How to choose a headless CMS - a Selection Process Checklist

We will explore the key considerations when choosing a headless CMS to understand which features and capabilities matter most to you.

Key Takeaways

• Several business and technical benefits can be gained by selecting a headless CMS over a Monolith.
• The best headless CMS will scale with your business but remain flexible enough to adapt to changing requirements or market conditions.
• Organizations must beware of the "Feature Creep Curve" to avoid expensive long-term developments to maintain infrastructure.
• Content Architecture, API Design, Content Delivery Performance, API performance, Editorial Features, Business Flexibility, Security, and Privacy are the key areas to consider when deciding on a headless CMS.

What are the technical bottlenecks a headless CMS can help with?

Whether you are looking to migrate to a headless CMS from a monolithic, custom, or headless CMS, chances are you are making a leap of faith, believing that a fresh headless CMS will help you with technical bottlenecks after careful assessment.

In this section, let’s look at how a headless CMS can help you.

Break free from the legacy stack

Traditional CMS platforms often have a predefined tech stack, limiting your ability to adopt modern technologies. A headless CMS decouples the backend content repository from the frontend presentation layer, allowing you to use a more flexible and modern tech stack for your frontend applications.

With this freedom and flexibility, it's possible to deliver content to multiple channels, choose the best frameworks and technologies, and integrate with other applications more easily to build a modern, future-proof tech stack.

No more performance concerns

Headless CMSs can be designed to scale more easily since they separate the content management and presentation layers. This makes it simpler to scale each component independently. Maintenance and security updates can also be applied more seamlessly, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities.

Free to choose frontend framework

With a headless CMS, you can choose any frontend framework or technology that best suits your project requirements. This flexibility allows for a more tailored and efficient development process, enabling companies to embrace the newest technologies like Jamstack.

Provide design flexibility

Traditional CMS platforms may limit design flexibility due to their integrated templating systems. With a headless CMS, the design is detached from the content structure, giving teams more freedom to create unique and innovative user interfaces and deliver content to different channels without being constrained by templates.

Faster time to market

Headless CMS allows parallel development of the frontend and backend since they are independent of each other. Additionally, marketers can operate without developer intervention. This can significantly reduce development time, enabling quicker releases and speeding up time to market.

Reduce technical debt

Legacy systems can accumulate technical debt over time due to outdated technologies and codebase constraints. A headless CMS allows for a more modular and maintainable codebase, reducing technical debt by promoting cleaner and more modern development practices.

Reduce hiring bottlenecks

While legacy or traditional CMSs rely on templated systems or restrict the technologies developers can use, a headless CMS removes those restrictions. This reduces the potential hiring constraints and gives companies a larger pool of developers to choose from.

Benefits of using a headless CMS

Moving to a headless CMS can reward organizations with business and technical benefits. Here are some of the most common ones:

Technical benefits

• Meet tight deadlines for a new project involving multiple channels.
• Meet speed and performance requirements.
• The flexible design of your content and application architecture.
• Pick the frontend frameworks your team prefers (React, Angular, Vue, etc.) and meet ambitious design requirements.
• Decouple a monolithic structure to reduce technical debt.
• Reduce hiring bottlenecks from hard-to-find legacy CMS experts.

Business benefits

• Expand into new markets with new digital products.
• Modernize the company’s digital presence.
• Reduce the total cost of ownership of your tech stack by decreasing infrastructure costs and reducing maintenance costs
• Leave behind troublesome and limited editor experiences.
• Streamline content distribution via a single content hub.
• Improve content discoverability and SEO.

Things to consider when choosing a headless CMS

While the benefits of a headless CMS are notable, some other considerations need to be made:

Organizational goals and objectives

Identifying your key problems and goals as a department or organization will help you navigate the buying process successfully. Knowing your organization’s pain points will tell you what to look for in a headless CMS. This will also allow you to decrease the risk of buyer’s remorse and avoid overspending and overly complex solutions.

Open-source or proprietary

Another decision is deciding between open-source CMS or closed-source CMS. Open-source headless projects may require significant development investment to make them production-ready. On the other hand, commercial options will likely be more mature and aligned with enterprise use cases, providing the full assortment of tools your team needs to manage the entire digital experience.

