How a Headless CMS Can Boost Your Core Web Vitals

How a Headless CMS Can Boost Your Core Web Vitals

As a smart business owner, you know your website plays a key role in bringing in business, whether online or to your brick and mortar location. And you already know that how Google rates (and ranks) your site can play an even bigger role in your digital marketing success.

With the roll out of Google’s Core Web Vitals, a good user experience (UX) is more important than ever before. Core web vitals are metrics that help you and your web developer quantify the user experience, and improve on it. 

And a key way to improve UX and your core web vitals score is to have a blazingly fast website. In short, speed matters. Why? Take a look at these statistics.

  • As page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%. Think With Google
  • 0-4 second load time is best for conversion rates. Portent
  • Improving page load time by just 0.1s can boost your conversion rate by 8%. Deloitte

And since Google considers page speed as a ranking factor, if your site is slow, it can send you further down the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is a big part of why you need to consider site speed as an integral part of your SEO strategy.

Today, we’re going to discuss how a headless content management system (CMS) can help you achieve the speed you need to keep people from bouncing and turn them into customers. Let’s get started.

What Is a Headless CMS?

In order to understand what a headless CMS is, we first need to talk about how a traditional CMS like WordPress works. A traditional CMS uses a webpage-oriented organizing system where it puts everything in one big bucket — content, images, HTML, CSS. This makes it impossible to reuse the content on another platform because it is commingled with code.

The front end (what a user sees) and the back end (the workhorse) are coupled. Having everything in one place can also slow down your website.

A headless CMS, on the other hand, is a decoupled CMS. The back-end content management system (the content storage “body”) is separated from the presentation layer “head.” Content stored in a headless CMS is delivered via application programming interfaces (APIs) for seamless display across different platforms and devices. RESTful or GraphQL are the most-used APIs.

And by separating your content from your tech stack, your website becomes a speed machine. And as we mentioned, speed helps users find you, and reduces your bounce rate.

Do You Need a Headless CMS Website?

Maybe, maybe not. We’ve already talked about the benefits of headless CMS and how it can help increase the speed of your website, which is critical to performing well with Google’s Core Web Vitals. But no CMS is one size fits all.

Reasons Why You Might Want (or Need) a Headless CMS

If you want to deliver an omnichannel customer experience, where you offer a seamless connection across a variety of customer touchpoints, a headless CMS may be for you.  They can pick up where they left off as they move from voice to email to digital.

Benefits of a Headless CMS 

There are several main benefits to a headless CMS, including:

  • Provides flexibility with unlimited customization.
  • Pushes content to any device or channel without being bound by a user interface.
  • Keeps your website highly secure, especially if your headless CMS is built from scratch.
  • API-driven CMS allows you to embrace and integrate new technologies without a ton of lag time.

Reasons You Might Not Need (or Want) a Headless CMS

Not everyone is ready for a headless CMS, and not everyone needs one. Here are some reasons you might not need a headless CMS:

  • It Requires Technical Expertise.

A traditional CMS like WordPress is popular because it is easy to create, add content to, and maintain the websites. Headless CMS platforms, on the other hand, generally require front-end developers to build the presentation layers for your website, mobile apps, and any other medium you will use to deliver content.

That technical expertise comes at a price. Not every organization has a team of developers, or even the budget to outsource building a front end for content delivery.

  • Your Location Matters.

If your company or institution largely has slow computers, such as large scale mobile usage in remote areas – this will lead to inherent performance problems due to lack of system resources. Also due to the remote request structure of a headless CMS, it may not be a good fit for institutional high-security environments.

  • You’re Just Not Ready.

If you don’t have the budget or the staff to fully support an omnichannel strategy, you’re probably better off using your time and money to focus on just your website and app. You can always plan for the future.

Work with an Experienced Web Development Company

A headless CMS website can be a great solution, if done well. If a headless CMS is right for your business, it pays to work with an experienced web development agency that can build and support your site. And it’s even better if the web developer also has digital marketing capabilities, such as SEO experience.

At North Studio, we check all the boxes. Our experienced and diverse team combines technology, UX design, and SEO to bring you a customized website that will give you a competitive edge. While we’re based in Victoria, BC, we work with clients around the world.

Schedule a consultation by filling out the contact form or calling our office at 800-215-6702.