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Willian Corrêa
Willian Corrêa

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Headless CMS: 6 best practices to boost value generation, reduce risks and accelerate time-to-market

To the point:

1. To avoid vendor lock-in, use a composable architecture with proper layers to isolate the core business. It will reduce common SaaS vendor risks, allow scalability, and better cost control in the mid & long term.

2. For small sites, static site generators (SSG) combined with deployments using content delivery networks (CDN) will provide the best performance and time-to-market strategy. For larger sites and eCommerce, the strategy is likely to require a solution based on cache and server-side rendering (SSR); which can be further improved with edge computing.

3. Mobile apps must use a local-cache-first strategy for content. For high-risk content, a time-to-live approach can be adopted to enforce compliance. I have seen many projects trying other approaches and failing to keep time-to-market at a competitive pace, to the point re-engineering was put back in the backlog.

4. In general, a separate vendor for media management is recommended. The SaaS offering is vast and offers specialization capabilities that will help teams to optimize performance and compliance. They also offer out-of-box integrations with the main headless CMS solutions.

5. eCommerce with a simple catalog or with a small set of SKUs can be implemented using the headless CMS solution. However, keep in mind that specialized headless e-commerce platforms provide built-in solutions for payments and shipping. Other capabilities like subscriptions, bookings, or digital assets will require a deeper evaluation of the strategy.

6. Adopt infra-as-code and content-model-as-code; it will prevent common bugs, enable continuous delivery and accelerate time-to-market.

I'm curious to learn from you. What are the challenges preventing your organization to adopt a headless CMS solution?

Top comments (1)

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Jan Küster

Is there a good resource on the first section? I'd like to see some examples of how to isolate the core business from vendor lockin. Is that even possible without any other drawbacks like technical dept or big overhead?