Why A Hybrid CMS Beats Pure-Play Headless
A hybrid CMS is everything a headless CMS was supposed to be.
Organizations have turned to a headless CMS architecture because they wanted greater flexibility in bringing content to a variety of omni-channel touchpoints.
A headless CMS has been touted as a way to act with greater agility and achieve faster time-to-market. It can seem like the only alternative to hard-coding every new request that comes up.
The pressure to move the business forward quickly makes it easy to ignore the costs of decoupling your front-end presentation layer from the CMS back end. But they’re real, and they can have significant negative consequences for your team and customers alike.
A hybrid CMS is a way of avoiding those costs while keeping everything employees love about a traditional or single-stack platform.
It’s time to call out the pitfalls of a pure-play headless CMS approach and establish a hybrid CMS as the superior choice for modern enterprises.
Where pure headless falls short
The business case for a headless CMS is often predicated on freeing marketing and developer teams to work more autonomously while allowing the organization to publish content everywhere. Bringing a hybrid CMS into the discussion early on could save a lot of future headaches.
Imagine it as a case study:
The customer:
You’re working in a large organization that runs a high-traffic site and possibly dozens of local country sites. You also offer a mobile app, kiosks that customers and employees can use in physical locations. Now you’re looking at how your content could create an engaging and helpful experience via digital displays or even smart objects connected to the Internet of Things.
The challenge:
Your organization’s single-stack CMS only manages your main site. It takes custom development every time you want to add a new channel to meet customers where they are, and there are only so many developer resources available. Even when they have time to respond to CMS-related tickets, developers complain about being constrained in the front-end frameworks they can use.
Meanwhile, your marketing team is also struggling to publish duplicate content across the channels you’re already juggling. Messaging risks being inconsistent, outdated, or simply incorrect. There are also data localization rules and consent requirements to consider, but managing these in siloed systems is difficult and prone to error.
The solution:
You opt for a headless CMS because you believe it can expose your content via application programming interfaces (APIs) instead of being tightly coupled to a particular front-end. You believe this will satisfy developers by giving them the modern front-end frameworks and microservices they want.
A headless CMS also seems like the best way to please functional business groups like your marketing team, who can now enjoy the benefits of centralized content and the ability to execute campaigns quickly and with greater cohesion.
The results:
This is where the case study doesn’t deliver the usual happy ending.
For developers, the reality is that a pure-play headless CMS architecture can force them to essentially build a CMS around the CMS. This could include front ends, workflows, and integrations. This all increases cost and time-to-market, the very elements you were trying to reduce.
The marketing team isn’t impressed either. They may have gained omnichannel capabilities, but they’ve also lost much of what made their everyday tasks easy and enjoyable. No more previews, no more drag-and-drop, no more WYSIWYG. If they want any of that, they need to call upon developers again, which will put them back in the ticket queue.
On a broader level, migrating to a headless CMS is such a significant move that the organization may be left unprepared if its needs change in the future.
How hybrid CMS closes the headless gaps
Let’s rewrite the case study with a different, more practical solution: a hybrid CMS (sometimes referred to as a hybrid headless CMS).
The solution:
Instead of a pure-play headless CMS, which allows only for the delivery of content via APIs and separates the back-end content repository from the presentation layer, your organization deploys a hybrid CMS. This means the content repository acts as a central storage hub, and the back-end continues to be the place where content is created, edited, managed, and stored.
One of the key differences between a hybrid CMS and other CMS platforms is that the front end can be customized based on the specific needs of a particular channel and delivered through Node.js or other applications. API integration still allows for seamless delivery.
The results:
Omnichannel marketing may be a priority, but most organizations are also balancing several others, such as launching additional country websites within a six-month timeframe. When you deploy a hybrid CMS, you see how you can go live quickly while continuing to expand into other apps and touchpoints using APIs.
This translates into:
Increased marketing agility
Whether it’s adding more channels or running a campaign that spans multiple channels simultaneously, a hybrid CMS enables marketing teams to execute at speed without being overly reliant on developers.
Just as critical, they’re getting the advantages of a headless CMS architecture while preserving workflows and collaboration tools, in-context previews for the web, drag-and-drop layouts, and a WYSIWYG page editor. All that would have been lost in a shift to an API-only authoring experience.
