Making the best possible choice of content management system (CMS) is crucial for the success of your website. But, these days, not only do you have to navigate the many different options – from WordPress to Sitecore to Webflow – you also have the added challenge of deciding whether to go “headless” or not. 

Whether to take the less conventional headless approach with your CMS is a decision that could cause some confusion. It could even cause some challenges with your website if you end up making the wrong choice.

In this article, we’ll help you understand exactly what a headless CMS is, when you may need to take that approach, and highlight some key considerations to make before finalising your choice. 

What is a Headless CMS?

With a traditional CMS, the back-end and the front-end of the system are directly linked. This is how you use your CMS for both the content management (back-end) and to control how the content is presented to your website visitors (front-end). 

In this context, the back-end of the CMS is sometimes referred to as the “body” and the “head” is the front-end. In a headless CMS, that front-end is decoupled from the back-end of the system, hence the term headless. With this approach, you use the back-end as normal for content management and the presentation of content in the front-end is handled completely separately. 

This is valuable because it allows you to design your website front-end however you like, without any restrictions. However, it also requires more technical work from your development agency as a trade-off. 

With a headless CMS, your content is presented to your audience on your live website by using APIs that take it from the back-end of the CMS. This use of APIs also allows you to publish the same content in a variety of different formats via different channels as well, but more on that later. 

Scenarios in Which You Might Need a Headless CMS

It’s important to understand that you should only take a headless approach if it’s the most suitable way to meet a specific set of requirements or objectives.

Some scenarios in which you might need to take a closer look at adopting a headless CMS include: 

If a large volume of content is a key component of your marketing strategy. 

If you’re going to be producing and publishing a lot of content on your website, you may benefit from a headless CMS. Many people find it easier and more intuitive managing websites in the back-end of a headless CMS.

The decoupling of the front-end also means that your development agency will be the ones responsible for ensuring your audience is presented with dynamic, engaging content. 

If you expect to have high volumes of traffic and need to maintain performance. 

If the size of your website’s audience will put a heavy demand on your CMS’s performance, a headless system could be a worthwhile investment. Using APIs, and leveraging other intelligent techniques, the headless approach often delivers faster loading times, reduces the workload on your servers, and offers greater scalability.

If you have a multi-channel marketing strategy, or need to publish content across multiple digital touch-points. 

The headless approach allows you to take one piece of content, upload it into the back-end, and seamlessly publish it across several channels, including website, mobile app, social media, email, and even internet-of-things (IoT) devices.

This can help you maximise consistency, while providing your users in each channel an experience optimised for their preferred context.

If you’re prioritising personalisation. 

As personalisation is becoming much more important in modern marketing, headless CMSs are becoming more popular in enabling those tactics. 

If you need to create personalised experiences for your website visitors based on their demographic data, past behaviour, preferences, and so on, a headless CMS may be the right option. This is a useful approach for delivering tailored content to individual visitors, improving your engagement and increasing conversions.

If you have a multi-lingual or multi-regional website. 

Delivering the same content to visitors in different languages, across different locations, can also be made easier by using a headless CMS. Your localisation process can be streamlined by managing the content for all users just once in the back-end, then delivering it seamlessly in its different forms based on location or other conditions. 

Key Considerations and Potential Pitfalls

While a headless CMS can be a great choice to deliver on the requirements discussed here, it’s still not a straightforward decision in these scenarios. 

Firstly, it’s important to note that a traditional CMS like WordPress can still help you achieve all the things listed above, especially with the support of an experienced, talented agency. Secondly, there are some downsides to the headless approach that need to be considered while you’re evaluating your options.

Security

Security is an issue that needs careful consideration when looking into the headless approach. The headless architecture, and use of APIs, create more security vulnerabilities than you’d have with a traditional CMS.

It’s also common for a headless CMS to require more hands-on management in key areas such as hosting and compliance, as well as more thorough and frequent testing. 

Development Complexity

When you ask your development agency to build, manage, and maintain your website using a headless CMS, you’re asking them for more complex work than they’d be facing with a traditional system. This complexity is something you need to be aware of, both in your selection of an agency capable of delivering your requirements, and in the additional workload you’re asking them to complete for you. 

Time-to-Market 

Following on from the previous point, more complex development work often results in a longer time-to-market for your website. 

Developing a website using a headless CMS may require more time and resources from your agency to deliver the work for you. If you need to get your site up and running quickly, or if you may require future development work to be delivered quickly, a regular CMS may be a safer bet. 

