Why do I need to use a Headless CMS?

Why is a Content Management System Important?

A content management system (CMS) can take away the overall stress of managing your website. It can also give developers the flexibility to build and focus on creating solutions to complex problems so they can spend more of their time coding.

Headless CMS can help marketing teams to effortlessly create and manage pages and enjoy integrations with mar tec.

A headless CMS is just like a regular CMS, except it does not place any assumptions on how the content will be used in the presentation layer. This means that developers are free to build their website or app exactly how they want, using whatever tech stack they wish. Content is consumed via an Open API and can easily be accessed regardless of programming language or framework. On top of this, many headless CMSs offer hosted, managed CMS instances, with high-availability APIs that are designed to scale to meet high traffic demands. It’s a bright future for CMS, not only do the editors have all the features they’ve come to know and love but now many of the development pain points have also been addressed.

Why would you want to use a CMS, as a developer?

1 | CMSs can streamline web design and content publishing.

A properly implemented content management system allows non-technical editors to modify and create content without requiring a developer’s assistance. Let’s imagine you’ve built a website for a customer without a CMS. You’ve spent countless, painstaking hours obsessing over the design and content of the site with your customer. Then, you launch the website.

In today’s web, content is often fluid and in a constant state of flux. The amount of content on websites is also growing exponentially. Before you know it, your customer starts to request new pages and alterations to existing ones. How do you handle these? Without a CMS, this responsibility falls on you.

You might find yourself going on and on in email chains with your customers just to get some basic content updated. This is a huge time-suck, not only for you but for your customers as well. Wouldn’t you prefer to move on to building new websites, and continue to learn and grow your development skills rather than fiddle with HTML updates all day?

2 | Developers will have more time to write a better code. Marketing team will have more time and freedom playing with content.

Many believe that a CMS only benefits editors, but I strongly disagree. I think a CMS is an invaluable tool for a developer. You’ll be more productive, write better code, and have happier customers. Once you have a site with a CMS, it can be managed without your involvement, this frees you up to work on the next big thing. Ideally, when you are building a site using a CMS, you are effectively creating Lego pieces that editors then use to piece together their pages. This also forces developers to think about how to support different use cases and placements of functionality and content. So, you’ll spend more time developing your skills and building efficient, re-usable code.

A successful implementation will delight your customers. The next time they ask you to update content, you’ll be able to show them how they can manage this on their own and how this in-turn empowers the editor to be able to do more. They’ll love that they have control, and love they’ll love you for enabling this.

3 | You are your own boss.

The popularity of a headless CMS is rising and many are moving away from a traditional CMS. Let’s face it, it’s time to say goodbye to planning around outdated capabilities. Waiting on IT just to make simple content updates, risking serious security breaches, and shying away from multichannel optimization.

Not everyone has had great experiences with CMSs. There are various reasons for this.

One is that traditional CMSs dictate how you build your website and place constraints and limitations around the tools and technology you use to build it.

Developers like to be in control of their tech stack and try new things. Being told what to do and how to do it doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity. Another problem with traditional CMSs is that they get old, need to be maintained, upgraded, managed and they don’t tend to scale well. Frankly put, they can be a headache that gets in the way. Luckily, we are heading into a new era of CMSs, the era of the “headless CMS”.

4 | Coding is Hard, Understanding Someone else’s Code is Harder.

It’s said that there are many skills needed to develop and build a successful website. This primarily depends on the type of CMS architecture you’re using. We recommended a headless CMS architecture because it only contains 2 core components: A back end to manage and store content and an API to deliver that content anywhere.

A problem with traditional CMSs is that they tend to have a steeper learning curve. Not only do you need to understand the backend of the CMS you also need to know how to work in their supported programming language, framework, and sometimes even specific themes. Coding is hard, understanding someone else’s code is harder. On the flipside, headless CMSs are just an API. This means all you need to know is HTML/CSS/JavaScript and how to make an API call to fetch content. With technologies such as JAMstack and static site generators, you don’t even need to know a server-side programming language anymore. If you can build a website in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, then you can build a website with a CMS.

Common Languages and Frameworks used by CMS Developers

If you’re wondering what programming language to use for creating your CMS, the answer may not be so simple. It also depends if you’re using a traditional CMS or a headless CMS, in this case we both agreed that a headless CMS was the best way to go.

Traditional CMSs are often coupled with specific server-side programming languages such as PHP, .NET or Java (to name a few). While these programming languages are still popular, useful and relevant, they aren’t required anymore in order to integrate a website with a CMS. In the last few years, JavaScript is taking a much larger role in overall web development (with or without a CMS). Things that used to be done by traditional server-side languages are now being done in JavaScript.

For example, you can execute JavaScript on the server using Node.js. You can run JavaScript in a build-process of a static site generator to pull content from an API, render HTML pages, and then deploy those static HTML pages. This is referred to as a JAMstack (JavaScript-API-Markup) architecture.

On the frontend, modern frameworks such as ReactJS, VueJS, and Angular continue to be on the rise. One of my personal favorites (and exploding in popularity) frameworks is GatsbyJS, a progressive web-app framework built on-top of ReactJS that includes static site generation and uses GraphQL to store and access content from any data source.

Why would you want to use a CMS, as a marketer?

