Developers have gained a lot by moving away from DXPs and adopting headless tools, especially high performance and flexibility. However, business teams, such as marketing and e-commerce, have lost a lot, notably control of the presentation and understanding of their audience’s exact context. This makes their day-to-day work slower and more frustrating. Worse yet, those business professionals might quit and join a company whose tools support instead of obstruct them from getting work done. Today, we’re releasing two features that restore control to business teams—without technical sacrifices:<ul><li>Canvas: The no-code visual editor in Canvas has been completely revamped to put your work front and center. With an integrated, responsive live preview, you can see how your page looks while building or editing it and, along with new layout-control options, orchestrate the exact context for your audience.</li><li>Project Map: Project Map brings structure to the pages you’re building for a website or app, placing you in the exact spot of your audience’s journey. That capability converts a legacy system’s page hierarchy to a modern composable architecture, accelerating the onboarding process and content velocity for business teams without impacting technical performance or long-term flexibility.</li></ul>Both features are now available for all customers, partners, and Uniform’s free-tier users. Check out the related documentation and try out the features in your Uniform account.<h2>Building with Canvas previews: a new window on your content</h2>Throughout my marketing career, I’ve built a lot of webpages. No matter which tool I use, the Preview button is my best friend. Not just because I’m prone to typos, but because it shows me how my audience will come to my page and their context for reading it. (I’m not claiming I always get this right, but I do try.) Our updates to Canvas make this seamless: Your preview sits right in the middle of the interface, showing what you’re working on and how it will look to your audience. There’s even a handy button to switch between desktop and mobile previews.This is what marketers and merchandisers using headless architectures have been dreaming of: The ability to build a page with content from any of your connected sources and see exactly how the page will look in any screen size before publishing it. No more “publish and pray” or those heart-stopping moments when you realize that things look wrong after they’re live. (We’ve all been there and it feels pretty bad.)<h3>Composing with Canvas: everything at your fingertips</h3>How do I build a page with Canvas? I’m glad you asked!<ol><li>Create a composition, which is often a page of your website or app or, but can also be delivered to a kiosk or email. 

A Uniform project can support multiple page types, each of which you can tailor for specific roles and permissions. For example, your commerce team manages category homepages while your growth team controls landing pages. Additionally, each composition type can access various components, leading to a faster build process and ensuring brand uniformity.

You now have a blank canvas to work with. (Do you see what we did there?)
</li><li>On the left side of the screen, add a component, e.g., a “hero,” a content carousel, or another specialist component. The selection of components is dictated by your page type.
</li><li>Build the content. Uniform Mesh’s powerful integrations facilitate content sourcing from all connected services: a CMS, commerce platform, DAM, or search like <a href="https://www.algolia.com/">Algolia</a>. Simply connect the component to the entry you need or create one in the system. 

This is the same process you’re leveraging a modern headless source or a connected legacy platform like <a href="https://uniform.dev/integrations/sitecore">Sitecore</a>.

Alternatively, enter content directly into Canvas. That option is great if your content is for a short-term project or is really dependent on its context, as in the case of a CTA button or an event registration page. 
</li><li>Make your page look great. You can also control the presentation of your content with Canvas, firstly by choosing and ordering your components. Each component can also contain an incredible array of options and variants, which can easily be deployed by designer and front-end engineers. This gives page editors far more flexibility in how to tell stories without the need for developer support

Also for designers, those features eliminate a load of custom or one-off tasks since, once a component or variant is in Uniform, it can be used for all subsequent pages. Created is an ever-expanding library without constant manual updates, which affords marketers unlimited flexibility and compliance with the brand’s design language.

For developers, it also has :

Short term, they have far fewer tickets and Slack requests to handle because they no longer need to support publication or layout changes. That means that they can focus on value-add features and plan sprints more accurately. Also, unlike most visual tools for headless systems, Uniform is very quick to implement—instead of having to mark up their output in order for it to function they just have to add Uniform SDKs and it works!

Long term, moving presentation data to Uniform lets headless systems be truly headless. They can eliminate extra fields to control a page’s featured item or text alignment options for a hero image. This can reduce the number of content types they need to manage, and content can much more easily across services to accommodate evolving needs and omnichannel requirements. </li><li>Sometimes we all need the boss to sign off. Fortunately, Canvas makes it easy to share a single link of the draft page so that approvers see everything in full context, accelerating your workflows and keeping your content moving. Whether it&#39;s your legal team, an external partner, or just a slightly neurotic product marketer (not me, of course), it only takes two clicks to send the content their way.

