Your Ultimate Guide to Headless CMS

A headless CMS separates content management from content delivery: the backend manages content and exposes it over APIs — REST or GraphQL — to any frontend, whether that's a website, a mobile app, or a smart device. That decoupling frees teams to build the presentation layer in modern frameworks like Next.js or Gatsby, publish once and deliver everywhere, and scale the frontend independently of the backend.

It isn't always the right answer: for a single, simple website a traditional coupled CMS can be more straightforward. This guide walks through how headless works, how it compares to a traditional CMS, the benefits (multi-channel delivery, flexibility, performance), and when decoupling makes sense — the same architecture this demo uses with Drupal and Next.js.

Read the full guide on Pantheon's learning center: Your Ultimate Guide to Headless CMS.