← Back to Insights

Headless AEM: Patterns That Work

Sylexa Team · 9/12/2025

Headless CMS with GraphQL powering a frontend application

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Headless lets teams author structured content once and reuse it across web, mobile, and edge surfaces using APIs instead of page-centric rendering. The result is faster delivery, consistent brand expression, and easier testing at scale.

Benefits you can expect: faster release cadence by decoupling content and code; multi‑channel reuse via structured models; cleaner governance with validations; and improved performance by caching API responses at the edge.

Why AEM Headless

AEM Headless lets teams author structured content once and reuse it across web, mobile, and edge surfaces using APIs rather than server-rendered pages.

  • Faster cadence: decouple content and code to ship changes quickly
  • Multi‑channel reuse: model content once, deliver everywhere
  • Governance: validations and workflows enforce quality at publish time
  • Performance: cache persisted query responses at the edge

Core building blocks

  • Content Fragment Models (CFMs): your typed content schema
  • Content Fragments: authored instances aligned to the CFMs
  • GraphQL endpoints: typed APIs to fetch fragments and references
  • Persisted queries: stable, cacheable entry points for clients

Implementation outline

  1. Model: Create CFMs like Article, Author, Topic (title, slug, heroImage, summary, body, tags, author)
  2. Authoring: Add review/publish workflow to ensure quality
  3. API: Enable GraphQL; create persisted queries (getArticles, getArticleBySlug)
  4. Frontend: Call persisted queries from React/Next/Angular and map to components
  5. Delivery: CDN/edge cache persisted query responses; revalidate on publish
  6. Analytics: Emit view events with identifiers (slug/fragment id) for measurement

Usage patterns

List views call a lightweight query (title, slug, image, summary). Detail views call a richer query (body blocks, related content). For personalization, tag fragments with audiences and use your decisioning layer to select content.

Operational tips

  • Version CFMs; favor additive changes over breaking edits
  • Lint persisted queries in CI to prevent accidental changes
  • Rate-limit and key public endpoints to defend against abuse
  • Keep render logic in the frontend—avoid layout in models