For security, previews can be password controlled and to further manage workflows, you can restrict publication permissions to certain roles so that only the right people can give the final go-ahead. </li><li>Once you’ve built a page, perfected its layout, and obtained all the signoffs, it’s time to publish. Whether it’s a website, an app, an email, or an Alexa skill, publishing in only one click on Canvas. No need for developers to activate anything because business teams have complete control of their own workflows and schedules. </li></ol><h2>Reading the Project Map</h2>To build a great digital experience, you need to understand your audience’s journey. But when headless tools decouple content from presentation, that’s really difficult. That’s why we’ve built Project Map, which combines a traditional sitemap’s structure and control with the the speed and agility benefits of composable architectures. Project Map is unique in the composable space, and we’re beyond excited about how it will boost the efficiency and effectiveness of business teams. Through Project Map, you can easily see at a glance the structure of your project and pinpoint exactly where in the customer journey your content will appear. Not only can you create content in the right place faster, but you can also easily find the relevant content for reuse or redeployment to reduce duplicated effort and deliver faster. Rather than an abstracted “content lake,” where you need to search with the right term to find what you’re after, Project Map takes only a quick scan to find the right answer. To start using Project Map, navigate to where your content will be in the structure, click Create, and name the content. Project Map then ensures that your content is in the right place and automatically handles your URL-management. Then you can dedicate yourself to building pages, worry free.<h2>Achieving composable without compromise</h2>Canvas and Project Map bridge the experience gap for business teams in a composable architecture and arm them with the tools to work efficiently and independently. The easier, more familiar experience that emerges for business teams not only accelerates content velocity but also builds team morale, in turn raising your employee retention rate. You can then devote your efforts on improvements rather than training. Additionally, as new employees come on board, those tools are a cinch to learn.Crucially, Canvas and Project Map deliver all of these benefits without reducing the speed or flexibility of a truly composable setup or dictating the tools required. That means that marketers are empowered with great tools without impacting developer flexibility or speed. Ultimately, that’s what our mantra, composable without compromise, means. 

In <a href="https://uniform-2.wistia.com/medias/ybw8yyiwlw">this video</a>, you can see me walk you through how to use the new features to quickly build a page that combines multiple data sources with full preview and publish it without any developer support.If you&#39;re a developer who wants to learn more about how to set this up for your teams, or check out our <a href="https://docs.uniform.app/guides/composition/contextual-editing">documentation</a> or you can watch videos on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UyYXnCpPd8">Canvas</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrCtdwmF9fg">Project Map</a>

