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October 16, 2023
Top-performing eCommerce brands use a headless CMS to manage their content and user experience. But what are the benefits, and what CMS is best for your eCommerce brand?
In this article, we’ll highlight:
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What Is a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS is a back-end-only content management system that allows you to create and store the content in the backend and deliver your content as data over an API to wherever you choose.
At its core, a CMS lets you create, edit and publish digital content without any code. It allows you to make changes to the page layout, add content, modify the look and feel of your webshop, and more. However, traditional CMS platforms have tightly coupled frontends and backends. You’re often limited to delivering content to just a website or mobile application with these platforms.
Using APIs, a headless CMS allows you to decouple that frontend or ‘head’ and distribute content to mobile devices, tablets, digital signs, AR and VR devices, and anywhere potential customers view content.
Why Do You Need a Headless CMS?
Many eCommerce platforms like Shopify handle everything related to commerce. They enable you to manage products and sell them to your customers. In addition to the commerce side of things, some eCommerce platforms also include a CMS. This can simplify running your business, as it’s one system to manage everything.
However, content management is not the main focus of such eCommerce platforms. Thus these solutions are often not very suitable for larger brands and can restrict what your marketing team can do with content.
To eliminate any pains and frustrations, brands can opt for headless commerce. When you have adopted a headless architecture, you no longer need to use the CMS that comes with your eCommerce platform. Instead, you can couple a headless CMS that covers all your needs. This way, you can manage your content with a headless CMS, and the eCommerce platform only does what it’s supposed to do, organize the commerce side of your business.
For more information on headless commerce, make sure to check out the following resources:
What Are the Benefits of Using a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS coupled with an eCommerce platform is one of the most powerful combinations. With this setup, you use two systems built for a specific purpose: one to manage and distribute your content and one to handle everything related to selling products. It’s a setup with many advantages over working with the all-in-one solution provided by eCommerce platforms, also referred to as monolithic solutions. Here are some of the benefits you can achieve with this approach:
Omnichannel user experience
There is a 287% increased chance of purchase if the product is available on 3 or more channels. Companies with proper omnichannel strategies retain 89% of their customers (compared to the companies without, who only manage to keep 33% of their customers).
When it comes to omnichannel presence, a headless CMS enables you to manage your content in one central hub and display it on any platform you like because of its decoupled nature. More importantly, since the backend and frontend operate independently, the layout and the customer journeys (frontend) can be completely unique and tailored for each platform or device.
Speed to market
When it comes to updating content or adding features in a monolithic commerce solution, every change requires the necessary changes in the backend. This requires more work and makes it more challenging to respond to market changes and run time-sensitive marketing campaigns. With a headless CMS, the front-end code is disconnected from the backend, so no matter how extensive the modifications are, they do not influence the entire system.
Fast and SEO friendly experience
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps ensure your products can be found when a potential customer is looking for them. According to Google, 40% of users exit a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. It’s no surprise that Google announced a website’s response and loading time to be one of the most critical criteria in SEO.
Since eCommerce brands deal with many products, they also have a vast library of content, including images, videos, and more. At some point, this will have a significant impact on your site speed. With a headless CMS, you can ensure a fast shopping experience no matter how extensive your content library is.
Many headless CMS solutions can offer image optimization tools to decrease loading times. In addition, a headless CMS solves one of the most frustrating issues when it comes to Shopify, the fixed URL structure. Luckily a headless CMS allows you to customize your URL structure just the way you want, which can positively affect your SEO efforts.