Technical Skills 

Publishing content with a headless CMS may be easy, but if something goes wrong, or you need something changed, you’re unlikely to be able to do it yourself. A headless CMS requires more technical skills and development experience to maintain than a traditional CMS, even for small tasks. If you don’t have these skills in your team, you’ll be more reliant on your agency partner than you would be with a normal CMS.

Total Cost of Ownership 

All the points listed here will add up to a higher total cost of ownership (TCO). When accounting for the higher volume and greater complexity of work you’ll require from your agency, you’re likely to spend a lot more of your budget on a headless CMS. 

Unless you have specific complex requirements that demand the use of a headless CMS, it’s usually the more cost-efficient option to go with the more traditional approach.

Content Strategy

With all that said, it’s also important to consider whether a headless CMS is even necessary based on your content strategy. 

Unless you have an intricate, wide-ranging content strategy that spans various channels and platforms, it might not be worth adopting a headless CMS at all. 

Most of the requirements you have can likely be delivered by working with a reliable agency partner using a sophisticated, flexible CMS like WordPress. 

It’s also important to note that WordPress can be used in a headless context as well. This offers you a balance between a familiar, easy-to-use system and a more dynamic UX for your visitors in the front-end.

The Benefits of a Headless CMS 

If you do decide to take a headless approach, your CMS can deliver a wealth of benefits and strategic advantages. These include: 

Scalability

The headless architecture will enable you to build out your digital presence rapidly, on a large scale, across multiple channels. This scalability will be crucial for your website as your business grows and your requirements evolve. 

Customisation

Both the back-end of your headless CMS and the front-end presentation of your content are entirely customisable, tailored to your specific requirements. 

Flexibility

Headless CMSs provide a great deal of flexibility in terms of your selection of technology, content creation, and implementation of a multi-channel market strategy. 

Ease-of-Use

If you work with a skilled agency partner who can set up and manage your system for you, publishing and editing content with a headless CMS becomes quick, easy, and efficient. 

User Experience 

Delivering your content seamlessly – and consistently – across a wide range of channels and digital touch-points creates a far greater UX for your target audience. 

Performance

The headless architecture removes the need to render pages on your server. This creates the faster loading times and improved performance discussed previously, which also contributes to a better experience for your visitors. 

Competitive Differentiation

As mentioned earlier, the headless approach allows you to create a truly unique UX. In an increasingly crowded, noisy online landscape, this can help you differentiate your website and stand above your competitors. 

Future-Proofing

A headless CMS allows you to easily change or upgrade the technology you use for your front-end without having any impact on your back-end. This will help you become more agile and adapt quickly as new technology trends emerge in future. 

Making the Right Decision for Your Unique Requirements 

Ultimately, you should base your decision here on the specific requirements you have for your website and the circumstances you find yourself in. 

While a headless CMS does offer a range of innovative capabilities, the additional costs and resources you’ll need to invest may not be worthwhile. For example, the traditional use of WordPress can provide you with most of the benefits discussed earlier.

Carefully consider your objectives, your strategy, and the resources you have available. Use those to weigh up all the pros and cons listed in this article in relation to your own website project.  

The key thing is to clearly understand exactly what you need from your CMS, and use that to select the option that aligns best with your requirements.

As part of our web design series, we recently explained the process we follow when designing the UX of a website. If you’ve not read that already, it will be useful to go and have a look first before reading this article.

A study by Forrester Research has found that a well-designed UI has the potential to increase your website’s conversion rates by up to a 200% while UX design could raise conversion rates by a staggering 400%. 

Whether you’re working with a web design and development agency or an independent designer, this process is equally important. Nailing the UI design process is a crucial step towards producing a website that will maximise engagement with your target audience and help you achieve your business goals. 

So, let’s take a detailed look at how to run a successful UI design process.

User Interface (UI) Design at a Glance

The UI design process is the creation of the visual design elements of your website. Think about UI as the way in which you convey your brand’s visual identity and bring your UX to life. The UI is there to facilitate the UX.

How Does the UI Design Process Work? 

As mentioned in our related article, UI design is typically the fourth phase of the end-to-end process of web design.

Earlier in the process, we recommend conducting a visual exploration exercise, using mood boards to gain a clear understanding of how your brand will be conveyed and how your website will look and feel.

That visual exploration phase of the project is a pre-cursor to your UI design, as it creates the visual identity of the website, including use of colour, font, blank space, buttons, and more. Some agencies do this as part of the UI phase, but here at SoBold we like to keep it as its own stand-alone phase. You can learn all about the visual exploration phase and how it works here. 

