Web Development

Headless CMS development

A headless CMS separates your content from how it’s displayed. That brings real freedom and some real costs, so it’s worth being sure you need it.

Discuss Your Project

In a traditional CMS, the content and the website are one system. In a headless setup the CMS only stores and manages content, and a separate front end fetches it through an API. The same product description can feed your website, your app and your in-store screens without anyone copying and pasting.

The benefits are real when you have them: multi-channel publishing, a modern front end free from the CMS’s templates, excellent performance from pre-rendered pages, and a smaller attack surface. There are also costs people don’t always mention. You have two systems to host and maintain. Live preview needs setting up rather than coming as standard. Marketers lose some of the drag-and-drop freedom they may be used to, unless you deliberately build it back.

Who should stick with something simpler

If you have one website, a small team and no plans for other channels, headless often adds cost without adding much for you. A well-built WordPress or custom site will usually do the job for less. We’d rather talk you out of it than sell you complexity you’ll be paying for every year.

When headless is worth the extra moving parts

Content copied between channels

The same copy is maintained separately for the website, the app and elsewhere, and it drifts apart.

A front end held back by the CMS

Your developers can’t use modern tooling, because the CMS dictates how pages are built.

Content that needs structure

Products, locations or courses need reusing and filtering, not storing as long pages of formatted text.

What the work involves

Content modelling

Designing content types and relationships around how your content is reused, not how pages look today.

CMS setup

Configuration of Sanity, Contentful, Strapi or Statamic, including roles, workflows and previews.

Front-end build

Fast sites with Next.js, Nuxt or Astro, using static generation or server rendering as each page requires.

Content migration

Scripted import from your current system, with cleaning and redirects.

Editor experience

Live preview and reusable page sections, so marketers stay independent of developers.

Where it fits

  • Publishing to a website and an app from one source
  • Large sites with heavily reused, structured content
  • International sites with translation workflows

Technology

  • Sanity
  • Contentful
  • Strapi
  • Statamic
  • Next.js
  • Nuxt
  • Astro
  • GraphQL

Headless CMS questions

Is a headless CMS better for SEO?
Not by itself. A headless site can be very fast, which helps, but the front end has to output server-rendered HTML, metadata and structured data properly. Done badly, client-only rendering can make things worse.
What does a headless CMS cost to run?
Expect platform subscription fees for hosted products (some are priced by users and usage), plus hosting for the front end and more developer involvement than a traditional CMS.
Which headless CMS do you recommend?
It depends on your content and team. Sanity is very flexible, Contentful suits larger organisations, while Strapi and Statamic can be self-hosted. We’d look at your content model and budget before recommending one.

Related services

Interested in Headless CMS Development?

Outline what you need, and we will reply by email with questions or next steps.

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