Ask HN: Is headless a good solution for small businesses?

[superfad]

The headless CMS approach seems to have growing adoption among enterprise businesses. However, for small businesses with a simple marketing or ecommerce website I'm not sure they can reap the same benefits, in particular cost saving.

For example in one report I read the average cost to implement headless architecture for enterprise business is $2.6 million. But for small businesses, if they need custom development each time they want a new feature added the headless model becomes cost prohibitive when the same feature could easily be added with a plugin/app on a traditional WordPress or Shopify site.

Interested to hear other peoples' experience with using a headless CMS for small business clients and thoughts on opportunities for the future?

[vagrantJin]

We used headless wordpress a lot and it has its moments. Its just a big 'ol php database crud app that gets unneccesary hate. The wordpress community is one of the most helpful so of you are leaning towards WP - have at it. It's cost effective and gets things done. Few things can beat the WP/[insert page builder]/ACF/woocommerce combo

I've done custom work with Strapi and if your shop has a lot of 'roll your own' money to throw around - then sure go for strapi, butterCMS and their ilk. There are great tools out there.

[superfad]

Thanks for your insight. I agree there are some great tools available, but I am still working on a cost effective solution for small business clients. Maybe I should be putting my energy into finding clients with a bigger budget instead. :)

[smt88]

Absolutely not, assuming they could use either SquareSpace or Shopify and get 100% of the features they need.

I specifically left out WordPress, which is an absolute nightmare to maintain. I recently inherited 9 WordPress sites, some of which should've just been static sites, and they are a mess of plugin spaghetti and hidden code.

Avoid WordPress for new projects. There are plenty of alternatives that aren't ground-up custom builds.

> average cost to implement headless architecture for enterprise business is $2.6 million

This needs a lot of context. The likely scenario is that these enterprises are converting a lot of existing sites.

For a brand new site, getting started with a headless CMS is not a lot slower than WordPress anymore.

> Interested to hear other peoples' experience with using a headless CMS for small business clients and thoughts on opportunities for the future?

We're starting to switch to Strapi for our CMS and Svelte as our client. Existing sites were reasonably well-built on WordPress (Oxygen or Elementor).

It has been a breath of fresh air. It's amazing to be able to fully use git again. Multiple devs can work on the same file without stepping on each other's toes.

Headless CMS is much closer to using WordPress than to building things from scratch, which I think people don't realize. We've been able to on-board clients onto it very easily.

[superfad]

Thanks for the reply. I believe you are correct in that the $2.6 million figure is organisation wide so would cover multiple sites.