5 things you need to know before you get started with headless

If you're reading this blog, you're probably familiar with the term 'headless'. In my opinion, headless is the best way for many organizations to build digital solutions. This involves the backend being developed separately from the frontend.

Headless is gaining popularity. Nevertheless, there are still a number of misconceptions and issues that are still relatively unknown about this technology. Things that keep companies from seeing headless as a serious option. I have listed 5 of them below.

#1 Misconception: Headless is only for large companies with large (digital) budgets When headless systems were still relatively new, this was certainly true. Since then, various software suppliers have entered the market that focus on different use cases and company sizes. As a result, headless is now also possible and suitable for smaller projects (<€100k).

#2 Unknown: You can determine your own roadmap Monolithic systems, in which the frontend and backend of a web platform are 'coupled', have a major disadvantage: when it comes to product and platform development, as a user you are dependent on the roadmap of the software supplier. This means that you cannot make your own plan for innovations and improvements to your platform. 

Headless gives you back that control and you can decide for yourself when you want to build and rollout which functionality. And because the focus is on renewing specific functionalities, components or applications, it is possible to make choices faster during the development process, to arrive at an MVP faster, and headless thus ensures a better time-to-market.

#3 Unknown: Less downtime in the case of system reboots and upgrades Digital platforms are constantly being tweaked and upgraded. With 'coupled' environments, this often means that the entire system has to be taken offline during a reboot or upgrade. During that downtime, customers can't use the platform and companies potentially even miss out on revenue.

In headless environments, reboots and upgrades take place at the component level. As a result, the other systems continue to run and transactions and orders are captured through caching in the integration layer. If you choose headless, (virtually) nothing is lost during the downtime of a component.

#4 Misconception: the TCO of monolithic systems is more favorable than that of headless environments At first glance, you would expect monolithic systems to be more complete out-of-the-box, reducing the TCO, including development and integration time. After all, headless involves a relatively large amount of custom development.

In most cases, however, the total development costs are more favorable with headless. This is why:

• reuse: components and APIs you've already built can be reused
• call optimization: from the API-driven headless environment you can optimize the calls on applications and set up processes more cost-efficiently (for example in the case of price calculations and order processing)
• way of updating: component updates require less test time and there is no need to draw up and execute an intensive migration plan

#5 Misconception: Headless environments are less stable Since the applications and functionality of monolithic systems come from the same software vendor, you would expect these environments to be more stable and integrated than in the case of headless.

In reality, the opposite turns out to be true. With headless, companies improve the control and reliability of their IT landscape. This is because fewer adjustments (i.e.: new code) are needed, and built, stable APIs can be reused. Best-of-breed applications can be managed individually and tweaked standalone without compromising the overall performance and stability of the entire tech stack.