Greater empowerment for front-end engineers
Packaged web rendering means the team is not going to lose nearly as many hours in custom builds and maintenance for standard sites compared to a pure-play headless CMS. They also get a lot of the same freedom in terms of new channels, modern frameworks, and the ability to leverage APIs.
SEO, performance, and governance boosts
Your marketing team might know how to get site content ranked in Google search, but what happens once you decouple your CMS? Hybrid architectures can help avoid sudden drops in referral traffic by including SEO-ready front-end capabilities. It’s another area where custom engineering isn’t always necessary.
From a performance perspective, modern hybrid architectures use API-based delivery and caching, so they can match headless performance while retaining usability.
With built-in workflows, roles, and asset management features, a hybrid CMS also simplifies compliance and brand governance compared with do-it-yourself (DIY) headless setups.
Capacity to change at the pace of business
Adopting a hybrid CMS is less of a “big bang” shift than a pure-play headless approach. You’re still using the CMS’s built-in presentation layer for your core sites, which is where the majority of your traffic, conversions, and other meaningful activity happens today. But you’re also setting the stage for an incremental, multi-year roadmap to create and enhance digital experiences when they make sense.
Don’t forget that working with decoupled front ends will take some training, and choosing hybrid gives you the capacity and time to foster the necessary skills development among your developers.
When hybrid is clearly better than headless
Choosing between headless and hybrid isn’t something you can settle with a coin toss. Instead, think about the features, cost savings, and other benefits that might get tossed aside.
If your organization isn’t ready to rewrite everything at once — and that includes most enterprises — a hybrid architecture lets you modernize steadily but gradually.
You can still run experiments quickly with a hybrid CMS. You can still increase marketing campaign velocity. You’re just not mired in bleeding-edge front-end customization on every channel as you would be in a pure-play headless CMS migration.
Teams that care about fast experimentation and campaign velocity more than bleeding-edge front-end customization on every channel.
When pure headless still makes sense
Organizations should always be in control of their own destiny, especially in the technologies they deploy. That’s why being open, along with being intelligent, is one of the core principles behind everything WordPress VIP does.
If you’re working in a very engineering-led organization building highly bespoke experiences across many devices with in-house tooling, a pure-play headless CMS could be the right option.
There are also going to be cases where front-end teams explicitly want full control and are prepared to own authoring and preview tooling. In those scenarios, WordPress VIP can provide the headless CMS architecture you need and has deep experience in doing so.
A practical path
A hybrid CMS delivers headless flexibility without sacrificing editor experience, making it a better default choice for most teams. It means you’re not having to invent an authoring UI, build integrations from scratch, and handle basic site management.
Instead, a hybrid CMS can help lower costs over the long term by requiring less custom infrastructure to maintain and fewer developer hours spent on basic content changes.
You can’t go wrong if you evaluate CMS options based on a variety of factors, including editor needs, team skills, and time-to-market, not just on architectural buzzwords.
Frequently asked questions
Which headless CMS is best?
For the majority of organizations, a hybrid CMS provides most of the benefits of pure-play headless but with potentially lower costs, less customization, and no trade-off in editing features or workflows.
How does a hybrid CMS work?
Unlike a pure-play headless CMS, a hybrid architecture consists of a content repository, back-end content management, and front-end presentation layer to deliver content across multiple channels.
Is WordPress a headless CMS?
WordPress VIP offers headless options for WordPress for large enterprises, but recommends a hybrid CMS approach that balances risk, flexibility, and cost.
How hard is a hybrid CMS to use?
A hybrid CMS requires a careful setup and deployment, but is easier for both developers who will work on integrating additional channels and content teams, such as marketers, who can use the same authoring, workflow, and collaboration tools they know and love.
Author
Shane Schick
Founder, 360 Magazine
Shane Schick is a longtime technology journalist serving business leaders ranging from CIOs and CMOs to CEOs. His work has appeared in Yahoo Finance, the Globe & Mail and many other publications. Shane is currently the founder of a customer experience design publication called 360 Magazine. He lives in Toronto.