Arming business teams with visibility and control creating great UX

Being a CMO is tough. You’re caught between tactical sales and pipeline goals and also have strategic targets of elevating the brand and reaching customers in new channels. This would be enough, before you even consider that <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-analytics/types-of-jobs-with-most-turnover">marketing teams have some of the highest turnover in an organization</a>. Any captain will tell you that it’s hard to move the boat fast if you’re constantly swapping out sailors. That’s why I always make sure to listen carefully to my teams’ complaints, and whether the complaints-per-month rate is going up.One of the main reasons marketers leave their jobs is because they get frustrated at the tools they have to use. It’s the same reason your plumber would quit if you told them they could only use tools made of plastic: it’s impossible to do a good job. And it’s really annoying. Unfortunately, this is the situation many marketing teams have found themselves in—especially when they are using headless services. Engineers sing the praises of these new tools, and they aren’t wrong to do that. Most of them do the jobs they were designed to do extremely well, especially on a technical level. The problem comes from their specialization and disconnection, which makes life very difficult for marketers.While these tools have been amazing for technical teams (they do love a good API), their specialization and disconnection has made it really hard for marketers to understand where content will exist in the customer journey and how an end user will see it. If it takes five tabs and a begging Slack message to a busy developer in order to publish a regular page, it gets awfully tempting to open up a sixth tab so you can check LinkedIn for a job where you’re empowered to do great work.As a Marketing leader, it could be easy to dismiss these issues as teething problems in a new system. That means you won’t necessarily see these problems until the resignations start to pile up, and you need to rebuild the team. Once you’ve done that, the cycle of bad tools frustrating your best talent will only continue until you do something about it. <h2>Tools make teams effective—or ineffective</h2>So, unless you want to fill the same job three times in two years, it’s a good idea to listen to your team’s complaints about the tools they use—even if Engineering insists that everything is great. Engineering will soon feel the impact of this problem, as I’ll explain later.As a marketing leader, your role is to advocate hard for your team and pick the technologies that satisfy its needs. Otherwise, those folks must work in spite of their tools instead of with them, and your star performers won’t put up with that for long.Think of a train ride that runs well for passengers. If the driver must constantly run to different parts of the train to keep it running and call an engineer for help three times a day, that’s not a sustainable situation. Or vice-versa, the driver has a lovely experience in a comfortable chair while passengers cling to the outside hoping they reach their destination. Why should you accept that in your experience stack?<h2>A platform only works if it works for everyone</h2>If your organization deems your stack “<a href="https://chiefmartec.com/2021/05/entire-martech-stack-really-one-big-virtual-platform/">one big virtual platform</a>,” your marketers have to live with that reality. As the gap between expectations of the larger stack grows, <a href="https://chiefmartec.com/2021/04/martech-tools-manual-tasks/">so do manual tasks and frustrations</a>. Concurrently, so does the list of job openings you must fill. Because they help solve many challenges for the developers of marketing stacks, <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">headless content management systems (CMSes)</a> have been widely adopted by mature marketing teams. These systems are cloud-centric and API-first, which brings performance, flexibility and integration advantages over legacy tools—if you implement them correctly.But it turns out that a lot of the time, a head is really useful! By disconnecting content from its context in the customer journey, the authoring experience becomes a lot more complicated. While this approach has benefits for omnichannel delivery, it’s undeniably a very steep learning curve and a lot of unnecessary turmoil.That’s because in many purchasing processes, the marketer experience has been a secondary—or completely ignored—concern. That means that when the new system is implemented–after a long, expensive replatforming process that doesn’t create any immediate value for your customers–common tasks like building a hero component and assigning a CTA to site visitors require a ridiculous amount of copy and pasting elements among numerous tabs and tools. That creates a huge mental load of context switching to do simple tasks.If a marketer thinks that the best way to tell a story needs even a basic layout change such as a different color choice or to change the text alignment—this isn’t supported in a truly headless setup and they will need developer support—delaying things even more.If it sounds complicated to create great customer experiences in a headless system, that’s because it is.These complexities and dependencies can grind your content pipeline to a halt. That means your bets need to be bigger and you can say goodbye to agile “test and learn” workflows, or the ability to respond to market or wider strategic changes.<h2>Frustrated editors are a big problem for developers</h2>When Engineering leadership implement systems that work well for their developers but not Marketing, they will quickly find out that they should be careful what they wish for. Headless architectures give developers the tooling and flexibility they love, but the lack of business-user autonomy will come back to bite them.By making life harder for marketers and other business teams, developers open themselves up to more tickets and interruptions. After a few weeks, they’ll realize that this isn’t a teething problem, but the constant Slack messages and tickets are the new normal. Constant emergency requests lead to disruptions and context switching, making it hard to plan sprints effectively and impacting delivery of the value-add features that are used to measure KPIs.A compromise that many teams reach is adding some presentation fields to their headless CMSes, giving marketers some limited control over presentation. However, this ties the content to a particular front-end presentation—making it harder to redeploy the content to a new context or channel. This undermines the whole point of using a headless CMS.<h2>You’re all one team so act like it</h2>You need to work together because, ultimately, an organization can move only as fast as its slowest team. Accelerating engineering at the expense of business users (and vice versa) is always a false economy and a bad idea. That’s why smart leaders must take a step back and explore the root cause of their problem across business functions rather than assuming that their truth is the only one that matters.Even though complaints from both business and technical teams may seem like they’re against your CMS or other tools in your stack, the true source of the issue normally lies in how they enforce a specific way of working that makes your teams’ lives harder.Before the frustration transitions to yet another <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a> effort to “solve all the problems once and for all,” (who hasn’t heard that line before) consider implementing a solution that can meet all the teams’ needs so that everyone can work fast and effectively. With Uniform<a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition"> Digital Experience Composition platform (DXCP)</a>, you can—<ul><li>Empower marketers to build and preview experiences on top of those agile SaaS tools (and even legacy systems) with a clear, visual interface and a Project Map to fully understand the customer’s context and journey.</li><li>Give developers the power and flexibility to test and deploy modern tools and frameworks to keep performance and functionality at the cutting edge of your industry. </li><li>Speed up your team’s output and cycle time to learn and adapt, and keep pace with your customers because you can divide and conquer by working in parallel. </li></ul>You can see this in action <a href="/canvas">Uniform Canvas</a>, which provides a consistent interface for business users like marketers and merchandisers to tell stories and control the presentation for every channel. In short, it’s everything they loved about traditional DXPs, but without the technical tradeoffs (or sky-high price tag).On a technical level, Uniform Canvas allows developers total control of modern frameworks and the ability to smoothly adapt and innovate with headless and legacy tools. Both teams can then work faster and can work to their own KPIs without becoming interdependent.As uncertainties continue to prevail in the economic landscape, the technical and marketing leaders that truly listen to what their teams need and give them the tools that propel them rather than weigh them down are the winners. <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">Schedule a free demo</a> to see how Uniform DXCP can lower your complaints-per-month (CPM) rate.

