Headless CMS For Lead Gen Website

It’s Friday afternoon, as you are wrapping up your week heading into the weekend, you receive a message saying your website is down, all your landing pages are unreachable, and your CPC campaign is running. Sounds familiar? The next thing on your mind is most likely “Pause the CPC campaign” or worse, “What’s the damage? How many invalid clicks?”…

Then you spend the next hour troubleshooting, and you get the WSoD (White Screen of Death) as you try to log into your WordPress admin, so you quickly phone up the agency who built the website, but no dev on call rotation. Now what?

You might ask, is there a better way?

A Blessing and A Curse

The popular CMS (Content Management System) WordPress was originally designed for personal blogs, no more, no less, and it was fine. As it gained popularity with the ever-expanding plugin ecosystem, things got a bit funky. You write your blog, send email newsletters, manage paid subscriptions, build the entire website with page builder plugins. If you can name it, you can find it in the marketplace, and you can do all that IN ONE PLACE! Perfect, right? Until the downtime hits you. It’s not unheard of for one single plugin to bring down the entire website.

In business, risk diversification is crucial, and your website is a big part of your lead generation mechanism. If we apply the Pareto principle here, you probably don’t need 80% of the plugins, or more frankly, shouldn’t.

It’s not always like that. WordPress at its core is a very decent tool for blogging, it was built for that, known for that. To a more extreme use case, it would be in news networks and the digital media publishing industry, but in such cases, only the core of WordPress is used, no third-party plugin in sight. All features are implemented via plugins, and they have to be developed in-house, with proper system design. At the end of the day, WordPress is just a part of the bigger system. This is very different from the use cases we often see in the wild, which very often consist of page builder-based themes applied to brochure sites that don’t even use it to blog, and over time with the nature of the plugin lifecycle and lack of maintenance oversight, it gets out of hand very quickly.

So You Asked: Why Are So Many Websites Built This Way?

The answer is rather simple. When the only tool in one’s toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you use such a tool for static content that doesn’t need to change by the second, it is quite a misuse of resources.

Of course, one will argue: “But there’s data indicating over 40% of the websites on the internet are built with this CMS, it must be the best tool for creating websites.” The truth is: “It depends.”

Many web agencies build websites this way for several reasons:

• Low Barrier of Entry: No need for advanced technical skills to set up a basic site.
• Budget Constraints: It’s cost-effective for clients with limited budgets.
• Widely Available Themes and Plugins: The extensive ecosystem allows for quick and easy customization.
• Client Familiarity: Many clients are already familiar with the CMS, making it an easier sell.
• Industry Standard: The perception that “everybody uses it” reinforces its widespread adoption.

While these points make it seem like a contender, there are significant caveats. Because the entry barrier is so low, there’s often no need for skilled developers to build the site. This results in websites loaded with third-party plugins, extremely visual-driven designs with meaningless huge images, and no system oversight—leading to a poor user experience.

Do One Thing And Do It Well

“Do one thing and do it well.” We can apply this UNIX philosophy not only in developing software but also very well applicable to how you build your lead generation machine on a technical level.

Here’s why.

When everything is tightly coupled together, for example, you have a WordPress site that is responsible for content creation and management, managing email subscribers and newsletter delivery, managing paid content and online courses, and the list goes on.

Now let’s say you have one plugin in your WordPress that might be outdated, and causing an incompatible issue with your WordPress version. As a result, the website is completely down, not even accessible to the admin dashboard. Now your lead generation pipeline is stalled, everything stopped because of this single point of failure. This is not uncommon, in fact, this happens all the time when a WordPress installation is not properly maintained. This is a classic example of “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

Let’s take a look at the example of an individual professional such as a coaching business. As a coach, you will need a website for clients to find you, answer the commonly asked questions for your prospects, handle basic booking for the clients that are ready, send out invoices, create content to establish trust and domain authority, and provide online self-paced courses or workshops if one-to-many coaching is part of your structure. You want all these critical components to have proper isolation between each other. You don’t want to do all that using one single database, which in most cases of WordPress is the unfortunate fact.

Why You Might Benefit From Headless CMS

So what is a “Headless CMS”? You may ask. A headless CMS is a content management system that is not tied to any front end of a website. It’s a back end only system. It only takes care of creating and managing content. The visual part of the website is decoupled from how content is managed. The front end part of the website could be using anything; it could be a SPA (Single Page Application), MPA (Multi Page Application), SSG (Static Site Generator), even mobile apps.

This means that content can be accessed and managed through an API (Application Programming Interface), allowing it to be reused on various platforms beyond just websites, such as mobile apps and IoT devices, without being tied to a specific presentation format or technology.

The Power Combo: Headless CMS + Static Site Generator

When headless CMS pairs with a static site generator, it removes the common weak links that we usually found in more traditional monolith architecture like WordPress.

The CMS outputs the content via API, typically in standard JSON format. Then the static site generator takes the content, passes it through its templating logic and components at build time to generate a static website as the final product.

Once the site is generated, there’s no worry about database downtime, server-side caching, and such, because after the build, everything serves as a static page, no database query, and also reduces the probability of XSS Attack (Cross Site Scripting Attack). Let’s say your headless CMS ever goes down; your website front end will still remain accessible, and this is critical for your lead generation machine.

There’s No Better Alternative Without Understanding Its Flaws

Traditional CMS like WordPress paved the way for modern content creation. Let’s not ignore the fact that it powers a significant amount of the content on the internet. As a community, we learn from its flaws and then seek and come up with alternative solutions. As we look to the future of web development, it’s clear that the era of monolithic CMS platforms is giving way to more modular and agile solutions. Even WordPress itself now has a headless feature built into its core.

So, as you plan your next digital project or website redesign, consider breaking free from the constraints of traditional CMS platforms and embrace the power of headless CMS and static site generators. Your users, your team, and your bottom line will thank you for it.