I've done a lot of global corporate .coms in my life. A lot. In fact so much that once I established Extreme Consulting a few years ago, I swore not to do it again. But as it often happens, that didn't last for long. Maybe it's because I'm pretty darn good at it. ;)

Large website projects almost always follow the same pattern. There are beautiful designs that are hard to implement because of the limitations of the platform. The content creation is behind schedule. Integrations take a lot of calendar time. A headless CMS can, at least partly, solve all of these problems.

A traditional CMS tries to solve two problems at the same time:

1. Content creation.
2. Presentation (web).

This means that storing and managing the content (pages, news, blogs, etc.) and displaying them on a webpage are handled by the same piece of software. This is problematic, because not all websites look and feel the same. The headless way is to separate the concerns. A headless CMS worries only about the content creation flow, and exposes an API for developers to use the content. The benefits include:

• The CMS doesn't set limitations on which frontend frameworks to use.
• Content creation can begin immediately, before a single line of code has been written for the website.
• The same content can be utilised in different channels, like web and apps, even print.
• Heavy duty CMS's often take a lot of processing power and thus have high running costs. A custom frontend is a light or heavy as needed.

There are number of headless content management systems available on the market today. Extreme Consulting website is NextJS-based with custom frontend. I'm using Contentful headless CMS to write this article. The website code was written in about a week.