Headless CMS setup: when it makes sense and when it doesn't

A headless CMS setup is not automatically the right call. It is a specific architectural trade-off that pays off under certain conditions and quietly punishes you under others. This guide gives you a framework for making that call before you spend two months wiring up a stack you did not need.

What a headless CMS setup actually involves

In a traditional CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow), the editing interface and the front-end delivery layer are bundled together. You log in, edit, and the same system renders HTML to visitors.

In a headless setup, those two layers are separated. The CMS — Sanity, Contentful, Payload, Strapi, and others — stores and exposes content through an API. A separate front-end application (typically a Next.js site running on Vercel) fetches that content and handles rendering. You own both layers independently.

The benefit is flexibility. The cost is complexity. You now have two systems to configure, deploy, monitor, and pay for, instead of one.

The four variables that determine whether headless is worth it

1. Team size

A solo developer or a two-person team building a content site is often better served by a managed monolith — WordPress with a decent theme, or even Webflow — than by a headless stack that requires maintaining a Next.js app, a Sanity project, webhook revalidation, preview environments, and deployment pipelines.

Headless starts earning its keep when:

• A dedicated front-end developer is handling the rendering layer
• A developer (or technically confident editor) is managing the CMS schema
• There is someone responsible for deployment and monitoring

For teams of five or more with defined roles — a developer, at least one content editor, and either a designer or a product owner — the separation of concerns headless offers becomes genuinely useful. Editors are not blocked by deploys. Developers are not blocked by content changes. Each layer can evolve independently.

2. Content velocity

If your site publishes two to three pieces of content per month, headless infrastructure is probably overkill. A monolith handles that volume trivially.

Headless earns its cost when editors are publishing daily, running time-sensitive campaigns, or managing content across more than one locale. The structured content model that most headless CMSes enforce — typed fields, references, portable text blocks rather than a raw HTML editor — pays dividends when content volume is high enough that consistency and query-ability matter.

If your team keeps asking "why can't we just search for all articles tagged X that were published in the last 30 days?" and the answer from your current CMS is "you can't" or "hire a plugin developer" — you are hitting the ceiling that headless is designed to remove.

3. Channel count

This is the single clearest signal. If your content only ever appears on one website, the decoupled API that headless provides is largely wasted. You are paying the complexity tax for a feature you do not use.

Headless architecture earns its name when the same content needs to reach multiple surfaces: a web app, a native mobile app, a digital signage system, a third-party partner feed, a newsletter, or an e-commerce product description. Because the CMS exposes content as data rather than pre-rendered HTML, any channel that can make an API call can consume it.

If you have two or more of those channels today — or a credible roadmap to them in the next 12 months — headless is the correct structural choice. If you have one website and no plans to expand, build the simpler thing.

4. Budget

A headless setup has a higher baseline cost than a managed monolith, both in time and in money. You need:

WordPress on a $20/month VPS or a managed Webflow plan can serve a content site reliably for a fraction of that developer time. The question is not whether headless is cheaper — it usually is not, up front — but whether the operational benefits justify the difference at your scale.

For reference, I have written a dedicated breakdown of Sanity CMS + Next.js website cost in 2026 and a head-to-head Sanity vs WordPress cost comparison that go deeper on the numbers.

Decision framework

Answer these five questions. Count the "yes" answers.

1. Does your content need to appear on more than one surface (web + app, web + partner feed, etc.)?
2. Do you have a developer available who is comfortable with API-driven front-ends?
3. Are editors publishing more than 10 pieces of content per month, or running campaigns with time-sensitive scheduling?
4. Does your roadmap include internationalisation, personalisation, or A/B content variants in the next 12 months?
5. Is the business willing to invest 30+ developer hours up front in exchange for a more maintainable system over two or more years?

0–1 yes: Build with a managed monolith. You are optimising for simplicity that your current scale rewards.

2–3 yes: Headless is worth evaluating seriously. Start with a proof-of-concept on a low-stakes section of the site before committing the whole content model.

4–5 yes: Headless is the right call. Invest in the setup properly — schema design, typed queries, preview environments — because you will be living in this system for years.

What a proper headless CMS setup looks like in practice

Once you have decided headless is appropriate, the setup has four phases that matter:

Schema design first. Model your content types before you write any front-end code. Every field you add to Sanity later that has no equivalent in your front-end queries is debt. Every field you forget costs a schema migration. Spend a day on this with the team that will actually be editing content.

Typed queries from day one. Sanity TypeGen generates TypeScript types directly from your GROQ queries. Running without types in a headless setup means you are debugging null reference errors in production instead of catching them at compile time. The setup takes under an hour.

// sanity.config.ts — enable TypeGen output
import { defineConfig } from 'sanity'

export default defineConfig({
  projectId: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_PROJECT_ID!,
  dataset: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_DATASET!,
  // ...
})

// Run: npx sanity typegen generate
// Outputs: sanity.types.ts with inferred types for all your GROQ queries

Revalidation strategy before launch. Decide how stale content is acceptable on your site. If editors need changes live within 60 seconds of publishing, you need on-demand ISR triggered by Sanity webhooks. If five-minute staleness is fine, time-based revalidation is simpler. I have covered the webhook + ISR pattern in detail in an existing post — the short version is: HMAC-signed webhook from Sanity, a Next.js route handler that calls revalidateTag, and a fetch cache tag on every content query.

// app/api/revalidate/route.ts
import { revalidateTag } from 'next/cache'
import { type NextRequest, NextResponse } from 'next/server'
import { createHmac } from 'crypto'

export async function POST(req: NextRequest) {
  const body = await req.text()
  const signature = req.headers.get('sanity-webhook-signature') ?? ''
  const secret = process.env.SANITY_WEBHOOK_SECRET!

  const expected = createHmac('sha256', secret).update(body).digest('hex')
  if (signature !== `sha256=${expected}`) {
    return NextResponse.json({ error: 'Invalid signature' }, { status: 401 })
  }

  const payload = JSON.parse(body) as { _type: string }
  revalidateTag(payload._type)
  return NextResponse.json({ revalidated: true })
}

Editor onboarding before handoff. The most common reason headless setups fail in practice is not technical — it is that editors do not understand the content model and start creating workarounds (rich text where a reference should be, duplicated documents instead of shared components). A 45-minute walkthrough with the editing team at launch prevents months of data quality problems.

When to reconsider mid-project

If you are three months into a headless rebuild and your team has published fewer than five pieces of content, stop and audit whether the complexity is serving anyone. The answer is sometimes "migrate back to WordPress" or "use Webflow for the marketing site and keep headless only for the product docs." That is a legitimate outcome, not a failure.

For teams coming from WordPress specifically, I have written a detailed migration walkthrough and a signs your site needs a headless rebuild post that covers the symptoms worth paying attention to before committing to the switch.