The other CPM to worry about: Complaints-per-month

DXPs had great success by building tools that enabled business teams to build personalized digital experiences. However, for developers, those platforms were a time sink, forcing them to become experts in proprietary technologies and constraining their ability to innovate. Despite their modernization efforts, DXP vendors failed to adapt to market changes as headless-technology vendors emerged with a different vision of how digital experiences should be built and who should control the process. <h2>Headless gained popularity</h2>Headless technologies went in the opposite direction: open APIs and outstanding tools for developers but a nightmare for business users. Suddenly, marketers and merchandisers had to jump between tools and request developer support for even routine tasks. All too often, marketers’ requests were trapped in the developer backlog.Still, the significant gains offered by headless made the trade-offs worthwhile. Brands could deliver experience at such high speed that their SEO ranking soared. Not only did more conversions result, but brands also became more agile, capable of responding quickly to changing business needs.<h2>Composable was born</h2>Headless led to composable, whereby brands build a stack based on their needs instead of buying a bloated DXP suite. In response, vendors in the monolithic DXP and headless arenas called themselves composable almost overnight.The theory makes a lot of sense but, In practice, composable is very difficult to do well. Many brands are stuck with tools that are connected by endless custom glue code that’s slow to build and expensive to maintain. Some organizations have tried to overcome those issues with agency accelerators, but in reality that just means they’re stuck in the agency’s glue rather than their own. Even though that might speed up short-term delivery, the long-term lock-in issue still exists and is potentially even worse.

