Headless CMS development
One content model, several front-ends, and an editor screen people will actually use.
We model, build and populate headless content platforms: Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, Payload and Storyblok, usually behind a Next.js 16 front-end. The part that decides whether the project works is the content model and the editing experience. The logo on the dashboard is the least interesting decision we will make together.
What is a headless CMS, and when is it worth the money?
A headless CMS keeps content as structured data and serves it over an API, with no opinion about how it looks. Your website, your app, an in-store screen and your email templates all read the same records, and each front-end is built with whatever suits it.
The argument for it is not that it is modern. It is that content stops being pages. In a traditional CMS a case study is one page, so putting it on the service page, the industry page and the home page means three copies and three chances to forget an edit. Modelled properly, that case study is a single record with a client reference, a service reference and structured results, and every page that wants it queries for it. The two years of quiet inconsistency never accumulate.
What you give up is everything that came free. No theme, no front-end, no preview until somebody builds them, and an editing experience that is exactly as good as the schema you designed. A headless project that skipped content modelling is worse than WordPress: editors meet a wall of unlabelled fields, give up, and start emailing documents to the marketing manager again.
So the first week goes on the model. Which content types genuinely exist, what references what, what repeats, what should be a reusable block, and what an editor should never be able to change. Then the schema, the preview and the Next.js front-end. Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, Payload and Storyblok are all capable; hosting rules, budget and how technical your editors are will pick one for you. If none of that applies, WordPress is still a perfectly good answer and we will say so.
What we build with a headless CMS
Content modelling
The types, fields and references your content really has, designed before a line is written and documented for whoever inherits it.
Explore →Next.js front-ends
Statically generated pages that revalidate the moment an editor publishes, so the site is quick without ever being out of date.
Explore →Editor experience
Live preview, grouped fields, validation, roles and a review workflow. If your team dreads opening it, we built it wrong.
Migration from WordPress
Existing content mapped into real types rather than poured into one rich-text field, with every URL and ranking carried across.
Explore →Multi-market and multi-language
One model, several locales, translation workflow for the editors and hreflang handled correctly at the front-end.
Multi-channel delivery
The same records feeding a website, a mobile app and partner or in-store surfaces from one API and one publish action.
Our headless content stack
Headless compared with the alternatives
Headless vs WordPress
WordPress is cheaper, quicker to launch, and your editors already know it. Headless earns its cost when the same content has to appear in several places or on several channels, when the front-end must be genuinely fast, or when an exposed PHP surface is not acceptable to your security team. Running WordPress as the editor with a separate front-end is a legitimate middle path and we ship it often.
Sanity vs Strapi vs Contentful
Sanity has the best editing and preview experience and a query language worth the afternoon it takes to learn. Strapi and Payload are self-hostable, which settles it when data residency rules apply, and they have no per-seat pricing to grow into. Contentful is the safe enterprise pick with the governance and support contracts procurement wants. We recommend on constraints, not preference.
A headless CMS vs JSON files in the repository
For a site only developers edit, content in version-controlled files is simpler, cheaper and fully typed. This website works that way. Introduce a CMS at the moment a non-developer needs to publish without a deployment, and not one project earlier.
Headless CMS, answered
Which headless CMS should we choose?
Non-technical editors who need preview: Sanity or Storyblok. Content that must stay on your own infrastructure: Strapi or Payload. Enterprise governance, support contracts and a procurement process: Contentful. We will name one after seeing your content types and meeting the people who publish, not from a feature table.
Will our editors find it harder than WordPress?
Only if the model is built badly, which is the usual reason people say headless failed for them. A schema with grouped fields, validation and live preview is generally easier than a page builder, because there are fewer wrong things an editor can do. Twenty untitled rich-text fields is worse than any WordPress theme ever shipped.
Can we migrate our WordPress content into a headless CMS?
Yes. The export is the easy half. The work is the mapping, turning pages made of markup into records with real fields and references. We script it, review a sample by hand, and keep every old URL alive through redirects so nothing drops out of the index.
Does a headless CMS help SEO?
Indirectly, through the front-end. A Next.js site over a headless CMS is server-rendered, quick and complete on the first crawl. The CMS contributes structure, which is what makes correct metadata and schema generate themselves rather than being retyped on every page. See our SEO services for the rest of it.
What does a headless CMS cost to run?
Most platforms price on seats, API usage or record count. A small marketing site typically lands between $0 and $200 a month for the CMS, plus front-end hosting. Self-hosting Strapi or Payload swaps that subscription for infrastructure and patching, which pays off above a certain size or under residency rules.
Can you staff this work with a dedicated engineer?
Yes. Full-stack engineers who do both the modelling and the Next.js front-end are $25/hour or $3,200/month, with a 15-day trial.
Content spread across pages you cannot reuse?
Send the sitemap and a list of what your team publishes each month. You get a content model and a platform recommendation you can act on.