Feature creep curve

The complexity of products increases with time due to the continuous addition of newer features. Features released early are essential and solve core problems for most users. However, features released later are often non-essential and only solve a marginal amount of the issues for some users. The complexity caused by many non-essential features often outpaces the value they provide, and user productivity is often negatively affected.

Making the move to a headless CMS: The ultimate selection guide

When moving to a headless CMS, there are some core features that any platform you assess should provide. So, it should ensure that it checks the following boxes:

Content architecture and API designs

Ease of setup

If you can't set up the content architecture quickly and intuitively, you may be wasting resources on your CMS.

Your content AP|(s)

Consider the differences in RESTful vs. GraphQL, and ensure your CMS provides a content AP| that matches your needs.

API functions

Your CMS's content AP| should offer ordering, filtering, and pagination functions.

API content management

Your API shouldn't just deliver content via API (read/query) but allow you to add content programmatically (write/mutations).

Development environments

Your CMS should enable a secure development process. Developers should have access to multiple Environments.

Content stages and versioning

Your CMS should provide multiple versions of your content with a flexible retention period, enabling you to schedule content as needed and revert to previous versions.

Content delivery and performance

Predictable payloads

Your API should deliver exactly what you ask for - no more and no less. This is the default behavior with GraphQL APIs.

Content availability

Your content should be available whenever you need it with a minimum guaranteed uptime that suits your business needs.

Content distribution

Your content and assets should be distributed (and cached) across several data centers close to your key markets.

Effective CDN

Your CMS and Content API should have middle-layer caching across a global CDN.

General API considerations

Management API

Your CMS should have a robust & flexible management API to manage schemas, users, and admin activities across projects.

Mutation API

A Mutation API allows your team to programmatically create, edit, and update content with GraphQL Mutations.

Documentation

A well-documented API flattens your team’s learning curves, costs, and overheads.

Roles & permissions

Your CMS should allow you to set several access levels for multiple users and manage them on the fly. OAuth authentication should also be available for better security.

i18n and i10n

Your headless CMS should support localization and internationalization out of the box to help serve your markets.

No hard limits

Your content API should not dictate or throttle the complexity or size of your generated queries.

Content security

Your CMS should support Permanent Authentication Tokens (PATs) for your endpoint out of the box.

Editorial features

Ease of use

Your content editors should be able to intuitively use a headless CMS with a seamless editorial experience.

Custom roles

Depending on your team’s needs and structure, you should be able to set custom roles for colleagues.

SEO

Your CMS should support strong technical and operational SEO best practices.

Flexible content modeling

Your CMS should handle all marketing-related formats and templates.

Digital Asset Management

A good CMS allows you to handle your digital assets within the app and serve them for optimal performance.

Programmatic asset transformations

A CMS should allow you to serve your assets with best practices and modern formats like WebP for SEO and performance.

Manual asset transformations

Furthermore, and for ease of use, your CMS’s DAM should enable you to edit assets to perfection manually.

Asset hosting

Most CMS’s DAM would be publicly accessible. Your CMS should enable you to host assets in a self-owned bucket, too.

Rich editor experience

Whether in Rich Text, Markdown, or Plain Text, your CMS’s editor should offer the options your team prefers.

Editorial convenience

Your team should be able to create, edit, and update content on the fly in multiple languages without a learning curve.

Integrations

As a core component, your CMS should be able to communicate with your other marketing APls and tools seamlessly.

Omnichannel content

Your CMS should let you manage content for all your devices - web, mobile, smartwatches, or anything IoT-connected device.

DXP ready

Your headless CMS should work with your tech stack, not against it when delivering modern digital experiences.

Business flexibility

Flexible pricing

Your CMS should scale with you and your project and not make you suffer vendor lock-in or unfair pricing practices.

Multiple support options

A robust SaaS CMS allows you to find assistance via an active community, docs, support channels, or account managers.

Service level agreements

SLAs should be available depending on your needs for support response time, APl uptime, or dedicated resources.

Security, compliance, and privacy

Backups

You should have the options of manual backups, point-in-time recoveries, and nightly and offsite backups.

Robust infrastructure

Your customers and users are across the world and need constant attention. Your content should match that.

