Going Headless. Part 2: When a Headless CMS Is Your Best Bet (if you have Sitecore)

Daniil Raschupkin, Palina Trokhautsava on September 15, 2022

Discover how a headless CMS can benefit organizations that use Sitecore.

Let’s continue discussing the pros and cons of a headless CMS for businesses. In Part 1, we discussed the concept of headless architecture and some reasons against using this approach, despite its recent popularity. Now let’s review a few use cases when headless architecture is the optimal solution for an organization that uses Sitecore.

You Need the Best Possible Time to Market

If it’s crucial for you to launch your product or service as quickly as possible and you don’t have a team or partner ready to start working on a complicated platform, a headless CMS is the way to go. With the cloud, you can start building data models immediately, and the development team will be able to start using them the next day with a minimum entry threshold.

Sitecore will be your friend if it’s already set up and your development team has experience using it.

Your Content Is Not Just for Websites

A headless CMS allows content to be displayed in multiple formats—not just on a website but also through mobile apps, IoT devices, chatbots, and web pages.

Sitecore was initially optimized for web pages, though development teams can configure its Layout Service to deliver content through other channels.

Your Content Is Relatively Simple and Uniform

If your website or app structure is pretty straightforward, you don’t need a complicated content hierarchy, and the structure of your pages is predefined, you can use a headless CMS without the risk of displaying content incorrectly to the end user. A headless CMS doesn’t provide page visualization, so you’ll have to manage content as a bunch of fields, not as pages. At the same time, a number of headless CMSs are also suitable for managing complex data structures.

You Are Planning To Switch to an Enterprise-Level Platform in the Future

Maybe your business is still evolving and serving multiple audiences, and you aren’t ready to take it to the enterprise level yet due to the cost and bulk of the software needed for this. A typical headless CMS is much lighter and more affordable than an enterprise web platform. You can always make the move to an enterprise-level platform later, which will be no problem if it supports the headless approach. You’ll also be able to to present the same content on websites and mobile apps by replacing one content API with another.

Sitecore JavaScript Services provide a flexible content API while supporting the most modern UI frameworks.

Manage large amounts of content, engage customers, and personalize offers

You Need a Lightning-Fast Website

There are many ways to make a website faster, and most of them include using cloud technologies, a lightweight content API, and prerendered page caching. A headless CMS gives you all this and more, so systems with such architecture are fast and easy to scale.

Sitecore can be your friend here too. It’s possible to build a global website with a time to interactive of less than a second, but you need to remember that a specialized website will work faster than a complex one.

You Don’t Want To Pay for Tools You Won’t Use

Maybe you aren’t going to build your own content hub and don’t need complicated data processing. You already have marketing tools in place, and everything you need to integrate and personalize can be done on the edge or client-side. There’s no need to pay for out-of-the-box tools that you will never use. If this is you, a headless system is the way to go.

If You Want to Try Modern Technologies (Almost) for Free

Many headless cloud CMSs offer a free (or almost free) account. This allows independent developers to create their own blog and small companies to build their own website. Developers who want to learn modern technologies can also try using a headless CMS. The vendors of such products usually offer study materials on the most popular programming languages and frameworks.

If You Want to Try Modern Technologies (Almost) for Free

A headless CMS will allow you to build fast, robust web applications with the latest technologies, such as server-side JavaScript and Jamstack. These technologies are constantly evolving, and development teams are always interested in such projects, so you won’t need to worry about keeping your cloud-based headless CMS updated.

If you want to take full advantage of the headless approach, the Sitecore DXP setup will be your friend.

As you can see, using a headless CMS has certain benefits, though going this route should be justified from a business perspective. The main thing is to choose the toolset that best suits your business needs. The tools you choose shouldn’t limit your business; they should help you achieve new objectives as your business grows and evolves.