Headless is not platform but an approach to building your website. A headless set up involves separating the front end of the website (what the user sees) and the back end of the website (where the administration and content creation happens) into self contained independent pieces.
Headless works by having all of the content stored in a back end solution and the user facing website gets that content through the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). There are a lot of ‘headless’ back end solutions you can choose from including:
- Sanity
- Strapi
- Contentful
- Even WordPress
The front end can be created in a totally different technology since outside of grabbing the content, there is no dependency on the back end.
Pros:
- Content creation can happen in one spot and get syndicated out to many different websites, apps etc.
- Separating the front end and back end makes it harder for people to find the back end, improving security
- Quite scalable, a typical headless front end will already have the website ‘generated’ ahead of time rather than when a user visits. So the website uses less resources to send the content to the user.
Cons:
- The most technically challenging option. You will need at least one developer (more likely at least two) to implement this as there is a lot of custom work needed. The front end is typically built from scratch and needs to integrate with the back end solution.
- Based on employee costs alone, this is also the most expensive option, especially when starting out. Cost savings tend to come as the website scales.
As you can see, the big con of Headless is cost and complexity. I wouldn’t recommend it unless your organisation already has a web development team in place to implement and support it. However, if you have the resources then the sky is the limit doing things this way and you can be sure your site is set to scale in the future.