Benefits of Decoupled Content
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This move to decoupled content providers can seem daunting — it’s a total paradigm shift, after all. But there are several benefits to making the switch, some of which you’ve already come across in previous chapters.
A headless CMS decouples the content from how it is displayed, enabling content distribution across various platforms (such as websites, mobile applications, IoT devices, and more) without needing any (or very few) further adjustments or transformations. This enables an omnichannel strategy, ensuring a uniform experience across all touch points.
One of the biggest (developer) complaints about WordPress isn’t all the stuff we should care about, like security and scalability, but that if we want to customize WordPress, we have to write PHP. So even though it may be a great solution for editors, many developers don’t want to work with it. (The same can be said for any language.)
Because content sources are decoupled from your other services and your frontend code, you can choose the tools and languages that best serve each unique situation.
A headless CMS is typically built on a microservices architecture, which can be more scalable than a traditional monolithic CMS. Individual services can be scaled independently as needed, which can improve performance and cost efficiency.
And because this scalability is delegated to the provider, it’s something you’ll have to validate upfront, but not something that requires ongoing management.
Being decoupled really helps when it comes to adjusting new technology over time. You could work toward a whole new frontend, even changing to a different programming language or framework, and you could do so without doing anything differently with the CMS.
If another team needs to use content from the CMS, it's trivial. Give the read-only access, and the content becomes immediately available via an API, and there’s likely a TypeScript-ready SDK available for working with that API.