This is the fourth post in a series on Sitecore XM Cloud and the pivot to headless decoupled delivery:

1. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for Sitecore
2. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for developers
3. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for Sitecore partners
4. Sitecore XM Cloud's headless content delivery is good for customers

So far in this series we've talked about why a move to headless content delivery is good for Sitecore as the product innovator, developers that implement customer experiences, and Sitecore partners. In this final post we will round things out for customers, the reason we design and build solutions in the first place.

Headless Delivery is Good for Sitecore customers

At the end of the day, the product exists for customers. So what benefits can they get out of this headless-only model? Well, all of the prior reasons mentioned - customers benefit from all of the benefits above because everything else is in service of these customers:

• Customers have more technology options of how they implement (or have their partner implement) an experience: this opens up the door to more partner options and/or more in-house engineering options. No more do they need .NET based internal teams to build solution. If there's an existing team that's more front-end oriented, Sitecore offers rich SDKs for React, Angular, Vue, and Next.js.
• Customers have more hosting options: if they want to host the site themselves (or manage it on a cloud themselves) or have very unique hosting requirements, as long as the technology can consume the APIs, they are good. There's no longer a need to focus on Microsoft-based hosting since the CMS is SaaS and the front-end CX can run on any web technology.
• Customers can achieve global reach and performance more easily: since the website is decoupled from the CMS and it has all of the flexibility mentioned above for hosting options, customers can focus their energy on building performant front-facing experiences while taking advantage of new modern techniques such as Static Site Generation (SSG) and hosting on the edge.
• Customers can expect more security: now the CMS is decoupled from the website and Sitecore can focus its efforts on ensuring the security of the CMS is sound. If a customer decides to build their site using Static Site Generation (SSG) they can attain more security since there is no back-end server responding to page requests.
• Customers can receive CMS feature updates more easily: now that the underlying CMS is hosted by Sitecore as SaaS, this enables Sitecore to better control releases of features as updates.

As you can see, customers benefit from all of the architectural changes with the release of XM Cloud. The next step to consider on the journey to XM Cloud is a migration path. Stay tuned for my next series on that topic!