Our Visual Editing feature is live! 🎉 Learn more
Directus Logo
  • Use Cases and Features
    • Headless CMS
      Manage and deliver content with ease
    • Backend-as-a-Service
      Build and ship applications faster
    • Headless Commerce
      A single source of truth for products
    • 100+ More Use Cases
      Build anything (or everything)
    • Instant APIs
      Connect a database, get REST + GraphQL APIs
    • Granular Policy-Based Auth
      Provide secure, autonomous data access
    • Visual Automation Builder
      Automate content and data workflows with ease
    • 50+ More Features
      Get everything you need out-of-the-box
    Project Showcase
    Built With Directus

    Built With Directus

    See what everyone's been building with Directus

  • Learn More
    • Blog
      Read our latest articles and guides
    • Case Studies
      Case studies and success stories
    • Community
      Join our 13k member Discord community.
    • Agency Directory
      Browse our list of agency partners
    • About Us
      Learn more about Directus and the team
    • Wall of Love
      See what others are saying about us
    • Contact
      Have a general inquiry or question for us?
    • Support
      Reach out to Directus support
    Watch Directus TV
    Directus TV
    Video

    Directus TV

    Go down the rabbit hole with hours of original video content from our team.

  • Developers
  • Enterprise
  • Pricing
Chat With UsGet Started Free
GitHub logo30,643
Back
resource
Monday, April 11, 2022

What Is a Headless CMS?

From flexibility to security, explore the transformative benefits of a headless CMS and its edge over traditional systems.
What Is a Headless CMS?

There are more than 72 million websites that use a content management system (CMS). But in recent years, organizations have begun to shift away from using the monolithic systems that became popular in the early 2000s and are instead adopting headless CMS offerings. In fact, the market for headless CMS software, which was $ 328.5 million in 2019, is projected to reach over $1.6 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 22.6% from 2020 to 2027.

Why? Because today’s audiences don't just consume content on websites – they use an array of devices and channels to access content. What’s more, no one knows what the future holds. Brands must be prepared to provide high-quality omnichannel digital experiences across a growing number of form factors – from apps and kiosks, to voice assistants, VR headsets, digital signage and more.

In this post, we’ll take a look at why the traditional CMS can’t accommodate these new use cases, and explain how a headless CMS can provide a better, more efficient and secure way to manage and democratize content across devices and channels.

What You See Is All You Get?

Traditional CMS platforms such as WordPress, Wix or Drupal enable organizations to build a single digital experience, such as a website, using a WYSIWYG approach – what you see is what you get.

You drag and drop components onto a page to create your layout, then fill them in with copy and images. As a result, your copy, media, design and architecture are all one and the same. The problem with this approach is that everything powering your website – the copy, media, branding, etc. – is commingled with website code.

Plus, everything’s proprietary – you’re building the site within CMS-specific templates, and on the vendor’s tech stack, which may differ from your engineering team’s preference or the business’s requirements.

All of this creates vendor lock-in and makes it impossible to leverage the data and content for other digital experiences.

By contrast, a headless CMS decouples the back-end content management system from the front-end presentation layer — the “head.” In the case of a website, everything that’s specific to the website is removed, and you just manage channel- and platform-agnostic data and content.

By separating content creation, management and storage from its presentation, content can be accessed seamlessly through a no-code app and APIs, and displayed across an array of channels and devices without having to be migrated or modified in any way.

You benefit from a single source of truth for managing all of the content and data across the organization, and the ability to access it using APIs to power native apps, websites, digital signage, kiosks, or whatever digital experience you’re developing.

You can also pull content into the database through website forms or kiosk registrations, to enrich the existing datastore.

A headless CMS makes sense for organizations for many reasons:

Provides time and cost savings

With a headless CMS, content can be reused across multiple experiences and touchpoints, so projects can be created and completed much faster.

And because you’re not beholden to the CMS’ tech stack, you can build within yours, avoiding costly infrastructure migrations and expensive specialists.

Maximizes flexibility

A traditional CMS requires users to work within themes or predefined templates, and there’s limited flexibility when it comes to customizing the interface.

With a headless CMS, you can create your own layout and UI, and have complete flexibility in the technology you use. Because content is accessed via APIs you can leverage the latest tools and technologies to deliver content experiences across an array of platforms.

Simplifies workflows

By focusing exclusively on content management, a headless CMS simplifies the backend significantly.

A clear "separation of concerns" between the logic and data and the presentation layer enables a cleaner architecture, and you can push agnostic content to different touch-points and devices, without being limited to using HTML.

The decoupled approach eliminates many limitations of the traditional CMS, enabling you to build a digital experience in any tech stack or framework. This opens the door for less expensive and more performant static site generation (SSG).

Even if you're "just" building a website, using a headless CMS leaves the door open to other projects in the future without a full rebuild.

Improves security

Today’s corporate websites often act as portals for customers to access services or purchase products, and as a result, they’re susceptible to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – malicious attempts to disrupt traffic to a server, service or network by flooding it with traffic.

The way in which a traditional CMS dynamically renders content makes them vulnerable to an attack. A headless CMS, on the other hand, performs most of the content processing on the client side rather than on the server side, so the impact of an attack would be less severe.

Additionally, because a headless CMS interacts with the database via API, the original data stays intact and unaltered, eliminating the risk of data corruption or loss resulting from human error.

Enables multilingual capabilities

A vast majority of organizations have global audiences, which means they must be able to translate content into different languages in a cost-effective, dynamic way.

That’s not possible when using static templates. And, only 30% of organizations integrate their CMS to language service providers or translation management systems.

Modern headless CMS allow authoring multilingual content, and their API-first approach makes integrating with automated translation services possible.

Go Headless with Directus

Directus began as a Headless CMS a decade before the term “headless CMS” was coined in 2014. Directus democratizes data across organizations with an easy-to-use, intuitive platform for technical and non technical users alike.

Delivered as a cloud-based service, Directus eliminates the need to architect, provision and maintain your own infrastructure, and because there’s little to no learning curve. Using the no-code app, you can start creating highly customized digital experiences in minutes.

With Directus you get:

  • A feature-rich toolkit with frequent updates delivered seamlessly to enhance your experience.
  • Fully customizable interfaces and layouts that provide maximum flexibility and creativity in authoring content.
  • Powerful workflows enable teams to collaborate effectively throughout every phase of the content lifecycle.
  • Multi-lingual support for 46+ languages ensures consistency across geographies using an intuitive localization interfaces.
  • The ability to get up and running and start building digital experiences in literally seconds through our professional or enterprise cloud offerings.

Start a Directus Cloud project, and find out for yourself how easy it is to create amazing digital experiences with Directus.

Posted By

Directus Staff

Directus Staff

Share

LinkedIn LogoTwitter LogoReddit LogoDev.to Logo

Sign up for updates 🐇

Get insights, releases, and exciting news delivered directly to your inbox once a month. No spam - we promise. 🙂

  • Directus LogoDirectus Logo

    A composable backend to build your Headless CMS, BaaS, and more. 

  • Solutions
    • Headless CMS
    • Backend-as-a-Service
    • Product Information
    • 100+ Things to Build
  • Resources
    • Documentation
    • Guides
    • Community
    • Release Notes
  • Support
    • Issue Tracker
    • Feature Requests
    • Community Chat
    • Cloud Dashboard
  • Organization
    • About
    • Careers
    • Brand Assets
    • Contact
©2025 Monospace Inc
  • Cloud Policies
  • License
  • Terms
  • Privacy