As I like to say, “Composable tools don’t compose themselves.” Both DXP and headless encompass three serious issues: <ul><li>Time-consuming implementation and expensive stacks</li><li>Slow response to changes in strategy</li><li>Unhappy users who don’t like their tools</li></ul>In today’s hypercompetitive market, brands can’t afford to spend time on workarounds, and of course they don’t want experts to quit because they’re sick of using tools they hate.Business teams and development teams end up in conflict with each other, competing for tools that work for one but not the other. This is the reality in the industry, as we see any time we talk about a purchasing process is either “marketing-led” or “developer-led.”But that’s not right!For the business to thrive, both business and developer teams must be empowered. That was what we set out to do when we founded Uniform.[![DXC ebook Banner Image](https://res.cloudinary.com/uniformdev/image/upload/w_700,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2.0/marketing/blog/DXC_Ebook_Blogbanner.png)](https://uniform.dev/resources/unlock-composability-with-dxc)<h2>Digital experience composition came into play</h2>At its founding, Uniform had two key goals:<ul><li>To build a platform that allows developers to select the best framework for their job and account for rapid innovation. For example, JavaScript, Next.js, and Nuxt lead the way as I write this, but Sveltekit and Astro might be trending next year. We wanted developers to have the power of choice and use the best tools for the job, not what someone decided years ago was right for them. </li><li>To free business users from the developer backlog, enabling them to build fast digital experiences and realize the DXP vision without being constrained by rigid, sluggish websites.</li></ul>Earlier this year, to our delight, Gartner recognized what we were doing as part of the industry movement and defined <a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">digital experience composition</a> as a category with three layers:<ul><li>Composable integration, through which you can snap in the technologies from your stack and, when it’s time for replacement, simply remove them and add new ones with no need for costly <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a>.</li><li>Experience builder, which is what separates digital experience composition from an API aggregator, giving back business users the visibility and control of what they’re building.</li><li>Front-end orchestration, where your design system works, decoupled from all sources and gaining efficiency by being able to assemble content from various components—with total freedom of framework selection.</li></ul>In a composed solution, the composable API orchestration and front-end layer are connected by glue code, removing so much of the flexibility and ability to innovate that makes a tangible difference to business outcomes. This problem is even worse in large, complex stacks, where the number of integrations between tools gets exponential.With digital experience composition&#39;s no-code orchestration layer, your marketers and other business users can compose digital experiences based on your design system, your underlying technologies, and the content business teams create—without involving developers at all.Together, those layers are where business teams and developers intersect. Developers can add components in the top layer and map them to sources from the bottom layer. Business teams are free to use those components for any experience. The result is lightning-fast compositions for any channel in the context of the visitors’ in-the-moment intent.Uniform digital experience composition platform (DXCP) makes that vision a reality. It’s so easy to adapt your stack to meet changing business needs that it doesn’t go stale. In fact, as you build a more sustainable platform, your stack’s value rises as you can easily incorporate new technologies to take advantage of innovations and learnings faster than your competitors. <h2>New version of Uniform DXCP is now available</h2>Today, we are releasing major updates to Uniform DXCP with exciting new capabilities.<h3>A more visual Uniform Canvas </h3>At its initial release, Uniform Canvas functioned as a no-code, experience-orchestration layer for business users to easily create and manage compositions: pages, emails, apps. It had the convenience of a page-builder, but with true omnichannel functionality.The new <a href="https://uniform.dev/canvas">Uniform Canvas</a>m.dev/canvas includes an integrated and responsive multi source live preview so that business users can fully engage with the context of what they are building, accelerating their digital experience delivery.<h3>Structure management in Project Map</h3>A major request from our partners has been to structure the underlying technologies so that large sites or apps become more intuitive to users.Project Map brings hierarchy-management capability to Uniform Canvas, transforming composability at scale without compromising the underlying tools. This structure makes it much easier to visualize an experience, locate key content, and give them ownership over their area of a digital experience. That’s especially relevant at enterprise scales, where headless tools’ lack of structure has been a major barrier to adoption.<h3>Superpowered integrations</h3>We’ve boosted our Mesh integrations, making it even faster to connect and build with Uniform before going to market. With a few clicks, you can connect, for example, a review API to products, or location data to a point of interest.

The new integrations include edgehancers. As you might have guessed from the name, they enhance performance by delivering content to the CDN edge from any source out of the box. That means that users worldwide get the best possible experience and that SEO performance is greatly enhanced.These new integrations also include surgical cache invalidation, which enables content updates to go live instantaneously after publication. If you’ve ever spoken to a marketer who has pushed a typo to the company homepage, you’ll know how valuable this feature is.All the new features are available through DXCP Catalyst, our white-glove support program, to our current and new enterprise customers, as well as select partners; and will come to our free tier in 2023. To add the features to your Uniform projects, get in touch with our team.If you’re new to Uniform and want to understand more about what our DXCP solution can do for you, click the <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">Request Demo</a> button at the top of this page. <h2>More about digital experience composition</h2><ul><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">What is digital experience composition?</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/explaining-dxc-and-its-benefits-to-marketers">What is digital experience composition and why should marketers care?</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/from-dxp-to-headless-to-composable-to-dxc">Why digital experience composition is the future</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/why-the-rush-to-composable-is-not-paying-off-for-marketers">Why the rush to composable is not paying off for marketers</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/tame-the-martech-chaos-with-dxc-and-mach">Tame the martech chaos with digital experience composition and MACH</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/orchestrating-composable-systems-harmonizes-team-workflows">Bring harmony to digital teams by orchestrating composable systems</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/digital-experience-composition-dxc/are-digital-experience-solutions-truly-composable-or-just-composed">Are digital experience solutions truly composable or just composed?</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/demystifying-digital-experience-composition-lars-birkholm-petersen/">Demystifying digital experience composition</a></li></ul>

