Insights
How Contentful Improves Your Content Experience
With Contentful CMS, you can take your digital experiences — and your business — to the next level.
- Article
- 3 MIN READ
- Aug 25, 2021
Head of Platform Strategy
Summary
If you’re considering a shift from your current content management system but are not sure what to choose, it’s worth considering the power of a headless CMS like Contentful.
Headless CMS platforms enable a high degree of flexibility and scalability in your tech stack, so it can change as your business evolves. While there are many to choose from, Contentful is a platform we use often at Apply Digital.
There are many reasons why we use Contentful as the backbone for many of our client projects. We believe the benefits abound — and so does Forbes. In 2022, Contentful was recognized in the Forbes Cloud 100, an industry-recognized list that ranks the top 100 private cloud-companies in the world.
In this article, we’ll explore a few of the advantages Contentful provides in improving your overall content management capabilities — both for your developer team, and your end customer.
Turning information into impactful content
As a headless CMS, Contentful enables you to focus on creating and delivering exceptional content experiences. The platform makes it easy for content managers to get content up quickly without needing to have advanced technical skills like coding or database management.
On the back-end, the platform achieves this by operating with a decoupled approach (the essence of a headless CMS). Each content component on your site is adjustable like buildable blocks, supported by structures that allow flexibility and standardized design elements ready for reuse.
These features make it possible for your designers and content managers to change the look and feel of the front-end of your site while your developers continue to make adjustments in the back-end. As you can imagine, this decoupled approach makes it easy for everyone on your team to work in parallel, testing new content and experiences on your end user.
SEO benefits of headless CMS
If you’re operating with a traditional CMS, it’s likely that you’re used to working with plug-ins to manage and optimize your SEO. With a headless CMS, things look a bit different, and provide advantages to those who are open to a new way of working.
To start, search engine optimization on a headless CMS like Contentful begins at the site structure level with a process referred to as ‘content modeling.’ So rather than depending on a plug-in to do the work, you would assemble all the building blocks you’d need to optimize your SEO, and program these blocks to activate on each of your content pages.
For example, if you were creating a new page on your website from scratch, you would start the content modeling process by outlining the elements you’ll need — the page title, slug, content, and SEO metadata. This SEO metadata element would act as the container with your SEO preferences programmed in.
The benefit of using this approach is that you can get even more specific in describing your page content than you could with a standard SEO plug-in. For example, you could instruct every title tag, meta description, and H1 to be unique — a common issue for site audits where missing or duplicate metadata abound. Over time, these seemingly small, incremental changes can add up to give your content an SEO advantage over the competition.
Optimize your customer experience
When you manage your content in a headless CMS like Contentful, your ability to optimize customer experiences expands. Not only do you benefit from performance improvements in site loading speed, security, and stability, but you have more flexibility in how people can interact with your site.
Some common challenges experienced with monolithic CMS platforms are that they can be large, complex, and slow. Combined, these can create a poor experience for your customer. On the other hand, headless CMS platforms like Contentful are designed specifically with omnichannel experiences in mind. This allows you to create a more ‘sticky’ experience, where customers browse longer, and have a chance to form a connection with your brand.
Behind the scenes, it’s the modular nature of the platform that enables these benefits. Content blocks can easily be loaded, and reused throughout the customer journey across different devices.
Digitization speeds up business transformation, and having technology in place to build new experiences quickly is the best way to stay ahead of market shifts. At Apply Digital, we use only the most innovative approaches to building digital assets to drive your business forward. If you’d like to explore how we can help, reach out to someone on our team, and we’d be happy to chat.
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