, contact us. Cimarron Winter supports organizations by helping ensure they have a healthy and scalable infrastructure.