Headless CMS vs. tra­di­tion­al CMS

Content man­age­ment systems (CMS) are widely used for websites. While tra­di­tion­al CMSs are well suited to building an entire website, with a headless CMS, you can con­cen­trate on the backend and the content of your website.

What is a tra­di­tion­al CMS?

Tra­di­tion­al content man­age­ment systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have helped rev­o­lu­tion­ize the web. Once set up, even people without any coding skills can easily add new content to their website or blog. To make this possible, this tech­nol­o­gy (also known as “Mono­lith­ic CMS”) has a frontend (what visitors see) and a backend (where website operators work).

Once the frontend, which includes the UI design, has been set up, new content can be added via the backend. With a tra­di­tion­al CMS, content isn’t stored as in­di­vid­ual HTML documents. Instead, all content is stored in a database and loaded from there when the website is visited. The close in­te­gra­tion of frontend and backend makes for user-friendly website man­age­ment. A tra­di­tion­al CMS is ideal when you want to quickly and easily create one website.

Many tra­di­tion­al content man­age­ment systems are built on the LAMP stack, a stack of software that is free and was pop­u­lar­ized by the open-source community. The letters in the acronym stand for:

• Linux: The operating system is best suited for servers.
• Apache: This web server tech­nol­o­gy is widely used on the internet.
• MySQL: The database man­age­ment system is one of the most popular tech­nolo­gies on the web.
• PHP: The scripting language enables the creation of dynamic websites.

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What are the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of a tra­di­tion­al CMS?

Headless CMS

With a headless CMS, there is no fixed frontend. This type of CMS only consists of a backend. Since more and more headless CMSs are being equipped with a graphical user interface (similar to those used in tra­di­tion­al CMSs), content creation is just as simple. In many cases, headless CMSs are also offered as SaaS, which sim­pli­fies con­fig­u­ra­tion.

With a headless CMS, the content is also stored in a database. However, the avail­abil­i­ty of the content is not re­strict­ed to a specific website. A wide variety of frontends can access the data via simple APIs. This is possible because modern CMSs follow the Jamstack approach:

• JavaScript: The scripting language can be used to keep websites dynamic. This allows images to be reloaded or user input to be evaluated.
• APIs: In­ter­faces can be used to exchange content with different frontends. Usually, a REST API is used for this purpose, which is based on simple commands and is un­der­stood by different ap­pli­ca­tions.
• Markup: The HTML markup language is the cor­ner­stone of the web. The language is so stan­dard­ized that prac­ti­cal­ly every ap­pli­ca­tion can handle it.

These very simple and highly stan­dard­ized tech­nolo­gies make it possible to pass on in­for­ma­tion to a wide variety of frontends. The design of the content is equally flexible. While tra­di­tion­al CMSs usually have re­stric­tive spec­i­fi­ca­tions when writing content in order to stan­dard­ize pub­lish­ing, headless CMSs are different.

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What are the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of a headless CMS?

What are the best CMS providers?

Once you have decided which type of CMS you would like to use, it’s important to figure out which provider is right for you. The table below provides a com­par­i­son of CMS platforms, placing tra­di­tion­al CMSs next to headless al­ter­na­tives.

How to create customer-facing websites with Jamstack

In this whitepa­per, you’ll learn about the chal­lenges as­so­ci­at­ed with con­ven­tion­al CMSs and how Jamstack can help static pages become a viable al­ter­na­tive. The paper also looks at how you can ensure leaner workflows and improved customer outcomes with Jamstack.

Summary: Headless CMS or tra­di­tion­al CMS?

De­ter­min­ing which content man­age­ment system is the right one for you depends a lot on your project. If you are just looking for a straight­for­ward solution to implement a simple website or even just a blog, the classic CMS is still a good option.

However, if you are planning to fill more than just a single website with content, it’s worth taking a look at the headless CMS, which offers a wider range of pos­si­bil­i­ties. Once set up, you can feed a wide variety of systems with your content.

When making your choice, think about the future. Maybe you want to start with a simple website, but later on you also want to use apps? In that case, you should opt for a headless CMS now, so that you can avoid any problems that might occur with having to change systems later.

You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to use a CMS though. With static site gen­er­a­tors, you can create lean and powerful websites. If you’re not that in­ter­est­ed in pub­lish­ing new content fre­quent­ly, a solution like this could be the right choice for you. With the best static site gen­er­a­tors, you can create im­pres­sive websites from simple HTML documents.