Tackling Headless Head-On

Businesses today are facing an important question, and it’s truly a head-scratcher. With online sales surging in a world reshaped by the pandemic, improving your business, educational, or eCommerce website is more critical than ever before. It may even mean rethinking the entire framework on which your site currently exists.

But revamping your site into a better, more secure, more scalable solution doesn’t have to leave you banging your head against a wall. Headless architecture is an increasingly popular approach to website creation, and it’s often the best solution for businesses that require exceptional performance, better omnichannel capability, and fewer security complications when it’s time to make updates.

In this article, we’ll dive into the most important benefits of headless architecture for businesses and explain how Atlas, our Headless WordPress hosting platform, is making a huge impact on the decoupled future of website development.

Performance improvements

Headless sites deliver on a whole host of performance improvements, including faster page loading speeds, increased agility for staging and development, enhanced efficiency in site scalability, and easier ability to deploy site changes or push new digital channels live.

During testing, headless websites show between 2x–15x faster loading times than their traditional counterparts, making the implementation of decoupled architecture an attractive option for enterprise sites that have to store and display lots of data while remaining fast and agile.

This is especially critical for eCommerce sites. A recent study by McKinsey & Company showed that online shopping during the pandemic grew at an astonishing rate—eCommerce saw the equivalent of about 10 years of sales growth in just 90 days.

If your site isn’t performing well enough to appease the consumers making those purchases, you’re likely to miss out on your share of the market. By making the switch to headless, businesses can ensure fast page speeds and deliver the best possible experiences for their online shoppers.

Omnichannel capability

Omnichannel capability is critical to any brand or agency’s digital presence, and WordPress sites that use headless architecture improve the entire omnichannel experience.

Traditional CMSs present information in only one way. For example, content on a mobile app typically has to be created separately from content found on a website, even if the content itself is very similar. But for modern businesses craving growth, there are multiple digital touchpoints throughout the customer journey that require your attention because they are crucial in shaping the way your brand is perceived.

Headless sites support digital experiences across all your channels, from on-site to in-store, including apps, point-of-sale solutions, push notifications, QR codes, contactless payment options, and more.

Switching to a headless site construction allows companies to create better customer experiences by increasing opportunities to connect across all devices. Plus, the data you collect from your customers on any device can then be used to serve up more personalized experiences down the line.

Increased ease of use & security

The key to headless architecture is the transition from a traditional CMS where the front and back-end are tied together to a decoupled CMS where the front and back-ends operate independently from one another.

For developers and marketers, this helps improve the overall experiences for their independent roles by giving each of them access to the tools they love. For developers, that means using popular front-end frameworks that don’t interfere with content management. For marketers, it  means easy publishing without the potential to accidentally disrupt important code.

The best part of this improved structure, however, is less about the ease-of-use and more about the embedded security headless offers. Decoupling the front-end from the back-end makes it harder for bad actors to access sensitive consumer information. 

Headless cuts down hackers at their knees, keeping all the important data you’ve collected about your customers and their habits safely stored in an independent and well-protected back-end environment that is decoupled from your front-end.

Atlas is the roadmap to headless success

The adoption of headless technology is still in its infancy, and while companies are starting to come around, there’s not the same level of maturity as there is with traditional WordPress. Luckily, WP Engine has a longstanding history of great performance. Our goal is to cement our position as the thought leader paving the way for headless adoption at an enterprise level, and we’re making it happen with Atlas.

In fact, we’re already making headless history with Atlas. Recently, Android Authority—the largest online publication dedicated to all things Android—achieved a 6x increase across their Lighthouse metrics, becoming the fastest among competing tech media websites. And they did it by switching to Atlas.

Keep your head in the headless game

Learn more about the State of Headless by downloading our free ebook or following us on social media—we’ll keep you up to date on all the latest advancements in Atlas and ways you can get started with headless tech as a whole!