There’s an ongoing split in web development today between monolithic platforms and modern decoupled solutions. Each side has its own pros and cons, but picking the right path is a critical decision you’ll need to make when you rebuild your site.
A decoupled website (often used interchangeably with a “headless CMS”) is a website architecture pattern separating content from presentation. Effectively, this means you have a CMS for managing your content, but the CMS is only responsible for managing content — not how it’s displayed. You can use any front-end tech stack you want for the display — because it’s not part of the CMS itself. Instead, content is queried out of the CMS as needed by any number of front-end experiences.
The more common alternative to a decoupled website is often called a “monolithic website” — or a website architecture in which the same system is used for content and presentation.
In a decoupled website build, you likely leverage a SaaS-based CMS like Storyblok, Contentstack, or DatoCMS in combination with a frontend framework like NextJS or Astro. In a monolithic website build, you would pick a single platform like WordPress that acts as both CMS and front-end template renderer all-in-one.
Should you care if your website is decoupled?
Decoupled website builds are growing in popularity due to corresponding shifts in thought on how sites should be built. These shifts include the desire for:
More modern CMS platforms are designed to be headless-first, which allows a single CMS to manage content that can then be used by any number of omni-channel experiences like digital signage, external microsites, mobile apps, and more. That means there’s always one source of truth regarding your content, no matter where a user is experiencing it. That means less management and duplication on the back end and more seamless experiences on the front end.
Performance is another area where decoupled excels. With monolithic architectures, performance can be hard to scale and is typically done by vertical scaling — aka adding more resources to a given server. On the other hand, modern decoupled solutions focus instead on horizontal scaling, which is the ability to spin up any number of server instances on demand.
Good scalability on monolithic platforms typically comes from caching pages that would otherwise be dynamically generated at request time so that they don’t have to be regenerated for subsequent requests. This approach largely works well, but things like unique email tracking URL parameters can cause page requests that can’t be cached and, in some cases, cause sites to experience downtime during high traffic, like during a mass email campaign, for example.
A decoupled approach is great for SEO since page load time is a key criterion for PageSpeed Insights scores, which factor into SEO page rank. As such, having the fastest page loads possible can help you outrank your competitors. Modern decoupled approaches allow for per-route selection of rendering approaches. This means you can have all the pages of your site be fully static (aka built at build time, not at request time) for the fastest response times possible, or you can choose specific routes that implement server-side rendering (SSR) or incremental static regeneration (ISR) — giving you full control over your rendering strategy so you’re always best optimized for the pages you serve, from fully dynamic to fully static.
In addition to all the benefits listed thus far, decoupled websites are typically more flexible both in terms of how they’re built and who can support them. These sites are built with front-end languages and frameworks like JavaScript, React, and NextJS, which is how many modern SaaS web applications are also built. Instead of having separate developers that manage CMS-specific modules and templates in PHP, companies can have the same React developers work on websites and web applications (and mobile apps with technologies like React Native). You can even build a component library with tools like Storybook, resulting in components you can leverage across all your digital properties. This is ideal for SaaS-based companies who want to deliver a unified experience across the entire user journey — from the consumer website to the customer portal.
Ultimately, you should care about decoupled website development because this new evolution of websites can not only improve performance, delivery, and experience but also allow your business to embrace the future gracefully.
Is a decoupled approach right for your next website build?
- How important is security, performance, and scalability?
Decoupled approaches allow for fully statically rendered websites. That means no more request-time processing to tamper with and no more database queries to compromise. This allows for “infinite horizontal scalability” of your front-end website and even multi-cloud hosting redundancy. Therefore, there are no more performance bottlenecks or server outages during the most critical traffic peaks.
- How important is omni-channel content?
Decoupled approaches typically leverage headless CMSs — platforms built with multi-channel content in mind. If you want to manage content for web, mobile app, kiosk, and more all from one location, then decoupled is likely for you.
- How often do you plan to refresh your web design?
Decoupled tech stacks allow you to swap out your front-end experience anytime without starting over with your content and CMS. Instead of one big rebuild every 4-5 years, you could have smaller front-end focused rebuilds more often without the headache of remaking your content.
- How important is front-end flexibility and control?
Since they use modern tech stacks like React and NextJS, decoupled site builds can provide more app-like experiences beyond basic page templates — delivering the ultimate in flexibility and content control.
- Do you like your current editor experience?
Some folks love traditional CMSs like WordPress, while others are looking for something more modern. If you want built-in image editors (including focal point editing), content approval workflows and permissions, and real-time previews, it may be time to move to a headless CMS.
- How important is SEO?
If SEO is critical to your business, decoupled may be the way to go since SEO page rank benefits from fast page loads. The statically built pages and full control over rendering approaches that decoupled deliver means you have as much flexibility as possible in optimizing for SEO.
- What does ongoing maintenance of your website look like?
Do you have a team of JavaScript developers or a WordPress developer on call? How much time is spent on CMS updates and maintenance? Modern SaaS-based headless CMSs take security updates and maintenance off your plate, and modern JavaScript-based platforms give you a common language all of your devs can rally around.
- How forward-looking are you in your tech approach?
With all their flexibility and control, decoupled architectures can be more complex than monolithic ones. If you need to keep it simple, you may want to leverage an approach with fewer moving parts than a decoupled solution.
- What is your budget?
Decoupled builds typically take extra dev work upfront but reduce limitations and costs in the future. For example, using a headless CMS can increase your field of options while decreasing how large subsequent rebuilds need to be. While the list of pros in a decoupled approach is long (editor experience, performance, security, etc.), your appetite for the potential cost difference simply comes down to budget and cost/benefit based on your needs.
Need help deciding?
At Alloy, we understand that a decoupled solution doesn’t make sense for everyone. There are just as many reasons to go with platforms like WordPress or Webflow as for headless platforms like Storyblok and NextJS. Evaluating your needs and helping you make those decisions is something we can help you with as you search for the right custom web design.