What is a Headless CMS? And why should you care?

The Blog Industry shall prepare for the headless CMS revolution

Content Management Systems played a really important role in the internet revolution. The blogs that you use to get information are all brought to you buy CMS. Without a CMS it is very difficult to maintain blogs. But CMS are very restricted in terms of customization ability. So, what’s the solution? A Headless CMS is the solution. Headless CMS allows you to reap benefits of a CMS and at the same type build a custom frontend for your website using the technology that you deem fit for your needs.

What is Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is basically a backend content management system where the content repository or the body or backend is decoupled from the head or frontend. What this basically means that you have a separate deployment of your backend server and frontend and you can pair your backend with any frontend. You can even use the same backend to power multiple frontends. In traditional CMS the frontend was coupled with backend and therefore they were limited in terms of customization.

But with headless CMS you can have your frontend in React or NextJS and backend in WordPress. And reap the benefits of super fast powerful frontend frameworks to build website that provide far better User experience can be tailored down to your brand theme and without wasting resources on building the backend for your custom website.

Why should you care?

Back in the day when WordPress was the best option for people looking to build a website there was not much that a developer could do. Developers stayed in their lane of high level of coding. But with headless CMS you have a completely new career scope. If you know ReactJS and a little bit of Strapi you can literally find thousands of clients on upwork who are looking for just that. Upwork is filled with jobs for Node developers who could customize the backend of strapi, or build a frontend for their WordPress website, or add extra functionality to strapi API.

Enterprises hire developers to maintain Strapi+Next Applications. But, then how should you reap the benefit of this headless CMS explosion as a developer? Its’ simple just learn a CMS that goes along with your favorite frontend technology and learn how to integrate it with your favorite frontend stack and deployment. Once you do that you are future ready. But, now what CMS would you learn?

Choices we have

Now I won’t go in much detail but the best javascript CMS are strapi, keystone and ghost. WordPress can also be used as a headless CMS but there is no much scope in it in terms of code level customization so, you just need knowledge of frontend in case of wordpress. However, one thing that you need to learn is how you can self host wordpress, or ghost cms. strapi and keystone are by default self hosted so, they have documentation for that.