After you’ve been through the UX design process, you’ll have approved a set of wireframes, which give you a blueprint of your website’s structure and flow before anything is built properly.

Once you’ve approved those wireframes, then the visual design created with the mood boards will be applied to bring them to life. This is essentially how you create your UI.

Your agency will typically begin with the design of your website’s homepage. Like each phase previously, you can expect this UI design process to be collaborative. Be prepared to have all the stakeholders available to provide feedback to your agency, and work with them to perfect the design when it’s combined with the wireframes.

Once the homepage is approved, your design will then be applied across all the pages of your site. Again, this is an iterative, collaborative process based on feedback and revisions.

Responsive Design Testing 

On completion of the desktop designs, your agency partner will work on designing the site across multiple break-points. To ensure your site is responsive across all the most popular devices, the following break-points should be tested as a minimum:

• 1,920px – This covers most external computer monitor sizes
• 1,366px – This covers most laptop screen sizes
• 992px – This covers most Notebook and iPad devices
• 768px – This covers most other tablet devices
• 375px – This covers most smartphones.

You’ll then reach the exciting part, where your website is fully designed for you to view, test, and play around with. Once you’re happy with the design across the different break-points, your agency partner will be ready to prepare the design for a development handover. 

What Does Effective UI Design Involve? 

Good UI design is something that should feel seamless and almost invisible to your visitors when they land on your website. The aesthetics and visual style should be simple and engaging, while not distracting from the UX. 

These days, you only have a matter of seconds to make a positive impression that can retain your visitors’ attention, so it’s crucial you don’t over-complicate things. But what differentiates good UI from bad UI in practical terms? 

Like with UX design, there are some best practices you can follow to ensure your website has an effective, attractive UI. 

Follow these guidelines to create a UI that delivers the desired experience for your visitors and supports your website’s strategic objectives: 

• Keep your design simple and your content succinct
• Prioritise the preferences and best interests of your target audience
• Make your design elements as clear as possible 
• Maintain consistency
• Ensure your brand, and your company’s identity, have been accurately represented through the design
• Use power of visual imagery to capture and retain your visitors’ attention 
• Make your call-to-action as strong and compelling as possible
• Don’t create anything that interferes with the goals of your UX.

Check out our related article for seven helpful tips to ensure your website is designed with great usability here for additional guidance. 

The Importance of Accessibility 

Accessibility is the practice of making technology as easy to use as possible, and fully accessible to everyone. While web accessibility is largely intended to help people with disabilities gain better usage of technology, it’s also much broader than that. 

There are people who have difficulty using certain types of, or aspects of, technology who don’t have a disability. For instance, someone with deteriorating eyesight may find it difficult to read small text on a smartphone screen.

It’s also important to ensure your website is as easy to use as possible for the average person as well, because you should always strive to deliver the best possible UX for all your visitors. Accessibility is a key driver of this.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are used to define what constitutes good accessibility, lists four key principles of web accessibility that should be followed by all websites. 

This means your website must be:

1. Perceivable
2. Operable
3. Understandable
4. Robust.

Web accessibility is an important topic, so we’ll talk more about that in a separate article. For now, it’s worth noting that any web design and development agency you work with should consider accessibility a top priority when designing the UI of your website. If they don’t, you should challenge them and ask why not.

Here at SoBold, this is built-in to all our design processes. We believe that all technology should be inclusive and equally available to everyone, regardless of their physical ability, location, personal background, or any other factors. 

Some design best practices that we’d recommend you always follow to ensure your website is fully accessible, from a UI design perspective, include: 

• Use contrast and blank space to make your content easy to perceive
• Use bold colours 
• Use font sizes no smaller than 14px for desktop and 13px for mobile across the whole site (although, this does depend on the font you use)
• Use headings and structure correctly to organise content clearly on each page
• Make all your content easy to both see and hear
• Write all your copy in plain, simple language
• Avoid any flashing or blinking imagery or video content 
• Write simple, clear, and helpful error messages.

Preparing Your Website for Development 

As you can see, UI design is mainly a case of applying the visual design that was created with the mood boards to your UX wireframes with the agreed flow. Good UI is no more than a clean, simple design that accurately represents your brand identity. While it sounds straightforward, it’s important to remember this is just one phase in the holistic, end-to-end process of web design. 

To conclude the design process after the UI is complete, your agency will prepare your site’s designs for development. To learn how this process works, understand what to expect, and ensure your own web development process runs smoothly, read our next article in the series here.

