According to Statista, the worldwide portfolio of IoT devices will grow from 15.41 billion in 2015 to 75.44 billion in 2025. McKinsey global predicts that the economic impact of IoT devices will range from about $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion every year by 2025. Wearable devices across the globe have increased from 325 million in 2016 to 722 million in 2019 and maybe more than 1 billion by 2022.
The need to connect and collaborate has resulted in this unprecedented growth of a diverse portfolio of devices. Therefore, to successfully market your innovative offerings, it is necessary to leverage a CMS that enables you to protect your content on any of these devices.
But are the traditional CMSs geared up to deliver the required customer experiences or is it time to go for a headless approach?
Traditional CMS Vs. Headless CMS- The Battle Begins!
What is a Traditional CMS?
A traditional CMS is a combination of a tightly coupled front-end aka the head and back-end aka the body. In this arrangement, content is getting created, managed, and stored at the back end, while simultaneously developers are also storing a website’s design and customized applications. This means that the presentation layer which is visible to end-users or customers on various devices plus the content management database used by editors for writing and publishing content - both exist on the same system.
Given the diverse forms of content pushed through the various IoT devices, there is an urgent need to technologically uplift the existing content management systems. Statistics shared by Review42 show only 18% of marketers believed they had the right technology, and about 45% were not using technology to its full potential.
Traditional monolithic CMS has several limitations. Some are their inability to sustain the growing customer experiences, multiple content silos, fragmented user data, slow processes, inconsistent user experiences, security breaches, lack of collaboration, outdated technology and processes, and inconsistent quality standards. Such limitations have led businesses to adopt more advanced content management systems, like the headless CMS.
What is a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS disconnects the actual data (back-end) from the presentation of data (front-end). It makes it possible to efficiently publish the same data across multiple platforms, such as phones, smartwatches, websites, VR devices, and voice-activated assistants. A headless CMS does much more than the organization of your content. It has a profound impact on all system users, including developers, project managers, and marketers.
| Factors | Traditional CMS | Headless CMS |
| Front-end Development |
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| Customization & Personalization |
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| Flexibility & Adaptability |
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10 Convincing Reasons for Choosing a Headless CMS
Every organization has its unique needs and must choose a system that solves its most pressing business problems. But, headless CMS has something for everyone. It helps developers, marketers, and editors alike, to take care of their content migration and management, flexibility, and innovation. Here are ten convincing reasons for choosing a headless CMS.
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Cloud Hosted
Most CMSs running in the cloud are not cloud services native. Frequent manual installations, impediments to scalability, and lack of flexibility are common concerns. Whether you choose an on-premise installation, CMS in the cloud, managed service, or platform as a service model, customization and control are hard to come by.
The headless CMS architecture addresses most of these concerns as it is built with the cloud in mind, separating vendor and client functions. This means that while the vendor takes care of the technicalities of running a CMS, the client only needs to worry about displaying content across channels using an API. -
Saves Upfront Costs
Headless CMS enables your teams to create newer websites and functionalities on existing websites and portals. Say, for example, creating fresh microsites for featuring your latest offerings is quicker as they need not depend on your developer to build templates. This reduces the upfront costs as you can start small while reserving the power to reuse and restructure the content at any time. -
Consistent Omnichannel Experiences
From billboards to smartwatches, content management has come a long way and will continue to evolve in ways that might seem far-fetched today. Headless induces this ability to centralize and manage your content across multiple channels and keep up the omnichannel experiences. -
Give your Developer the freedom to choose
Your developers are the heart and soul of your system. Therefore, it is only fitting that they are given complete control and freedom to work with tools and technologies to build behemoth solutions that can embrace the future disruptive technologies. This is exactly what a headless CMS lets you do. -
Build microservices
Microservices form a major part of the evolution of modern software architecture. Internal and external systems connected via APIs enable developers to stitch applications together. Adopting microservice architecture is easier with headless CMS. -
Deliver content faster
Most headless CMSs contain UI elements intended to simplify navigation. They also contain several visual elements to enable the tracking of changes. Now, you have complete control over your content appearance through the use of themes and plugins. This makes the editing process easy and accelerates content delivery. -
Enables Future-Proofing of Applications
Enterprises maintain legacy software to avoid the effort and cost of updating the application. This also restricts them to innovate and lose out on scoring customers in the marketplace. But, with headless CMS you separate the presentation layer from your data and logic layer. Therefore, to begin, a project, developers can use APIs to carve out a solution from different pieces of the existing solution. -
Scale easily
A headless CMS offers speed and scalability. Marketers can rely on the power integrated into the architecture of a headless CMS to harness the scalability of the system in the long run. A headless CMS makes it possible to accomplish efficient omnichannel content marketing. It also improves the overall digital user experience. -
Product-Focused
By separating the content and its presentation, a headless CMS allows the developers to focus on the product and produce streamlined and connected pieces of content for their target audience. It allows content creation, management, and delivery through a single process, allowing marketers to elaborate on their unique selling points. Focusing on the product or service also provides a user-centric experience when presenting content across multiple device platforms. -
Adds another layer of security
Unlike traditional CMSs, which integrate data into code, a headless CMS maintains code and data separately. It cuts down on the security threats by delivering data using APIs rather than maintaining a large codebase. A small and powerful codebase also allows a smooth integration of third-party tools with high protection against security risks. It minimizes chances of unauthorized access to network and system resources or denial of service attacks. Since the code and presentation are separate, it is easy to protect administration sections and allow only restricted IP access.
Ezcontent - The viable solution your organization needs
Our homegrown Drupal distribution, EzContent, is an intelligent CMS meant to help developers, marketers, and editors. It contains several out-of-the-box content management features. Backed by advanced editing capabilities and driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence, it makes multimedia management and smart content tagging possible, speeding up development by as much as 30%. It features an AI-based multimedia search, drag and drop layout builder, API-ready decoupled CMS, and AI-powered content generation. EzContent features a component-based architecture and is cloud-ready. Additionally, editors enjoy streamlined workflows to produce engaging digital experiences, while marketers deliver a unified experience to achieve the required targets.
In essence, EzContent is more than a headless CMS. It provides an enhanced digital experience. AI-powered capabilities make it possible to deliver never-before user experiences. To find out more, get in touch with us.
