Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Taking Us Back to the Future and Beyond
By Pierre Burgy, CEO and co-founder, Strapi
I’ll start my predictions with a look “Back to the Future”. We’re seeing that now is the time to get back to basics and return to static website design. The first website in history, by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, is an example of a static website and contained only simple HTML that represented just text and links.
Static sites serve content without the need for a back-end database layer. And because they consume very little computing resources (no database queries, no templates to render and no client-server requests to process), they load quickly.
Especially this year, as people have turned online more than ever, it is critical to improve website performance in order to handle the increasing volumes. Yet, one-third of internet websites are still built with first-generation content management systems like WordPress and Drupal.
The pressing need for high-performance websites is taking us back to the future of static websites… but this time with a difference – greater flexibility and accommodation for both developers and non-technical users. We’re seeing the emergence of the headless CMS that bootstrap APIs to enable content distribution across all types of devices and channels and I expect we’ll see that trend accelerate in the year ahead.
There are nonetheless limitations associated with static websites such as the build times required to transform templates to static assets which can be very long for large websites. That’s precisely why static site generators with dynamic capabilities such as Next.js offer the best of both worlds — especially for websites that have thousands of pages. The most recent trend lines indicate dynamic frameworks like Next.js growing in popularity in comparison with static website frameworks like Gatsby..
That takes me to my second prediction, which is headless CMS extending to usage for rapid application development and prototyping. It’s natural to see headless CMS taking on a new role in microservices. In a matter of minutes it is possible to build a robust backend and generate a well-structured API that works well with a variety of microservices no matter the type of content whether that is text, audio, video, etc.
Looking out a little further, there will be (and we’re starting to see emerge), the headless CMS play an important role as enablers and making the low-code/no-code revolution a reality. I can see headless CMS helping modernize legacy Drupal without requiring re-writes. Rebuilding/re-factoring using low code tools, like Airtable, and API calls to headless CMS means less technical skills are required to build or modernize apps enabling a new generation of citizen developers.
Over the past year, our open source headless CMS has seen tremendous growth in popularity with more than 2.5 million downloads on the Node Package Manager (NPM), more than 30,000 stars and 500 external contributors on GitHub, and more than 300 community plug-ins published on NPM. This tells us that the year ahead will be an exciting one and that users are buying into the advantages of the headless CMS that will evolve in the year(s) ahead.
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About the Author
Pierre Burgy, with two other classmates, founded the open source headless CMS Strapi out of frustration in their own work as developers. He is a lover of Node.js and APIs and when not coding, it’s likely he will be windsurfing.
