Deliver the right content to every channel with a headless content management system
When deciding between a traditional and a headless CMS, it’s essential to find a solution that satisfies your business objectives and lets you connect with customers everywhere they interact with your brand.
A traditional CMS manages both the content and presentation logic, and outputs fully formatted HTML that is easy to publish to a single channel like a website. However, as content needs expand across multiple channels, brands, and geographies, the content production and delivery cycle can get out of hand, often requiring 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
Adobe Experience Manager Sites is an industry-leading headless CMS that helps you create, manage, and deliver the right content to any digital property. It helps you create highly engaging digital experiences across web, mobile, apps, and in-venue digital signage that are tailored to your customer and drive conversion. Let’s take a closer look at how Experience Manager Sites can help solve some of your biggest content challenges, or watch an overview.
- Build and deliver quickly
Experience Manager Sites increases the speed of building experiences and accelerates time to market, so you can reach your customers quicker than ever.
- Reuse content easily. Developers and content authors can create modular 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 in-context edits through a WYSIWYG interface. Content authors can preview experiences, define editable sections, and automatically propagate changes to related components and linked experiences.
With Experience Manager Sites, developers and IT teams can allocate their time and resources more efficiently to enhance productivity and streamline the content management workflow.
- 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 Adobe Experience Manager Assets digital asset management (DAM), 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 has a native integration with Adobe Photoshop, your editing changes will be seamlessly reflected everywhere.
- Multisite management. With 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. 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 specific 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.
- 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. 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. 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.
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 Adobe 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 boosts employee productivity and organizational capabilities by giving your teams access to all their favorite connected tools in one convenient place.
- 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. IT/development teams are then forced to spend time and resources managing infrastructure, security threats, vulnerabilities, and compliance requirements — rather than 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 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.
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 offers a host of world-class hospitality offerings and needed to reimagine its websites and booking experiences. With the help of Experience Manager Sites, teams can create consistent brand experiences that can be updated and reused with the same or similar content. Genting Malaysia’s headless CMS approach lets marketers 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 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.
If you want to learn more about Experience Manager Sites headless CMS, check out these headless tutorials.
Test drive AEM headless CMS today and sign up for your free trial here!