Why digital experience composition is the future

A 2020 <a href="https://insights.wundermanthompsoncommerce.com/hubfs/@UK/Landing%20Pages/2020/Headless%20+%20Microservices/WTC%20-%20Headless,%20Microservices%20and%20the%20Future%20of%20Commerce%20Platforms.pdf">report</a> found that over three quarters of companies surveyed had adopted a headless approach for e-commerce or planned to do so within a year. And for good reason:<ul><li>Composable commerce enables developers to build digital experiences without the constraints imposed by traditional systems. </li><li>Like <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/headless-cms/uniform-for-headless-cms">headless CMS</a>, composable commerce stores data irrespective of eventual delivery. As a result, you can sell on any page or channel you choose, becoming much more responsive as customers adopt new channels. As <a href="https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/headless-commerce">this article</a> puts it, “The world is your storefront.”</li></ul><h2>Challenges of composable commerce</h2>Unfortunately, certain benefits of composable commerce, particularly the freedom to build storefronts any way you desire, are problematic, posing challenges that don’t exist in traditional commerce platforms. A key issue is the inability of composable commerce to transform e-commerce from a simple catalog and ordering system into a full-fledged shopping experience. Two reasons:<ul><li>By default, composable commerce shifts control away from marketers and merchandisers to developers, who must integrate and orchestrate systems, including commerce, content sources, customer-data sources, and marketing technology. As tools proliferate, it becomes increasingly difficult for business teams to take charge of the shopping experience without support from developers, hence delays in reacting to changing business conditions. Also, since developers are in short supply, implementation is more time consuming and costly.</li><li>Composable commerce makes personalizing and previewing content tough to do—a rude awakening for business teams and a disappointment for customers.</li></ul>
In fact, according to a <a href="https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics">2019 survey</a>, 74 percent of customers feel frustrated with unpersonalized websites. However, adopting composable products is complicated, requiring that those products be connected so that they can work together. Uniform serves as the bridge for that connection in a <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-platforms-what-why-how">composable architecture</a>—a process called <a href="https://uniform.dev/what-is-digital-experience-composition">digital experience composition platform (DXCP)</a> and a critical component for building digital experiences.<h2>Uniform as the answer</h2>For brands that desire the flexibility and speed of composable commerce along with the control accorded by <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/the-mach-monolith">legacy monoliths</a>, the answer is Uniform. Available from Uniform for marketers are independent personalization tools that are absent in composable architectures in addition to the scalability, security, and speed that makes composable the choice for most modern e-commerce implementations. It’s the best of both worlds.<h3>For marketers and merchandisers</h3>Using Uniform Canvas’s no-code interface, marketers and merchandisers can easily build seamless e-commerce experiences. Here’s why:<ul><li>Developers lay the groundwork. Uniform connects headless content and commerce to the front-end frameworks, libraries, and tools that make up the “head” in headless commerce. That way, developers can set up the components and connections that business teams need, and then simply step back to let those teams publish independently. </li><li>Business teams combine commerce, content, and the front end. With Uniform Canvas, a no-code tool, business teams can build experiences and instantly preview them by assembling the front-end components with any connected source and determining how to present them to the audience. This flexibility of input and output in a single step is extremely difficult to achieve with headless services without Uniform. </li><li>Personalization that’s usable. A <a href="https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics">2019 survey</a> revealed that “80 percent of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.” Traditionally, to add personalization, you had to adopt a monolithic platform that was tightly coupled with the vendor’s commerce application. Plus, your audience had to wait while their information was sent to a server and the personalized content loaded on the page. All that caused sluggish performance and lower SEO rankings. </li></ul>Not any more. You can now personalize your site with composable commerce and Uniform’s no-code interface for building experiences. They’re then delivered at the <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/personalization/personalizing-webpages-with-akamai-edgeworkers">edge by the CDN</a> of your choice