Content and platform consistency has become one of the most important requirements headless CMS users and customers expect to be met. We all look for usable, accessible, and fast websites and applications, regardless of the device in use. Achieving this while maintaining several websites requires a large budget and a huge team. This is known as the multi-site management problem. It undoubtedly comes with many challenges, but addressing them makes it easier than ever for businesses to reach more consumers and users, with little effort and low cost.
Let’s find out why a headless CMS is the perfect solution for a complex multi-site architecture.
The Multi-Site Management Problem
First, let’s have a look at what multi-site management is. You will learn what challenges need to be addressed while implementing it, as well as the benefits it can provide to your business.
What is Multi-Site Management?
Multi-site management is a strategy aimed at controlling different websites, mobile and web applications, and more from a single platform. This means that it provides a single back-end user-centric platform to manage several unique and separate applications, with the opportunity to maintain consistency and brand identity between them.
Adopting such an approach is way more efficient than managing each website or application separately, which is a well-known cumbersome task. This is why moving to a multi-site strategy can save businesses thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs. Particularly, when it comes to organizations developing microsites, as well as to international and/or multi-brand businesses. In fact, when dealing with different teams, websites, or marketing campaigns, multi-site management is a cost and time-effective solution. Not only does it allows developers to implement websites easily, but it also allows different teams to focus on regional-specific target content while offering low-cost digital asset management.
The biggest challenge lies in implementation. Developing software giving users the ability to take care of individual websites simultaneously is not easy. In addition, a consistent and usable user interface is required to avoid duplicating efforts to create content for each site. But do not be afraid, you are about to see a solution!
Benefits of Multi-Site Management
Although the benefits of multi-site management are countless, these are the 3 most important ones.
Scalability
You can easily create or delete tailored websites with just one software. It also allows you to manage and host them all simultaneously.
Control
A single platform means a centralized place where to easily monitor and track performance, network load, users interactions, and more.
Efficiency
No redundancy in the infrastructure means that creating a website from scratch does not take much time.
Headless CMS as a solution
Now, it is time to see what a headless CMS is, why it is the best solution to manage multi-site, and what other benefits come from adopting it.
What is a Headless CMS?
A headless CMS (Content Management System) is a back-end-only platform that acts primarily as a content repository. It provides a way to manage content, and make it available through APIs. This means that the front-end is totally decoupled from the back-end. It is called “headless” because it has no “head”, which means that it does not include a front-end layer at all.
The idea behind a headless CMS is that you do not want a head. This, as opposed to traditional CMSs, where the back-end and the front-end are tightly tied in a monolithic architecture. On the other hand, headless CMSs allow you to choose the front-end technologies you prefer to send your content to. So, APIs can be used to deliver any type of content, such as blog posts, products info, images, videos, descriptions, and more. Then, it is up to the front-end developers to present this information however they want.
Why Go Headless
Let's look at the top 5 reasons why you should go headless.
Business first
No more time spent in installing and setting up a traditional CMS. Avoid all these chores and start focusing on your business. Headless solutions allow you to easily deliver content and features to the end-user.
Scale up your teams easily
A decoupled architecture means that the front-end and back-end teams can work separately and simultaneously. This implies that your team can scale independently of each other.
Increase speed
Presentation logic completely lies on the client-side. This lightens the workload of the servers, consequently leading to an increase in the website’s speed.
Take advantage of all the channels
Ship your content anywhere and everywhere. Going headless means becoming omnichannel. Since the front-end is decoupled from the back-end, any device that connects to the internet is a viable channel.
Unleash creativity
Feel free to explore and create ways to deliver faster, more captivating, and more responsive user experiences. Abandon structures and forced conventions deriving from monolithic architectures.
DatoCMS: the Solution You Were Looking For
DatoCMS is a cloud-based headless CMS that provides all the benefits and features you have just seen and much more. It was designed to work with static websites, mobile apps, and server-side applications. Freelancers, companies, as well as startups, have chosen DatoCMS. Try it for free and learn more about all the features it offers here.
The headless CMS multi-site solution - Conclusion
Here we looked at why a headless CMS is a perfect solution to the multi-site management problem. First, we delved into multi-site management, understanding what it consists of and what advantages it can bring to your business. Then, we learned what headless CMSs are, what “headless” means, and why going headless could be the next step in making your business thrive. With that noted, DatoCMS is the all-in-one solution headless solution you were looking for.
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