These may include form builders, multilingual support, galleries, sliders, SEO tools, and various prefab social media sharing tools. There are also quite a few worthwhile add-ons and plugins that either won’t work at all, or will require significant extra coding. Any online help or documentation on “how do I do this” could be limited. You will be doing something very custom and will have less access to developers who have done this before. Referring back to cost, when you think of the entire life cycle, those initial extra development costs will also carry over to the longer-term maintenance. This is obviously adding some very fundamental complexities, and might even call for two development teams with separate specialties. While using something “out-of-the-box” is the quickest and most economical solution, decoupling is taking something apart and putting it back together again in a different way. While you aren’t fully doubling the amount of work you do, you are dealing with additional entities. Simply put, a decoupled website will cost more money to develop than a traditional website. There are also a few potential cons when dealing with a decoupled website: Initial Cost Drawbacks of using a headless website structure This leaner codebase can result in a faster site load time. Decoupled CMS structures allow your web development team to choose only what code they need (and keep the rest off of your live site). Not everybody needs the same feature set, but everybody needs some level of feature-richness. Pre-packaged themes need to provide a full-range of features to a very diverse audience. With a decoupled CMS, there’s less of a need to continually upgrade since isolating the back-end code, and not using the supplied front-end code, should provide some hardening. While this isn’t guaranteed, it certainly adds an additional security barrier. All other things being equal, a customized, a headless CMS is less likely to get hacked. Additional securityīy separating the back and front-ends, you are potentially providing an added layer of security. The back-end is critical, while the front-end gives you options. More than likely, you will be using a theme that is very much bound to the underlying CMS. You can choose to use the themes packaged with the CMS, themes from other vendors, or you can create a custom theme. Themes control the rendering of your content. Read More: Is Your WordPress Website Secure? CMSs, such as Drupal and WordPress, provide the core back-end CMS functionalities, and traditionally the front-end functionality by using what’s called “themes.” There are several potential benefits of when dealing with a decoupled website: More options with CMSīy having a decoupled website, you are less constrained by whatever CMS you are using. Benefits of using a headless website structure Now that we’ve defined what a decoupled CMS is and listed some of its capabilities, let’s look at the pros and cons of using a mainstream CMS, like WordPress, as a decoupled back-end. For example, changing a product description could simultaneously change the product description on a business-facing website, consumer-facing website, and a mobile application. In this scenario, a single content update in one back-end location could update front-end live content in multiple places. Decoupled website with two CMSs and multiple delivery destinations.Īdditionally, you could also have two backend CMSs, like WordPress and Magento, that feed out to multiple front-ends. You could even have an e-commerce back-end like Magento, and a better CMS back-end for the non-e-commerce, like WordPress, feeding one co-mingled front-end. Each entity can have separate code bases and even live on separate servers. Decoupled website with one CMSĭecoupled websites, also referred to as a “headless” CMS, break apart the front-end and back-end into separate entities.Įssentially, when we “decouple,” we are separating the back-end functionality and database from the front-end HTML content. Traditional, “uncoupled” websiteĪ traditional website has two sides: the front-end, which website visitors see, and the back-end, which your team uses to make changes and updates to the website. A decoupled website separates the administrative, “back-end” content management system (CMS) and the customer-facing website, HTML “front-end” exist as two separate entities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |