You might have heard the terms decoupled Drupal or the more sinister sounding headless Drupal - but what the heck does that mean? Basically, you can use the powerful Drupal 8 CMS with custom front-facing website that stands alone as opposed to having the theme and backend powered solely by Drupal.

So why would I want that?

A basic Drupal website may be limiting when your website calls for increased functionality along with integration with other systems. Decoupled Drupal (or headless Drupal, if you will) gives you access to all of the features Drupal offers with a front-end powered separately through other technologies and APIs.

Benefits of Drupal decoupling:

-flexibility and scalability
- freedom to use multiple technologies
- ability to easily replace your front facing website in the future
- your website looks and acts more like an app
- speed and power

Decoupled Drupal really shines when using javascript-based frameworks like Angular.js or its counterparts React.js or Vue.js for progressive web apps, interactive websites and mobile apps. For example, Inclind recently launched RentABeach with the combination of an Angular.js, Apache Solr and Drupal 8. This formula met and exceeded the goal of creating lighting fast search results and enables RentABeach to be leveraged as a progressive web app.

What’s the catch?

Before you go beheading your Drupal website, consider the following:

it takes more time to build the front-end and back-end separately but that same time can be recovered when it’s time to redesign or add in features later be sure that your decoupled Drupal site is built optimally so that you are getting all the benefits of going this route. Thinking about going headless in your Drupal development project? Let's chat about decoupling Drupal for a powerful and scalable website.