without impacting page performance, so no more SEO impact or bounces from slow loading. Here, instead of incorporating the best of both worlds, Uniform offers a whole new world for <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/personalization/personalizing-shopping-experiences-with-headless-commerce">personalization performance</a>.Unlike traditional origin-based, rules-oriented <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/personalization/personalization-at-mach-speed">personalization</a>, which can be complex to build and difficult to maintain, Uniform’s simple and intuitive personalization solution rests on two simple concepts: <ul><li>Intents, i.e., the goals of your site’s visitors </li><li>Signals, i.e., the visitors’ real-time behaviors that make those intents clearer. </li></ul>The purpose of personalization is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to realize their intents. Uniform’s innovative personalization interface blends seamlessly with your commerce tool so that you can tag components and content with intents and define the signals that support them. Afterwards, based on those intents and visitors’ real-time behaviors, Uniform’s personalization capability identifies your site’s most relevant content for your visitors anywhere you choose—not just on the product-details page. In addition, you can add A/B testing to components and preview personalization in real time.Not surprisingly, such ease of use for marketers and merchandisers and enhanced visitor experience promise to raise profits for your brand. In fact, according to <a href="https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics">a forecast</a>, “Smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15 percent.”<h3>For developers</h3>Uniform liberates developers from constraints imposed by proprietary commerce tools, giving them the freedom to build. In particular, developers can—<ul><li>Choose their tools and frameworks. Composable commerce with Uniform means you no longer have to work the way you do with legacy commerce tools. Uniform Mesh integrates your commerce tools and any other composable services as the front-end framework of your choice. You choose the best tools for the job.</li><li>Build and adapt faster. Integrating through Uniform removes the need to spend weeks or months writing custom integration code. Instead, you add services to Uniform, input your API keys, and get to work. As business goals evolve or if customers adopt new channels, Uniform’s modular approach makes it straightforward to change or expand your stack without refactoring or <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">replatforming</a>. </li><li>Work on features, not publication. Sometimes, the best gift is a little space. By giving your business colleagues the tools to create, test, and publish independently, you enable them to work at their own pace. Simultaneously, you have no publication tickets to handle and can focus on building value-add features.</li></ul><h2>The future of commerce is composable</h2>By delivering the speed and agility that monolithic architectures cannot match and that are required in today’s fast-changing business climate, composable commerce is here to stay. However, a powerful commerce engine isn&#39;t enough: Since a modern commerce experience combines multiple services and channels, you need a digital-experience composition tool to coordinate them all. With Uniform, you can quickly realize the full potential of composable commerce and create market-leading experiences, including personalization, which invariably drives conversions. Additionally, your developers can build the front end their way on a modern, performant architecture that readily adapts to your needs in an unpredictable market.<a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">Contact us</a> and learn how Uniform can accelerate your composable commerce experience.<h2>More about composable architecture:</h2><ul><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-platforms-what-why-how">Composable architecture: the what, why, and how</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/when-legacy-met-composable-a-dxp-love-story">​​When legacy met composable: a DXP love story</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/the-mach-monolith">The MACH monolith</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/composable-architectures-are-the-future-of-the-digital-sphere">The move from monolithic to composable architectures</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/uniform-for-headless-commerce">Uniform as a crucial tool for composable commerce</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/switching-vendors-for-digital-architectures-without-replatforming">Switching vendors for digital architectures without replatforming</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/a-cheat-sheet-for-getting-composable-right">A cheat sheet for getting composable right</a></li><li><a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/composable-architecture/mach-versus-monolithic-suites">MACH versus monolithic suites</a></li></ul>

