# Headless CMS

URL: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/headless-cms/

## What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS is a content management system with no website of its own: it stores and edits text, images and products and hands them over an API to a separately built website or app. One set of content can then feed a website, a mobile app and a screen in a shop. The price is that you build, host and maintain two systems instead of one.

**Example**

Two firms receive the same proposal: a website on a headless CMS, with a separate front end written in Next.js or another JavaScript framework.

The first is a furniture chain with a website, a mobile app and screens in its showrooms. Products, prices and promotions go in once and appear in three places. Here a headless setup saves the double entry, keeps the channels from drifting apart and justifies running two systems.

The second is an accounting practice with 15 pages and a blog. It has one channel: the website. With a headless CMS it gets two systems to host and update, a page preview that has to be built separately, and a developer between the team and every layout change. Meta titles, redirects and the sitemap, which a traditional CMS usually handles out of the box, have to be rebuilt in the front end too. For this firm a conventional system does the same job with fewer moving parts.

**Why it matters for a business**

Going headless is an architecture decision you live with for years, not a question of fashion. You gain freedom in the front end and one source of content for many channels. You pay with two contracts or two codebases, two sets of updates and more reliance on developers. Many headless services charge by seats, records or API requests, so the cost over three to five years often looks different from the first quote.

**What to ask**

- How many channels will the content feed — just the website, or an app, screens and partners too?
- How will an editor see a page before it goes live?
- Who builds the meta titles, redirects, sitemap and structured data in the front end?
- What happens to the CMS bill when the team or the content grows?
- Who maintains both systems after launch, and what happens if one of them changes its terms?The T&B platform is not headless: in the company website and in the online store alike, the pages and their admin share one codebase. For most company websites and shops with a single channel, that is the simpler road; headless earns its keep once there is more than one channel — and then we build it as web software: the same content goes out over an API to an app, to screens or to partners.

- Services: [The T&B platform](https://tnb-tech.com/en/services/platform/)
- Glossary: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/