Back in early October, SoBold made our debut visit to Brighton SEO. Since then, we’ve been busy putting the invaluable lessons from the event’s talented speakers into action, all while navigating Google’s November and December Core Updates. Now the dust has (hopefully) settled on the update-front, and the with next iteration of Brighton SEO still a few months away, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on our key takeaways and their impact on our approach.

A functional relationship with your development team is critical for SEO success

During Brighton SEO, a recurring theme across different talks was the challenges SEOs face when working with development teams, particularly those that operate in silos. Whether in-house or outsourced to separate agencies, a lack of communication, deprioritised SEO tickets, and limited understanding of SEO best practices often lead to delays, errors, and missed opportunities. Many speakers and attendees expressed frustration at the need for excessive hand-holding to ensure even basic tasks were actioned correctly.

At SoBold, we avoid these risks with a collaborative effort between our development and SEO teams. As a WordPress-first agency, our integrated approach ensures SEO tickets are prioritised appropriately, and implemented to the highest standard. By removing barriers between teams, we’re more efficient and deliver results that drive SEO success.

Don’t discount the basics

It sounds very simple, but one of the biggest takeaways from Brighton SEO was how critical the fundamentals remain to SEO success. Numerous case studies and real-world examples shared by speakers reinforced that many websites fail to rank well simply because they lack a strong foundation. While advanced techniques and tools may sound exciting, the potential is often wasted on websites that haven’t addressed core issues.

Speakers emphasised that getting the basics right still yields some of the highest returns. Core Web Vitals, metadata optimisation, fixing 4xx and 3xx errors, a clear site hierarchy and URL structure, proper indexation, robots.txt configurations and ensuring basic analytics are in place all play a pivotal role. These essentials are often the difference between stagnation and significant ranking improvements. Ensure your fundamentals are sound before turning to more advanced methods and strategies.

AI can be a game-changer for audits, but nothing beats human written content

AI has been the buzzword of the industry in the past two years. Incorporating AI into everyday tasks to maximise efficiency was a key theme at Brighton SEO, specifically the use of AI to streamline time consuming tasks like audits and data analysis. 

Audits are central to developing an SEO strategy and crafting roadmaps, and leveraging different AI and machine learning strategies to research, collate, and organise relevant data was a hot topic at the conference, with lots of very knowledgeable people offering extremely useful and actionable insights into how existing workflows can be enhanced through AI. 

By leveraging AI tools and machine learning, SEOs can quickly identify technical errors, gather keyword insights and generate comprehensive reports, freeing up more time for the higher-impact strategic work. Speakers showcased actionable ways to integrate AI into workflows, potentially revolutionising the process of audits, roadmaps, and reporting.

However, there are clear limits to the use of AI. While it excels behind the scenes, it falls short when it comes to creating authentic, engaging content. Google’s guidelines, a number of algorithm updates, and leading voices within the SEO community on social media continue to emphasise that nothing beats human-written content based on real expertise and experience. The message was clear: AI can enhance efficiency, but content that resonates with users, builds trust and meets the intent of the searcher must remain in the hands of skilled human writers.

Google’s AI snippets are traffic thieves

Generative AI has been a hot topic across numerous industries since the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022, especially in SEO. Google has released numerous updates (to mixed responses) to combat the large influx of AI generated content and the ability for anyone to churn out masses of content on subjects outside their areas of expertise.

There’s no doubt the rise of AI sent internal shockwaves at Google, who had to quickly innovate to withhold a potential threat to their dominance. As a consequence, they released the Google Generative AI Snippets, which generates AI answers at the top of the search results for a range of queries, based on information it’s gleaned from the top ranking pages for said query.

While the concept may seem beneficial to users, the reality is stark for website owners and their SEOs: visibility is drastically reduced. Data presented at Brighton SEO revealed that URLs in Position 1 under these snippets suffered traffic drops of 70%. 

Many SEOs and site owners argue this practice borders on theft, as Google repurposes content with minimal credit or incentive for users to click through, and wouldn’t be able to surface any of this content without the websites creating it in the first place. This controversy isn’t going away anytime soon, and SEOs will need to strategise carefully to adapt to this new reality.

Test, test, and test again

Many of the talks were very insightful, offering new methods and solutions for a range of tasks. But each website is different, and what may have a profound impact on one website may not do the same on another. 

There are very little one size fits all in SEO, and our testing of the new methods and techniques detailed at Brighton SEO has shown just that. We can take the direct learnings from these talks and apply them literally with minimal change, but with benchmarking the initial metrics, examining the difference once recommendations are applied, and tweaking these with our own insights, we can maximise the impact. 