Auto-scaling features

Your CMS features should scale with you based on your changing business landscape and project growth.

Scalable infrastructure

You should have the option of a strong hosted infrastructure - shared or dedicated - that doesn’t let you down.

Certifications

Your CMS should use ISO 27001-certified providers and data centers to match compliance needs. Other certifications, such as SOC2, are also recommended.

Data encryption

Your content and assets should be served over secure protocols without being compromised.

Secure API

Ensure your CMS’s API security policies include custom origin policies, IP firewalls, and regulation compliance.

Compliance

Your CMS (and other services, by extension) should be compliant with any regulations for the region you operate and able to process information securely. This includes GDPR, CCPA, and other regulatory requirements.

Internal protocol compliance

Your CMS should give you the option of Single Sign-On (SSO) and Audit Logs to ensure your team’s activities aren’t at risk.

Next steps to a modern headless CMS

A headless CMS can provide more flexibility and reduce the technical debt your engineering team has to struggle with. It can also enable your business to deliver content to new channels and take the customer experience to the next level.

The points in our checklist should help you to make an informed decision on which headless CMS best suits your specific use case. However, it only scratches the surface. To get a more in-depth analysis into considerations when opting for a headless CMS, download our headless CMS Buyer's Guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

What types of headless CMS exist?

There are usually two types of headless CMS. Open-source headless CMS, and Cloud-based (SaaS) headless CMS.

Some headless CMS options are completely open-source software solutions, meaning developers can access the source code if need be. Examples of this are Ghost, Headless WordPress, and Netlify CMS.

Many headless CMS options are cloud-based SaaS solutions that can either be hosted in the cloud or on-site. Popular headless CMS options include Hygraph, Contentful, and Contentstack.

What are common features of a headless CMS?

All headless CMS should first and foremost be API-driven and provide a robust Content API. These can either be RESTful or GraphQL H=headless CMS. They also commonly provide a GUI (Editor interface), act as a Content Hub, provide Content Versioning, Content Taxonomies, and User Permissions.

More advanced headless CMS would provide Digital Asset Management, Content-based Permissions, Webhooks & Integrations, and an SDK to manage content programmatically.

What are the benefits of a headless CMS?

Headless CMS often allow for multi-platform and omnichannel content delivery since they aren’t tightly coupled to the presentation layer or frontend. Headless CMS also give flexibility to developers to use their preferred frontend frameworks and backends, without “locking them in” to a predefined tech stack.

Who uses headless CMS?

Headless CMS are first and foremost used by developers, who define the content model and structure the content to be queried based on their use cases. Since headless CMS removes the static frontend delivery of a WCMS, presentation layers must be built before content can be delivered.

Once the structure is set, marketers and content editors begin to work with the CMS. While developers and programmers will likely spend the most time within a headless CMS, marketers, content creators, and content editors still leverage some features within one. In particular, written content and assets still need to be added to the CMS’s content repository.

What are the key features to look for in headless CMS options?

Once you have defined the needs around assets and content for your organization, it’s important to start shortlisting the requirements needed for a CMS. Several teams require extensibility, which headless CMS can easily accomplish. In the case of Hygraph, there are several native integrations, and for services that don’t have a native integration, one can easily be built by leveraging the granular webhooks features.

What are some challenges to consider when choosing headless CMS?

It can be quite tricky to make the transition to a headless CMS when coming from a pure Web-CMS background. Headless CMS doesn’t offer the traditional WYSIWYG feeling to content creation since they aren’t solely intended for managing websites and decouple the presentation layer from the back-end. Another big concern is usually SEO since headless CMS doesn’t offer the plug-and-play comfort of options like WordPress with Yoast. SEO has to be treated as “data”, and the technical foundation of the digital platform is at the hands of the development team.

What are the best headless CMS options for businesses?

Top headless CMS options for businesses include Hygraph, Contentful, Strapi, Storyblok, and Prismic. Each platform offers unique strengths, such as flexibility, scalability, and integration options. Hygraph stands out for its powerful content modeling capabilities, while others like Strapi and Storyblok cater to specific needs like open-source solutions. To explore the best CMS for your business, check out our detailed guide on the 5 best headless CMS options.