What is a Headless CMS?

Major publishers and brands in news, sports, media, and entertainment are opting to use headless CMS technology to power their products. But what is a headless CMS?

by Dzenita Vejsilovic

Published: 15:25, 02 August 2024

Last updated: 18:15, 21 February 2025

You will have heard the term "Headless CMS" becoming much more common in digital projects of all sizes, applied to news CMS, publishing CMS, sports CMS, as well as others, as developers and business owners look to accelerate their ability to create and launch new products and cut the costs and overheads of managing back-end systems.

But - whisper it - what is a headless CMS?

Glide CMS is a headless CMS, so we're in a good spot to tell you what they are, how they work, why they are becoming the default CMS technology in modern publishing and audience projects and what they have superseded on the way to being here.

In short, "headless" means that the content management system where the content is created and stored is separated from the website or app or anywhere the content is displayed or sent to. Those 'front-end' systems or destinations can be architected, managed, and hosted completely separately from wherever the CMS is, and the connection between the two systems is by APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

This fundamental separation means two of the main parts in a business's technology estate - where content is stored, and where it is shown - can be worked on and scaled independently, which allows for greater flexibility and freedom to do what's best for the end user or subscriber, and allows content to be deployed across an increasing number of digital channels and devices more easily. 

The evolution of publishing CMS: from traditional to Headless

To understand the advantages of a Headless CMS, for publishing/media or other use cases, we need to revisit the traditional CMS model that headless has largely made obsolete.

Traditional monolithic or "coupled" CMS like WordPress, Drupal, and Sitecore, were essentially designed to store and present content, images, and videos for website pages, keeping it all with the website admin and the front-end in one convenient place. For users, and those managing the stack, it was conceptually very easy to think of and when there was really only one channel in two - a website - it made sense.

For early website owners and creators, there was not much drawback in the website, site admin, and CMS being more or less one and the same, a sort of 1:1 relationship between where the content was seen and the systems behind it - in fact it was a benefit - combining a 'back-end' content entry system with website code (HTML and CSS).

While this method did solve specific problems in specific places, over time as new digital channels appeared and flexibility of content became much more important, coupled CMS and their 1:1 design made it difficult to reuse content across different channels. It was common for emerging channels like apps to have their own CMS, and for content to be manually duplicated across systems - costly, time-consuming, and restrictive. 

The fundamental difference was that older coupled CMS were building individual web pages, instead of being a modular content store created with easy repurposing in mind.

As digital channels evolved and audience demands grew, the need for more flexible content solutions became very apparent. Traditional CMS, which were structured around webpage-oriented frameworks, struggled to adapt to new digital platforms such as mobile apps, digital displays, and conversational interfaces, which all rocketed the requirement for new launches, product development, content modification, and the development of the many CMSes behind them all.

It was the combination of these many limitations which paved the way for the development of Headless CMS solutions, which offered a more versatile approach to content management.

Compared: Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS

How does a Headless CMS work?

In a Headless CMS, content is delivered to any chosen front-end and other channels via the aforementioned APIs, allowing the necessary variations in display across differing sites, apps, and devices from a single piece of content. 

This API-driven approach maximises content reusability and flexibility, and essentially eliminates the need to duplicate content into multiple CMS for different uses. From a business and product development perspective it dramatically opens up omnichannel customer experiences both today and in the future. Unlike traditional monolithic CMSes, which tie the frontend to the backend, a Headless CMS provides unparalleled freedom in how content can be displayed and managed.

Headless CMS vs. Decoupled CMS

The term "decoupled CMS" is often mentioned alongside Headless CMS. While both separate the back-end from the front-end, a decoupled CMS includes an optional presentation layer within its offering, whereas a Headless CMS does not. 

In practical terms this means that developers get to choose their preferred tools for displaying content on sites, such as React, Vue.js, or use other static site generators like Glide's partner Vercel, and the CMS developer may have a much closer understanding of the front-end technology being used by customers than a pure headless vendor.

Benefits of a Headless CMS

Implementing a Headless CMS offers numerous advantages.

1. A unified Content Hub: A Headless CMS centralises content and its management, making it reusable and eliminating manual processes like copy-pasting and multiple rewriting for alternative channels and devices. This centralisation allows for the "Create Once, Publish Everywhere" (COPE) principle, enhancing content consistency and efficiency. All channels reference the same original piece of content, but rules-per-channel handle the changes needed to suit different consumption experiences, e.g. shorter headlines for mobile, premium content gating for subscribers, localisations to suit different markets, and so on.