Uniform as a crucial tool for composable commerce

Pinning your hopes on a headless content management system (CMS)? If so, you’re not alone. Nonetheless, despite the many benefits of headless, do be aware of its limitations and familiarize yourself with the tools that address them.<h2>Headless CMS explained</h2><a href="https://uniform.dev/cms/what-is-a-cms">What is a CMS?</a> A traditional CMS contains components, such as a headline, images, and text, with which you can consistently and easily build a product, typically a webpage. However, because the components are usually earmarked for a single purpose, instead of reusing some or all of them to develop, say, an app, you must start from scratch by storing a second copy of the same headline, images, and text that are already in your CMS. That’s a tedious, redundant, inefficient, and costly process.In comparison, a <a href="https://uniform.dev/cms/what-is-a-headless-cms">headless CMS</a> is much more flexible:<ul><li>A traditional CMS stores both the content and its intended presentation together, combining them to produce one and only one output. </li><li>The “head” that’s missing in a headless CMS is the output. Rather than being locked into a presentation layer, a headless CMS stores content with no regard of its eventual presentation.</li></ul><h2>Benefits of going headless</h2>What are the <a href="https://uniform.dev/cms/headless-cms-benefits">benefits of a headless CMS</a>? In 2021, the market for <a href="https://www.precisionreports.co/global-headless-cms-software-industry-research-report-competitive-landscape-market-22069369">headless CMS totaled $490.0 million</a> and, impressively, to expand by 3X, reaching USD 1500.0 million by 2027. In addition to making content creators and developers happy by offering flexibility that meets today’s growing multichannel demand, headless CMSes are—<ul><li>Creators can focus on content. Separating content from presentation simplifies life for content creators, who no longer have to worry about the format, layout, or other aspects of page architecture. Instead, those creators can focus on what they’re good at: content.</li><li>Versatile for modern front-end development. Developers are free to use the languages and tools they prefer without being constrained by the technology and approach dictated by the CMS.</li><li>Channel agnostic. You can present the same content in various formats with a headless architecture, allowing teams to meet the rising demands for multiple forms of display without replicating content across multiple systems .</li></ul><h2>Problems of going headless</h2>Nonetheless, headless CMSes come with two major drawbacks: <ul><li>Business teams are forced to relinquish control to developers. The fact that headless CMSes have nothing to do with presentation shifts the burden of responsibility to developers, depriving business teams of control. That phenomenon has proved to be a huge adoption blocker for headless systems.</li><li>Personalization becomes problematic. Although a must-have for many sites, personalization being neither content nor layout has no real home in headless architectures. However, since those tools cannot access the content in the CMS, personalization winds up disconnected from content, which defeats personalization’s primary purpose of delivering the most relevant content to visitors.</li></ul><h2>Headless integration</h2>Gratifyingly, headless integration saves the day: You select the headless CMS along with the front-end technology you want, and then integrate them through <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/orchestration-versus-automation">composable orchestration</a>. Three major benefits result:<ul><li>Business autonomy is restored. With composable orchestration, business teams can readily compose and customize pages and templates without developer help—an independence that results in significant time savings.</li><li>Multisource composition becomes an option. Nowadays, even though companies frequently draw content from multiple systems, integrating those systems can be a logistical nightmare. By adopting composable orchestration, you can use a single composition tool to build digital experiences that contain content from multiple sources, such as a commerce platform, DAM or another CMS without custom integration.</li><li>Personalization returns as a familiar workflow. Instead of having developers programmatically add personalization and relinquish control, business teams can personalize webpages as they used to through composable orchestration.</li></ul><h2>The best of both worlds</h2>Adding your CMS to Uniform results in a headless CMS that yields flexibility and speed in addition to the traditional CMS benefits. Several advantages come to mind:<ul><li>Developer choice. Since Uniform imposes no requirements or restrictions on front-end development, developers gain time for their job of building fast and effective components.</li><li>Accelerated time to market. By connecting services with Uniform’s prebuilt integrations, developers can save weeks or even months of integration work while still delivering a great user experience. That approach also makes it much simpler to expand or adapt a stack to meet changing customer or organizational needs.</li><li>Presentation control. Uniform Canvas integrates content to the front-end framework, giving business teams much more control over how to present information from a single content type in the headless CMS. That way, content becomes reusable across channels with no need to add presentation information in the CMS.</li><li>Faster performance. Unlike sluggish origin-based personalization, Uniform’s edge-side personalization runs superfast on your CDN. You’re free to choose the technology you want while counting on the CDN for superior performance and scalability that server-side personalization can never measure up to.</li><li>MACH membership and Jamstack compatibility. <a href="https://uniform.dev/blogs/uniform-accelerates-composability-with-the-mach-alliance">Uniform is a member of the MACH Alliance</a>, which “advocates for an open and best-of-need enterprise technology ecosystem.” Also, Uniform’s offering is compatible with Jamstack, whose objective is “<a href="https://jamstack.org/what-is-jamstack/">to make the Web faster, more secure, and easier to scale.</a>” With no dependence on proprietary technologies or nonstandard frameworks, both MACH and Jamstack emphasize ease of integration. Tools built according to either standard fit well with Uniform.</li></ul>Uniform sets up an environment in which systems work together smoothly and lets teams work independently to get their work to end users. Marketers and merchandisers <a href="https://uniform.dev/cms/choose-headless-cms">get to choose content</a> from any and control the visual presentation to create digital experiences, and developers can focus on features and components that add value rather than having to manage publication workflows.Ultimately, Uniform enhances the best parts of headless CMS, such as speed and flexibility, while also offering many of the features they relied on for digital experiences, such as page composition and personalization. What’s more, Uniform does all that blazingly fast. <a href="https://uniform.dev/demo">Contact us</a> to learn how Uniform can accelerate the process of creating content.

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