When headless earns its complexity
Headless isn’t free. You’re trading editor familiarity for architectural flexibility, plus an extra deploy step, plus a content modeling discipline most teams have to learn. It earns its keep when one of these is true:
- Content needs to render in multiple places — web, native app, kiosk, partner sites.
- You’re shipping content at marketing-ops velocity and engineering is the bottleneck.
- Performance matters at edge level — sub-1s LCP across geographies.
- You’ve outgrown your CMS but the content model is sound — a headless rebuild is faster than a re-platform.
The four backends I work with
Strapi — when you want a self-hosted, customisable, role-based admin. Best for teams that need control over the backend itself. Contentful — when you want a managed admin with structured content + multi-locale + workflows. Best for marketing teams. Headless WordPress — when the editorial team already lives in WP and you don’t want to retrain them. Best when content velocity > everything. Sanity — when the content model is genuinely complex and you need real-time collaborative editing.
The four front-ends I pair with
- Next.js — when you need ISR, server components, and React ecosystem familiarity. Vercel-native.
- Astro — when content is mostly static, framework-agnostic, and you want absolute Lighthouse 100. Cloudflare Pages or Netlify.
- SvelteKit — when the team prefers Svelte and the site has app-like behaviour.
- Eleventy — when the site is genuinely static and the team’s small. Sub-second builds, deploys anywhere.
What headless builds cost in time
Plan for 6–12 weeks for a meaningful build, including content modeling (this matters more than people think), authentication, multi-environment deploys, and the editor onboarding that actually makes it stick. The first headless build a team commissions takes longer; the second one you commission with me will be faster because we’ll reuse the deploy + content patterns.
Common questions
Will my marketing team be able to edit it?
If we model the content well and pick the right backend — yes, easily. If we don’t — they’ll resent it. Content modeling is the most important part of a headless engagement; I treat it like the brief itself.
Headless WordPress vs Contentful?
Headless WP if the team already lives in WP, you have a publisher-style content workflow, and you want the cheaper hosting story. Contentful if you have a true content-platform need, multi-locale at scale, or marketing ops that needs proper environments and roles. Both ship fast, both perform well — choice is about the team, not the tech.
Will it rank?
Better than your traditional CMS, almost always — pre-rendered HTML at the edge is fast, schema is straightforward, and the build pipeline forces good redirect hygiene. The platform helps; the content strategy still has to do the actual ranking work.