2. Collaborative Workflows: By decoupling the front-end from the back-end, a Headless CMS enables parallel workflows, allowing content editors to update content independently of developers working on applications. This separation improves time-to-market and optimises resources.

3. Scalability and Reusability: A Headless CMS enhances content scalability and reusability across different channels and devices. It improves the ability to personalise or localise content so that the right things reaches the right audience at the right time.

Why Choose a Headless CMS for News and Publishing Platforms

For news CMS and publishing platforms, a Headless CMS offers some fantastic benefits.

1. Real-Time Content Updates: News products and publishers can demand real-time content updates by the second, which are facilitated by the continuous deployment capabilities of a Headless CMS. For breaking news, sports events, intensive topic coverage, or content tailored to dynamic markets, this is a vital capability.

2. Multichannel Publishing: A Headless CMS easily supports publishing content across various channels, from websites to mobile apps and beyond, ensuring a consistent user experience. Paired with the ability to model the original content in different ways for different channels, it means for example being easily able to send the "same" origin article to a site or newsletter or app, but with different experiences for the separate readers - all without having to duplicate or edit and republish the content multiple times to suit the channel changes.

3. Enhanced SEO: A Headless CMS improves SEO by giving better and finer control over how content is displayed and indexed by search engines. This optimisation enhances the platform's visibility and reach.

Best practices for implementing a Headless CMS

Adopting a Headless CMS should lean on some best practices and new ways of working to ensure it goes smoothly and you get the best from the decision.

1. Advance your use of Structured Content: Unstructured content is much as it sounds - a free(ish)-form mix of words, data, and elements such as images which are presented quite linearly by the CMS to the front-end. When this is majority text, this isn't horrendously limiting. However when the data includes more useful and referenceable elements like tables, rankings, specifications, charts, polls, and other such rankable and sortable data, it needs a better way to be managed than just being sent as part of a text flow. Structured content is organised into reusable building blocks classified with metadata, an upgrade in organisation which makes content easy to repurpose across different platforms and channels.

2. Content Modelling: Establish a set of content models to define and organise the content you create and use. This step will give you a set of must-haves and ever-present elements in every piece of content you create, allowing you to plan better for its use down the line and to build metadata around (vital for SEO), and which can be ported to many more channels than a simple chunk of text.

3. Collaborative not competing workflows: Separating the front-end and back-end technologies allows content editors and product/developer teams to work in parallel. This separation enhances efficiency, enabling faster content updates and independent strategic development without one team being blocked by the other.

Glide Publishing Platform: The best Headless CMS for Publishing and Sport organisations

Glide CMS is a pioneer in the Headless CMS landscape, offering an API-first, composable content platform designed to serve audiences and content in any channel or device. It integrates seamlessly with various in-house or external data sources and technologies, and provides you with robust orchestration and integration capabilities. 

Glide Publishing Platform employs MACH architecture (Microservices, APIs, Cloud, Headless), meaning it easily combines and works with new and different data sources and functionalities as digital experiences and technologies evolve. With built-in orchestration and industry leading integrations, Glide CMS frees up teams to work together to do great things for their audiences faster and more effectively.

The Glide CMS GraphQL API and RESTful APIs allow developers to programmatically manage and orchestrate content within the platform itself. This includes easy creation of new project spaces, assigning user roles, managing webhooks, content import/export, and content modelling, which is scriptable from any source. In fact, Glide Connect, our RESTful+ API offers a set of capabilities uniquely suited for the best practice publishing needs, further simplifying the interaction with our Connect API, and providing the best of both worlds.

Given that Glide is an API-first platform, it is completely extensible to fit your unique needs. Ability to build on top of the Glide platform powers this extensibility, letting you create apps that execute against multiple platforms and systems against your business needs.

Essentially, the Glide Publishing Platform brings the building blocks of content together to create once and reuse everywhere in any digital experience. Being API-first enables teams to build for customers and their internal teams - whether it’s to make a process easier, adapt to a changing need, or deliver a better customer experience.

Content is more than words on a webpage – it’s every part of every digital experience and removing silos and bottlenecks is essential to make content the strategic business asset it should be. Having every piece of content you’ve ever created immediately at your disposal means you have what you need to compose for any use case, helping you scale quickly and deliver faster.