Content teams are under pressure to publish faster. Marketing wants more landing pages, the blog needs weekly posts, and someone's asking about a mobile app. Traditional CMS platforms weren't built for this - they couple your content to a single website, making reuse painful.
Headless CMS separates content from presentation. Your content lives in one place, structured as data, and you pull it into whatever frontend you need - website, app, email, kiosk, whatever comes next.
Here's why this speeds things up:
- Content and design move independently. Developers can rebuild the frontend without touching content. Editors can publish without waiting for a deploy. No more blocked workflows.
- APIs handle distribution. Your content becomes available via API, so pushing to a new channel means writing a fetch request, not migrating a database.
- Pick your own frontend. React, Vue, Astro, whatever. The CMS doesn't care. You're not locked into a theme ecosystem or proprietary templating language.
- Easier to maintain long-term. When you need to redesign or switch frameworks, your content stays put. We've migrated sites where the content layer survived three frontend rewrites.
- Teams can work in parallel. Writers draft in the CMS while developers build components. Designers iterate on the frontend without breaking production content.
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The tradeoff is complexity upfront - you need developers who understand APIs and a frontend framework. But if you're publishing at scale or across multiple channels, the investment pays off.
If you're curious whether it makes sense for your team, we're happy to talk it through.