What is Sitecore headless and JSS?

Ever since the birth of content management systems, most websites have had a front-end, and a back-end, with the same code base enabling communication between the two.

A headless CMS changes all that. With a headless CMS, the creation and management of content (back-end) is separated from its delivery to a web page (front-end). A headless CMS allows you to edit, store, and manage content, but leave the design and delivery of that content to a separate application.

This means that website managers and content managers can change how a website looks, where content is placed, and how it appears on different devices, all without needing any development.

Sitecore Headless

Sitecore was built as a headless CMS from the very start. The design and presentation layer of a Sitecore website, and the content layer, have always been separate.

Other CMSs have been developed to store content within the page – one page may contain lots of different components and pieces of content, but they belong to that page and that page only. The components and content cannot be re-used.

Sitecore stores content as objects, and the layout engine places those objects in a format to be presented on the web. In this way, the content and components can be re-used across any number of pages, and indeed across devices, such as a mobile app. In this way, when you change your website content in Sitecore, those changes automatically replicate and spread across any channel or any page on which you’re using that content.

With Sitecore, you save your content once as a component, and let a separate process handle how and where it’s presented.

With the Sitecore Experience Accelerator, launched back in 2016, you have a toolkit with more than 70 standard components that you can use to create websites quicker, without any coding.

You can also transform content into the JSON file format by dragging and dropping JSON components on the page. JSON allows you to remove all visual formatting from your content so that voice devices, such as Amazon Echo or Google Home, can consume it. Now, that’s really headless!

Personalisation and Sitecore JSS

Sitecore JSS (JavaScript Services) is a complete SDK for JavaScript developers, which allows the development of fully-fledged solutions using Sitecore and JavaScript.

What does that mean in reality?

Sitecore supports the delivery of dynamic content, meaning you can deliver personalised content to almost any device or browser.

With Sitecore JSS, you can capture data from customer interactions on your website, mobile apps, retail kiosks, wearable devices, chatbots, connected home devices, and many other channels – and use this data to enable personalisation.

Sitecore JSS gives marketers competitive advantage through personalisation and consolidated data insights.

Sitecore JSS gives marketers competitive advantage through personalisation and consolidated data insights, and it helps enable consistent marketing and content control across multiple channels and various devices.

Learn more about Sitecore

Sitecore is a flexible and powerful digital experience platform that allows you to deliver personalised experiences to your customers, in the right way, in the right place, on the right device, at the right time.

It comes with a raft of marketing features that solve your digital challenges. From personalisation to visitor profiling and analytics, Sitecore has the tools to help you achieve your business and digital goals.

Here’s just a few of the things you get when you choose Sitecore as your website CMS.

• 360-degree customer view

• Personalisation

• Advanced A/B and multivariate testing

• Marketing automation

• Web analytics

Working with Codehouse

To learn more about Sitecore or book a demo, just get in touch.