From starting their search for a new home online, right up until they get the keys, digital is a powerful tool in meeting consumer expectations and providing an elevated buying experience. More and more homebuilders are embracing new technologies and strategies, including the metaverse, AI, and engaging with influencers, to increase their reach and improve the customer experience.
In this quick guide, we look at one cutting-edge technology framework – headless websites – that can help homebuilders get ahead of the competition and provide an elevated digital experience.
A headless website or headless CMS is a way of setting up a website that separates or decouples the front-end (what a user sees when they visit your website) from the backend content management (e.g. what you see when you’re adding or editing content via a platform like WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, Sanity, etc). Rather than being bundled into a single application and everything being delivered as one every time a page is requested, your front-end website is a static layer, and content is fed to it from your CMS and cached as data via an API layer.
Setting up your website with a headless architecture can offer a number of technological benefits that directly translate to an enhanced experience for potential buyers but also to you when managing property data and how it’s displayed across your digital platforms.
Some headless platforms, such as Sanity, allow you to work with custom data structures and more complex data relationships than other traditional content management systems. In addition, the backend infrastructure of a headless website can be easily scaled separate to the frontend.
This can help you:
- Process more property data without compromising on performance and stability as your development portfolio grows
- Work with, push and pull from multiple APIs, property feeds and portals more seamlessly
- Create a custom client login area to help customers track the progress of their new home and more
With headless, because of the separation between the backend CMS and the frontend, when a page is loaded, the content is pulled from the cached data in the API, and a static version of the frontend is served, rather than the content being pulled from the CMS every time the user requests a page, as with a traditional setup. This helps your website load more quickly and efficiently.
This can help you:
- Stand out amongst your competitors with a faster and slicker digital experience
- Improve organic search performance through better Google Core Web Vitals scores
- Provide a quick and seamless property search/browsing experience even with a large number of properties
- Ensure your digital platform is more stable and keeps sensitive and business critical data secure
Headless is the ideal technology stack for homebuilders, and can help if any or all of the following are priorities:
- Content delivery speed
- Processing significant amounts of property data both too and from your website
- Integrating with and pulling property data from/pushing property data to various systems and platforms
- Providing a digital experience across multiple platforms – e.g. a website with property search, customer portal and/or mobile app
- Scaling your development portfolio rapidly over the next few years and need your digital ecosystem to scale seamlessly with it
- Creating longevity in your digital ecosystem