Whilst the wealth of talent and expertise of the speakers at Brighton SEO was at a very high standard, SEOs shouldn’t rest on the laurels and only go as far as these talks suggest, but leverage their own expertise and knowledge, pairing it with the expertise from these conferences to get the best results. Building upon some of the strategies outlined at Brighton SEO and putting our own SoBold-spin on these is already bearing fruit, and testing is at the heart of this.

Final Thoughts

From the importance of solid fundamentals to embracing AI’s potential while recognising its limitations, these takeaways are invaluable for SEOs and developers alike. By testing, adapting, and collaborating, we can turn these learnings into impactful strategies allowing us to navigate the uncertainty of Google Updates, as we look ahead to the next conference in April.

SoBold are delighted to become only the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner in the United Kingdom. 

Cookiebot consent management platform (CMP) is a leading compliance solution that detects and controls all cookies and trackers in use on a website, and automatically manages end-user consents.

SoBold have been working closely with Cookiebot since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place on 24 May 2018 providing their clients with transparency and control over the cookies used on their websites. Since partnering with Cookiebot as a reseller, SoBold have worked with clients including Transport for London and the London Transport Museum to develop bespoke implementations of the Cookiebot CMP. More information on SoBold’s work with Transport for London can be found here.

In October 2022, Cookiebot launched a tiered partner and certification program. As a leading Cookiebot reseller SoBold has been named as a Platinum Certified partner, highlighting its expertise with the Cookiebot platform and data privacy compliance in general.

By becoming a Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner, SoBold will be able to continue to offer more support to leading businesses needing bespoke Cookiebot solutions. 

Cookiebot Sales & Channel Manager, Grant MacInnes said:

Congratulations to Sam Phillips & SoBold on joining our very elite group of platinum certified resellers. Looking forward to continuing to work closely with you and the team over the coming months and years.

SoBold Technical Director, Sam Phillips said:

By becoming just the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot partner in the UK we have continued to cement our position as a leading Cookiebot reseller. Having been one of the first resellers of Cookiebot in 2018, our partnership with Cookiebot continues to go from strength to strength and we are looking forward to developing more bespoke implementations for Cookiebot’s enterprise user base as a fully certified partner.

A fresh-faced Leo joined SoBold in August 2019, with a big booming smile and speaking in broken English. It was immediately clear how driven he was to learn and pick up new skills and it was a no-brainer to offer him a job to join our development team.

For much of his first year at SoBold, Leo was glued to Google Translate to try and properly understand the tasks he had been set, but each and every time the output of his work would be the same, outstanding.

As Leo’s English picked up, as did his confidence and skill-set and he made it clear that he wanted to focus on Back-End Development and he really wanted to take SoBold forward. Leo championed innovation in our development approach and much of the workflow we do today has been driven by Leo’s desire to set the highest of standards.

He is a key figure at SoBold and we are very fortunate to have him.

We caught up with Leo to find out more about what he get’s up to in his day-to-day life!

At what point in your life did you decide to become a developer?

During middle school, I tried to learn how to make games, which led me to development. I started exploring different languages and realized I really liked learning the syntax of as many languages as I could. Eventually, I got into web development, and since then I have tried to expand my knowledge of web development languages, trying out new frameworks, and both front and back end sides.

Describe your typical day

As of now I’m trying out double gym days, which means an early wake up (5.30am), gym at 6am, and finishing at around 8am. Then I go to work, have my day, and when I finish I go home and back to the gym. When I get back home it’s circa 8.30pm, so I have dinner, watch something on Netflix (not too much otherwise I end up snacking), then go to my room, and if there’s time and I’m not too tired I play piano, otherwise I go to bed ready to do it all again. 

What’s your favourite project to date

Favourite project to date is Rede partners

Any advice for junior developers?

Never stop learning, be curious, and be always ready to challenge yourself, and question what you do. Change your way of doing things if someone else out there is doing it better.

If you had to change careers what would you do instead?

Theoretical Physicist or Volleyball coach

What was your most recent challenge and how did you overcome It?

Hit a plateau in terms of motivation, but managed to overcome it by getting less on my plate, and focusing on meaning, eventually, it became better.

What’s your favourite thing to do outside of work?

Workout, play music (piano, guitar), play video games (fav ones are Skyrim, Horizon Forbidden West and Fallout)

How do you think the designer/developer relationship could improve?

The main thing is communication and chemistry, once those are there the relationship improves by itself.