Headless Drupal - What it means for marketers

If your website is on the right CMS, it becomes easy to create marketing campaigns, drive leads, and tell your brand’s story to the world. However, making content available on every new device in the market accessible to a user becomes a challenge for marketers.

Headless Drupal may sound exactly what a marketer needs - a platform that helps content reach any device a user uses. Yet, there are some significant problems that it poses to the marketer. Let’s understand them in detail.

Revisiting Headless Drupal

A traditional Drupal has a back-end (stores the content) and front-end (which decides the delivery of that content). Now as there is no limit to devices accessible to users, brands need to go beyond just delivering content on websites and web apps.

With a pure headless CMS, tightly coupled front-end is removed, and it delivers content through an API anywhere and on any device (commonly referred to as API-first).

Headless Drupal offers faster functioning than traditional Drupal and offers highly responsive and fast websites ensuring rich user experience.

When the user interface is decoupled from the CMS, the logic for displaying content on each device is on the front-end and its native tools are responsible for controlling the user experience.

How Headless Benefits Marketers?

It is important for marketers to be where their customers are and send the right communication, on the right channel, at the right time. Here are the 3 benefits of headless Drupal to marketers:

1. Platform Independent Communication

Headless Drupal CMS offers great flexibility to marketers as they can deliver one piece of content in multiple formats – to a desktop, smartphone, app, VR devices, smart speakers, and smart appliances. It saves marketers a lot of time previously spent creating and optimizing content for different devices.

2. Freedom on Content Display

Marketers prefer to use headless as it offers choice over how your content appears on the frontend, with extra security over traditional Drupal. JavaScript frameworks has gained more traction due to the demand for more flexibility in the front end. Its emphasis on client-side rendering offers a more engaging and dynamic user experience.

3. The Faster, The Better

Decoupled Drupal is also faster as the logic for displaying the content is decided by the front-end interface. As marketers are in a constant urge to impress the existing customers and at the same time attract new ones, a faster site helps them in engaging with customers as fast as possible.

Why it is Not Marketers’ First Choice?

Though headless Drupal has been beneficial for developers, but is it valuable to marketers as well? Below are the reasons why marketers, despite its advantages, don’t prefer to go for headless Drupal.

1. No Preview Available

With no presentation layer in a headless Drupal, marketers are not able to create and edit content with a WYSIWYG editor as they would with the traditional Drupal. The most challenging part is they can’t preview their content before publishing to their audience.

2. Dependency on Developers

With headless Drupal, development teams can create a custom-built front-end to customize the layout and entire design of individual pages.

The marketers will have to be fully dependent on developers to carry out tasks for conversion optimization purposes, which proves to be an inefficient solution for them.

3. Marketers Have to Manage Fragmented Environment

Today’s marketers have to engage with their audience in real-time, publish content in line with the latest trends, launch landing pages, deploy microsites, track progress, monitor data, collaborate with advertising campaigns, and much more.

A headless Drupal makes the marketers manage content workflows, form building, and microsite deployments. Managing everything at such a huge scale, soon creates an expensive and hard to manage ecosystem. Not only it complicates the life of a marketer, it also gets in the way of creating a seamless and connected customer experience.

4. Impacts the SEO

Marketers lose standard SEO functionality on adopting headless Drupal for their content strategy and will eventually have to invest additional time and cost for Drupal SEO development.

What It Means For Marketers?

Marketers can consider going for decoupling Drupal when they want to publish the content on more than one platform such as multiple websites, various front-end devices or when they need real-time updates of a site where performance would be killed by using traditional Drupal.

However, if their requirement is to manage a responsive website, headless Drupal won’t be beneficial and will slow down time to market. And, also the costs involved are too high.

Solution For Marketers - Progressive Decoupling

Decoupled Drupal loosely separates the back-end from the front-end, creating an architecture which serves perfectly to both developers and marketers simultaneously.

As a marketer, you can benefit by its user-friendliness and the API-driven omnichannel delivery capabilities. The content layer separated from the presentation layer allows marketers to have an authoring experience that feels familiar. The presentation layer above the API layer allows for seamless integration and blending of different tools and technologies.

So to conclude, headless Drupal isn’t for everyone, and in many cases sticking with a traditional CMS or choosing decoupled Drupal is the best option.

If considering decoupled Drupal strategy seems intimidating, Srijan can help you connect with the experts to help drive your marketing strategy with it. Contact us to get the best out of Drupal.