What features should a headless CMS have in 2026

Hey, how's it going? Hope you're having a great day. Let's talk a little bit about headless content management systems. If you didn't know, we're just about to move into 2026, and it's obligatory that we make these kind of lists to see how far off the mark we are when 2027 comes around. So, um, let's talk a little bit about the features that I would be paying attention to if you're looking for a headless content management system. Um, most important are usually kind of towards the top of the list and the less important are towards the bottom of the list because they should be table stakes anyway. So starting with AI and your CMS. Now we don't want to just talk to this as like a chatbot that talks to your content management system. You are going to find that you need more than that. And I think teams that have marketers that are willing to use things like Cursor or, you know, like Claude or something along those lines, like these AI assistants that are able to use MCP, are going to absolutely crush things. I'll give you a very quick example of something that we did in house and I could see how a marketer should be, and absolutely should spend time doing this. Um, but we had the launch of Next.js workflows. You may have seen it. It was about three months ago. They called them durable workflows. I don't think anybody knows what durable workflow is outside of developers. And then when you actually started using them, they probably created the most impressive tech, um, where you could literally say "go wait six months" and it would still work, um, which is just unheard of in the whole development environment, not without you know creating tons upon tons of infrastructure. Anyway, when this came out, they put out a press release. And the coolest thing was the fact that we were able to use Cursor with an MCP to take that press release, take it as a brief, you know, set of notes and refactor one of our pages that existed inside of Sanity to create a page that now exists on our own website called SL Services. I think it's workflow slservices/workflows. Um, the whole of that page actually isn't written by us. Um, it was a first draft that actually worked through an AI. So, um, I'm obviously going to say this and probably end up getting deranked by Google, but it was something that you could do from the get-go. And obviously, we've done some tweaks to it. Don't dank me, Google. Um, and it now is like our own words, but the fact that we were able to smash a first draft in roughly two, three minutes using Sanity's MCP is incredible. Now, Sanity's MCP, if you didn't know about this, has just been released, a brand new update to it. Um, there's a ton of different interesting stuff in there, but you should be getting all of this functionality inside of your headless content management system. Um, because you're going to find these small teams of these three marketers absolutely surpass what teams of, you know, ten, twenty, thirty marketers can do. Um, and our next one is a good ass preview. So, this is something that everybody gets wrong when they build their websites. Um, if you don't have a preview and you don't have a working preview that's almost instantaneous, uh, you're doing something very, very wrong because I guarantee you a marketer is going to want to see what's been changed on the website. So, more relevant than ever is that there is this, this idea, this concept of a preview that just works with one without locking other people out. So something that happens on some content management systems is, you know, person A and person B want to make a change to a website. You have to wait for person A to hit publish or hit save draft before person B can start making changes to the same document. You do not want that. You want a multiplayer environment, you know, like Google Docs, where multiple people can be working on the same doc at once. Um, it's been out on Google Docs for god knows how long. What, like ten years, I think or something stupid. Um, we should absolutely have that in our headless content management systems. Um, and again, this comes back to the good ass preview one. We want to see our changes live as fast as possible. Now, as far as I'm aware, I think Sanity has a proprietary system. I forgot the name of it. Is it, it's got a weird name, but they have some proprietary system that makes your changes almost instantaneous. Um, I think it's called the Insanity Live Content API, but I forgot the name they specifically use for it. It works with blank spaces, but it's really, really powerful, really fast. Um, what's so impressive about it is you hit publish and even on a statically generated website, you're going to see those changes instantaneously and everybody that's on that page will also see those changes. Um, and it's instantaneous. So, having all these things kind of work together, these top three are probably the most important I would say. Um, but having them all work together is a massive boon for the actual marketing team because there's less, you know, less tiny little paper cuts. You know, the whole idea of death by a thousand cuts, that especially applies to content management systems. Um, and the more we can make all of these things easy and actually be able to write this content faster, the better it gets. And now with all these top ones, we're going to move into kind of like the enterprise area, which is the idea of a DAM. Uh, and a DAM is a digital asset management tool. I think they call it digital asset management platform. Um, the more we talk about kind of a media browser, and this is something that I will say Contentful is very, very good at, um, is having this kind of like multifaceted media browser where you can bring everything together into one singular, uh, storage space. Um, Sanity is also pretty good at this, but the videos leave a little bit to be desired. Um, because you need to have something like MUX, and depending on which company you're working with, uh, it's another onboarding of another vendor and it can be a real pain in the ass to do that. Um, but yes, the whole idea of a digital asset management tool is super important and something that I think is going to have more and more demand as these uh headless content management systems are becoming mature. Um, and then scheduling that doesn't suck is another one that I personally really don't like. So I have had no end of problems with scheduling in my time. Um, especially with WordPress, especially with issues with PHP, all kinds of stuff back in the day. Um, but having a scheduling tool where you know and you feel confident you can hit schedule, um, and it just works in a day's time or two days time is huge. Now the other part of this is not just the scheduling but the concept of scheduling multiple things into a release. Now Sanity has something called releases. It's fantastic. Um, it's a way of being able to set up a whole bunch. So, for example, if you know you're going to release five different services uh next Wednesday, um, then you can actually use this releases to create next Wednesday's release of new services and put all of these changes into a single release and immediately publish it all at the same time. It's really cool, really good functionality, and it gives you that ability to see the changes before they happen again. So, that that kind of pulls back into the good ass preview. You need a great preview to kind of action the rest of these items on the list. Uh, publishing, unpublishing, and roll back. So, if we're talking about scheduling, we have to talk about these things. And not every system has a great roll back. Um, trust us, we've experienced it firsthand. Um, and the main thing that you want here is the ability to go step back through the history of changes. Um, it doesn't seem like an important thing until somebody accidentally um changed a good chunk or accidentally overrode, you know, two hundred um lines of of text. Uh, and that's the point at where you need that roll back. And Sanity has a great one. Uh, a lot of these different headless content management systems have a pretty good one, but it's something that you want to test before you get to that critical point. And then finally, the last one, instant search. So this one is about more than the raw speed of the search. It's about finding that data. Um, so this kind of plays again, I know I sound like I'm just pitching for Sanity at this point. Um, but again, Sanity is a very, very good tool for having structured content. And all of this kind of AI indexing and all these, you know, answer engine optimization that people are looking for all comes from indexing things in a great way, having great data available to these tools. The same principle applies with search. Um, if you want to test this out, and again with Sanity, um, there is Sanity's embeddings index, which is like the AI search tool. Um, and we actually did a long time ago, we did a blog on, uh, I think building the first, as far as I'm aware, embeddings index search, uh, engine with Sanity. So, feel free to have a look at that. Um, but all of these different things you want to make sure that you're looking for in your headless content management system in 2026. Um, and more importantly, when you are looking for these, make sure you're not getting absolutely rinsed for a price because all of these things are kind of like industry standard in every other aspect except headless content management systems. Uh, in our opinion, there are very, very few headless content management systems that feel like a truly mature product. Um, and it's because of that kind of that spanning of so many different facets of a website and trying to spin in all different tooling. Uh, you know, like personalization and digital experience platforms in general, which I am going to talk about more later. Um, but you know, they're trying to bite off more than they can chew. And it's very important that you have something that is very specifically purpose-built for you. And again, this wouldn't be a video without a tacky little sales pitch at the end. If you are looking at getting a headless content management system uh implemented, make sure to get in touch with us. We aren't just going to bat for Sanity. We have a whole bunch of different tools, but we do like Sanity a hell of a lot. So, feel free to get in touch and we'll catch you later. Take care. Bye-bye.