Digital experience, driving the push for (visual) headless

1,000 respondents share their thoughts on the next level of content management & digital experience design in the largest survey of CMS users – and the first one to focus on headless.

With the explosion in demand for headless content management systems, you could be forgiven for thinking that headless technology is something new or experimental and not critical infrastructure for enterprises. In reality, we at Magnolia have been offering a headless CMS for over 25 years.

In the last years, the demand for headless adoption surged as enterprises reached the point where their legacy systems couldn't juggle the demand for content across multiple online platforms, web, mobile, and emerging AI channels.

So why the sudden surge in interest? Well, for most businesses, it simply comes down to a renewed focus on digital experience. In PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey, 70% of executives think customer expectations are outpacing their organization’s ability to adapt.

Whether you’re a business leader, marketer or IT professional, delivering a great digital customer experience is now key to building a successful brand. In an era of omnichannel expectations, organizations are realizing that a visual headless cms is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for maintaining brand consistency across every touchpoint.

When it comes to developing these great experiences, it’s vital to use a content management system that can meet the needs of your business. Technologies that help bundle data, distribute content and deliver services across an ever-wider variety of customer touchpoints are key to providing great digital experience. Furthermore, as customer expectations continue to rise, today’s enterprises are expected to deliver high quality, personalised content, quickly and at scale.

However, even as the popularity of headless technology increases, there are still those who are reluctant to make the switch. This comes down to the fact that there remains a lot of confusion around this technology — with many marketers unsure of how to generate effective marketing materials without a clear visual front-end interface. Without a headless cms visual editor, content creators often feel "blinded," forced to rely on IT for simple layout changes or to wait for production builds just to see a preview.

In our study ‘From Head to Headless’, we found that while 82% of marketers are confident in their understanding and use of a traditional CMS, this drops to only 42% for headless CMSs.

Our research also reveals that this is due to the lack of a clear, visual frontend, which makes it harder for marketers to visualise exactly how their content will appear once published.

To overcome this, Magnolia offers a unique visual editor for single-page applications (SPA) to complement its headless CMS. The SPA editor provides a visual preview for marketers and content teams, while retaining the flexibility of a headless CMS. It allows marketers to view and manipulate the presentation to the user, yet work with clean, structured presentation-independent content.

This hybrid technology approach helps to bridge the gap for marketers by providing a headless CMS architecture, while also giving authors the context and creative control of a traditional CMS and ultimately, empowers brands to provide greater digital experiences to their customers.

To find out more, download the full Head to Headless report here.