1. Automate Your Content Freely

Your editing team should have the ability to create, publish and automate content freely. Page Management gives editors more power and flexibility to create and manage their content but also saves time, increases ROI, and improves consistency across the board.

Page Management within Agility CMS allows editors to have complete ownership of their content and provides flexibility to add, move, or remove pages. It empowers editors to create and manage actual pages in the sitemap and the freedom to relate and structure their pages without having to involve a developer. With content zones and modules, it forces everyone to use the same architecture across the board in a consistent manner.

2. Deliver Site-Wide Updates Across all your Digital Content

Content architecture defines all your content lists and items and where they will live. With the right content architecture in place, the creation and management of your content delivery can happen smoothly in the background while your end-users enjoy the quality experience they are looking for.

A good Content Architecture makes it easy for your team to deliver site-wide updates across all your digital content. Performance updates can be tested, applied, and rolled back quicker and easier. New employees can start generating ROI quicker, and editors and designers can efficiently complete the work they need to do as well. The CMS is easier to manage, and it’s relatively inexpensive to add new features such as integrating with any marketing automation platforms.

With a headless CMS like Agility CMS, you can start planning your content architecture and optimize your content across all your digital properties. Reduce expenses and create happy customers — all the ingredients you need to deliver standout ROI!

3. Sell and Promote Your Digital Store

Forrester reported that B2B Ecommerce will reach $1.2 trillion and account for 13.1% of all B2B sales in the US by 2023. What this means is a properly implemented Ecommerce solution is so important for managing your orders, products, coupons and customers. You need an Ecommerce solution that is robust and won’t get bogged, like on a big such as Black Friday, when a massive volume of orders are submitted. The last thing you want is for your Ecommerce store to crash.

Agility CMS’s Ecommerce is Cloud-Based; this means it’s scalable independently from your website. It’s also customizable, allowing customers to build highly responsive and comprehensive product pages. Our Ecommerce solution also boasts unlimited scalability, with auto-scaling hosting options and additional cloud resources to accommodate high-traffic periods. Additionally, it provides in-depth reporting and custom reports covering customers’ entire purchasing cycle.

4. Boost Your Movie Ticket Sales in 2020

Electronic ticketing allows your customer’s 24-hour easy access to events they are seeking. Instead of having to operate within box office hours, your customers can browse and purchase at their leisure. This makes it easy to schedule events, coordinate with other guests and browse for additional events that may be of interest.

When you offer a better customer experience, you are also providing additional value to your guests. The result is loyal customers who return to your website or app again and again. They tell all their friends about their great experiences, too! All these things lead to one very important benefit to you: an increase in conversions and sales.

E-ticketing within the Agility CMS platform is managed from one central hub. It is not only customizable; it also provides secure and flexible integrations with customers’ payment, shipping and CRM providers of choice. The platform also boasts unlimited freedom of design, a mobile-friendly user experience, customer account creation and tracking, multiple ticketing variant options and in-depth reporting.

5. Collect Data for Crucial User Insights

User generated content is the content on your site that is submitted by your website users. The most common types of UGC are comments, ratings, votes, blog post comments, reviews, form submissions etc. Having a way to store and organize this data properly is very important, especially for your marketing team. It provides the company with an opportunity to respond to the feedback and improve, make changes, and connect with their client base and community. It’s valuable information for a company’s overall presence, but also gives customers and clients a chance to be part of a large community, to feel like their voice is being heard.

As technology becomes increasingly user-friendly, it’s simple for users to provide honest reviews and feedback in various formats. UGC serves as an excellent social proof. Seeing content from real customers increases your credibility and brings your brand’s promises into perspective.

Agility CMS provides a flexible and fast way of managing your User Generated Content (UGC). This can range from something as simple as polling or a voting system to something more complex like forums, blogs, comments, or photo and video journals. Any form submissions on your website or app can also be defined and saved in UGC. In addition to the basic collection and storage of data, UGC includes functionality for defining and managing user profiles that allow a user to register and login on your website or app. UGC includes workflows and mechanisms for approving content before it is published, and the ability to automatically un-publish content if it is flagged as abusive by other users or contains offensive words.

6. Increase Your User Experience Conversions

Site search is one of the most effective ways to increase user engagement with your site. That little search box sitting there on your home page is a gold mine, waiting to be clicked. A search bar improves your user experience, especially for new visitors who come to your site. A user will arrive there from elsewhere on the web: Google search, a social media update, or a link from another site. Most of these visitors will follow a path you’ve laid for them, but for the few that prefer to carve their own way, a search bar will help them along.

Agility CMS’s search feature is powerful and neatly organizes all your digital content in a way that is easy for your users to find. In a few weeks, we are launching a new feature called “Content Search” that will provide Agility CMS editors with the ability to search throughout their instance for content that matches a specific search term. It will tell you where that content is used and provide a shortcut to directly edit/view your content item. This will make finding and replacing content much faster and reliable!

7. Empower your Content Team to Do More

The web is changing faster than we could ever imagine. Businesses and organizations have higher expectations for their CMS and the content that powers them. To keep up with all your content changes your CMS needs the speed and the capacity to keep up with all their content updates and the mass amounts of content accumulated over time. As an editor, being able to launch a campaign, schedule a blog post, or add new pages or modules should be a piece of cake.

Agility CMS uses a content-first approach that enables you to be faster and more flexible. You can reuse content wherever you want and easily connect it to all your digital channels!