Uniform blog/Uniform remarkably complements headless CMS
adam conn
Adam Conn
Posted on Aug 11, 2022

5 min read

Uniform remarkably complements headless CMS

Pinning your hopes on a headless content management system (CMS)? If so, you’re not alone. Nonetheless, despite the many benefits of headless, do be aware of its limitations and familiarize yourself with the tools that address them.

Headless CMS explained

What is a CMS? A traditional CMS contains components, such as a headline, images, and text, with which you can consistently and easily build a product, typically a webpage. However, because the components are usually earmarked for a single purpose, instead of reusing some or all of them to develop, say, an app, you must start from scratch by storing a second copy of the same headline, images, and text that are already in your CMS. That’s a tedious, redundant, inefficient, and costly process.
In comparison, a headless CMS is much more flexible:
  • A traditional CMS stores both the content and its intended presentation together, combining them to produce one and only one output. 
  • The “head” that’s missing in a headless CMS is the output. Rather than being locked into a presentation layer, a headless CMS stores content with no regard of its eventual presentation.

Benefits of going headless

What are the benefits of a headless CMS? In 2021, the market for headless CMS totaled $490.0 million and, impressively, to expand by 3X, reaching USD 1500.0 million by 2027. In addition to making content creators and developers happy by offering flexibility that meets today’s growing multichannel demand, headless CMSes are—
  • Creators can focus on content. Separating content from presentation simplifies life for content creators, who no longer have to worry about the format, layout, or other aspects of page architecture. Instead, those creators can focus on what they’re good at: content.
  • Versatile for modern front-end development. Developers are free to use the languages and tools they prefer without being constrained by the technology and approach dictated by the CMS.
  • Channel agnostic. You can present the same content in various formats with a headless architecture, allowing teams to meet the rising demands for multiple forms of display without replicating content across multiple systems .

Problems of going headless

Nonetheless, headless CMSes come with two major drawbacks: 
  • Business teams are forced to relinquish control to developers. The fact that headless CMSes have nothing to do with presentation shifts the burden of responsibility to developers, depriving business teams of control. That phenomenon has proved to be a huge adoption blocker for headless systems.
  • Personalization becomes problematic. Although a must-have for many sites, personalization being neither content nor layout has no real home in headless architectures. However, since those tools cannot access the content in the CMS, personalization winds up disconnected from content, which defeats personalization’s primary purpose of delivering the most relevant content to visitors.

Headless integration

Gratifyingly, headless integration saves the day: You select the headless CMS along with the front-end technology you want, and then integrate them through composable orchestration. Three major benefits result:
  • Business autonomy is restored. With composable orchestration, business teams can readily compose and customize pages and templates without developer help—an independence that results in significant time savings.
  • Multisource composition becomes an option. Nowadays, even though companies frequently draw content from multiple systems, integrating those systems can be a logistical nightmare. By adopting composable orchestration, you can use a single composition tool to build digital experiences that contain content from multiple sources, such as a commerce platform, DAM or another CMS without custom integration.
  • Personalization returns as a familiar workflow. Instead of having developers programmatically add personalization and relinquish control, business teams can personalize webpages as they used to through composable orchestration.

The best of both worlds

Adding your CMS to Uniform results in a headless CMS that yields flexibility and speed in addition to the traditional CMS benefits. Several advantages come to mind:
  • Developer choice. Since Uniform imposes no requirements or restrictions on front-end development, developers gain time for their job of building fast and effective components.
  • Accelerated time to market. By connecting services with Uniform’s prebuilt integrations, developers can save weeks or even months of integration work while still delivering a great user experience. That approach also makes it much simpler to expand or adapt a stack to meet changing customer or organizational needs.
  • Presentation control. Uniform Canvas integrates content to the front-end framework, giving business teams much more control over how to present information from a single content type in the headless CMS. That way, content becomes reusable across channels with no need to add presentation information in the CMS.
  • Faster performance. Unlike sluggish origin-based personalization, Uniform’s edge-side personalization runs superfast on your CDN. You’re free to choose the technology you want while counting on the CDN for superior performance and scalability that server-side personalization can never measure up to.
  • MACH membership and Jamstack compatibility. Uniform is a member of the MACH Alliance, which “advocates for an open and best-of-need enterprise technology ecosystem.” Also, Uniform’s offering is compatible with Jamstack, whose objective is “to make the Web faster, more secure, and easier to scale.” With no dependence on proprietary technologies or nonstandard frameworks, both MACH and Jamstack emphasize ease of integration. Tools built according to either standard fit well with Uniform.
Uniform sets up an environment in which systems work together smoothly and lets teams work independently to get their work to end users. Marketers and merchandisers get to choose content from any and control the visual presentation to create digital experiences, and developers can focus on features and components that add value rather than having to manage publication workflows.
Ultimately, Uniform enhances the best parts of headless CMS, such as speed and flexibility, while also offering many of the features they relied on for digital experiences, such as page composition and personalization. What’s more, Uniform does all that blazingly fast. Contact us to learn how Uniform can accelerate the process of creating content.
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