The headless content management system that helps you deliver exceptional experiences everywhere
Adobe Experience Manager Sites is an industry-leading headless content management system (CMS), which makes it easy for your marketing and IT teams to create and deliver personalized content experiences — wherever your customers are.
Headless content management gives you speed and flexibility
When deciding between a traditional and a headless CMS, it’s essential to find a solution that will help you work smarter, not harder. Your days are already busy enough, so think about where you can save some time while still creating the most engaging content.
A traditional CMS manages both the content and presentation logic, and outputs fully formatted HTML. It’s easy to publish to a single channel like a website. However, as content needs expand across multiple channels, brands, and geographies, the content production cycle can get out of hand. And it can often require more time, energy, and resources as efforts need to be duplicated.
A headless CMS separates content from the presentation layer — the head. It creates blocks of channel-neutral content and uses APIs to present the same material across platforms and devices. Because it can use any front end to display content, you don’t need to create new code for every experience. A headless CMS eliminates redundancies by unifying content in a single hub, making it easier to scale and display through virtually any application without losing quality and delivering a better overall customer experience.
Experience Manager Sites headless CMS creates a seamless experience for you and your customers
Experience Manager Sites is an intelligent, headless CMS that helps teams quickly build and deliver customer experiences across all channels and devices. Let’s take a closer look at how Experience Manager Sites can help solve some of your biggest content challenges.
1. Build and deliver quickly
Experience Manager Sites increases the speed of building experiences and accelerates time to market, so you can build and deliver new assets quicker than ever.
- Reuse content easily. Developers and content authors can create structured, atomic content blocks called Content Fragments , and reference them across channels without needing duplication. GraphQL APIs enable your developers to query and retrieve content efficiently, ensuring precise delivery of web-optimized content in a neutral JSON file format, while reducing the time needed to accomplish these tasks.
- Front-end flexibility. A headless CMS provides front-end flexibility by decoupling content management and delivery. This separation allows developers to build their own front-end using a variety of programming languages and front-end frameworks, such as React, Vue.js, Angular, or Next.js. With a headless CMS, developers have greater customization and control over the front-end, and can easily integrate the CMS with other tools and services.
- Collaborate across the business. Experience Manager sites is a versatile tool that caters to both developers and marketers. The headless visual editor lets content authors optimize and personalize experiences themselves by making edits in-context through WYSIWYG interface. Content authors can preview experiences, define editable sections, and automatically propagate changes to related components and linked experiences. So developers and IT teams can allocate their time and resources more efficiently — to enhance productivity and streamline the content management workflow.
Your company can increase efficiency and spend more time on other important business matters with the help of Experience Manager Sites.
2. Scale effortlessly
As your business grows, the amount of content you publish will too. But more content shouldn’t mean more CMS platforms. That’s where Experience Manager Sites comes in to help teams coordinate and streamline global content operations.
- Centralize content workflows. Through a native integration with the Adobe Experience Manager Assets digital asset management (DAM) tool, you can manage global assets, workflows, and versions from one place. For example, you can use Experience Manager Assets to automatically resize assets to fit any channel specifications — and because it offers native integration with Adobe Photoshop, your editing changes will be seamlessly reflected everywhere.
- Manage linked experiences. With Adobe Experience Manager Sites headless CMS, you can create and manage multiple content variations by connecting a master content structure to connected live content copies. For example, a global company may have a master site structure where most of the site components are standardized according to brand guidelines, but teams managing regional site variations would have the flexibility to adjust some components to fit their local needs. Creating and editing new regional sites can now be done with just a few clicks, saving time and ensuring brand consistency.
- Use a Modern UI. Adobe Experience Manager Sites headless CMS lets developers manage structured content resources through a modern UI that supports advanced search and filtering, as well as out-of-process extensibility to customize these UIs according to your unique needs.
Centralizing content workflows eliminates confusion and ensures your whole team is on the same page, no matter where they are. That way you can spend more time on high-value initiatives like analyzing and optimizing the journey you design for your customers.
3. Extend easily
Content management looks different for every organization. Experience Manager Sites can be tailored to suit your unique business needs and help future-proof your strategy.
- Development flexibility. With a serverless runtime, UI framework, command-line interface (CLI), software development kit (SDK), and other developer tools, you can easily build custom extensions and integrations. Adobe Developer App Builder is an extensibility framework that helps with system integration across all your Adobe solutions and the rest of your IT stack.
- Build your own tech stack. You’re able to integrate with hundreds of third-party tools for advanced personalization, A/B testing, performance tracking, and more. You get native integrations with other best-of-breed Experience Cloud tools — including Adobe Target, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform — as well as access to Adobe Exchange, a marketplace with partner-built apps and integrations.
Using a flexible, headless CMS like Experience Manager Sites that fits your needs boosts productivity and confidence across your organization. And you’ll have the capabilities you need, without limitations from your existing tech stack.
4. Stay resilient and secure
Hosting content management functions on multiple platforms can be problematic in a number of ways. Traditional CMS setups regularly require long and costly upgrades and maintenance. Your tech team is then forced to spend time and resources managing infrastructure, security threats, vulnerabilities, and compliance requirements — rather than on growing the business. Experience Manager Sites helps you maintain business-critical activities, including security, performance, resiliency, and reliability.
- High performance and resiliency. Experience Manager Sites headless CMS is a cloud-native offering that is always current with automated product updates. It is also resilient and reliable with multi-region redundancy, global CDN, and self healing architecture. Additionally, it also ensures data safety and business continuity with backup and recovery processes.
- Industry-leading security. You can have peace of mind thanks to a solidified security architecture with enterprise-level isolation for all services. Environments are preconfigured with security best practices and monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for always-on protection. Additionally, Experience Manager Sites helps customers remain compliant with industry-recognized security standards and certifications such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, GLBA-ready, HIPAA, and others.
Experience Manager Sites includes an entire suite of GraphQL APIs to quickly deliver specific content — such as the ability to sort, paginate, and transform images — for downstream applications.
A headless CMS in action
A headless CMS ensures you have all the tools you need in one place to make content creation, presentation, and management a breeze. Here are a couple of stories from our customers and how they’re using Experience Manager Sites as a headless content management system to get results.
- Genting Malaysia improved its digital experience for guests with the help of Experience Manager. The resort operator creates consistent brand experiences that can be updated and reused with the same or similar content. Genting Malaysia’s headless CMS approach has enabled its team to seamlessly update content on the Resorts World Genting website, update sales promotion modules, and announce new offerings — and more quickly than legacy systems allowed for. As a result, Genting Malaysia increased site visits by 100% while reducing bounce rates by 30%.
- Boots wanted to deliver personalized experiences to its 50 million customers, but website content updates were too slow and highly technical. The British health and beauty retailer adopted Adobe Experience Manager to accelerate content velocity, optimize engagement with A/B testing, and enable granular personalization with improved audience segmentation.
With a multitude of options and customization, Experience Manager Sites is a marketer and developer-friendly CMS that allows you to craft personal and purposeful content, without compromising speed or agility.