Minneapolis
Headless CMS Developer.

WordPress is still the right answer for most marketing teams. The block editor is familiar, the plugin ecosystem is unmatched, and content authors already know it. The problem is that shared and budget-managed WordPress hosting often starts to show strain past ~50k monthly page views without aggressive caching. Caching plugins help, but they don't fix the fundamental architecture.

Headless WordPress keeps the editor your team uses and replaces the front end with Next.js or Astro. The page is built once at deploy time and served from a CDN, so visitors hit a static file instead of triggering a database query. Sub-second loads, perfect Core Web Vitals scores, and zero architectural changes for your editors.

For sites that need the WordPress preview workflow intact we use the WP Engine Headless WordPress Toolkit (the multi-framework successor to Faust.js) with WPGraphQL. For simpler builds we pair WPGraphQL directly with Apollo Client or urql against vanilla Next.js. ISR (incremental static regeneration) means new posts go live in seconds, not on the next deploy. We've shipped this stack on WP Engine, Vercel, and self-hosted Node, so the architecture is what matters, not the host.

The migration is straightforward: existing posts, pages, media, and URLs all stay where they are. Your editors don't change a thing. The only thing that changes is the speed.

Sanity is the headless CMS we reach for when content needs to be modeled deeply — products with twenty attributes, articles with author bios and citations, landing pages built from a fixed library of components. WordPress's flexibility comes from plugins; Sanity's comes from a typed schema you define yourself.

The Studio is the differentiator. It's a React app that ships with the platform, and it's fully customizable. We've built Studios that match a client's brand, that add custom previews for marketing teams, and that lock down fields by editor role. Your editors don't see a generic "Sanity admin" — they see a tool tuned to their workflow.

We pair Sanity with Next.js by default. The combination handles structured content, image transformations, and live preview without any extra tooling. For documentation-heavy sites, we sometimes pair with Astro instead for an even smaller JavaScript footprint.

When to pick Sanity over WordPress headless: editors are comfortable with structured fields, content needs to be reused in multiple places (web + app + email), or the content model is genuinely complex (think e-commerce, real-estate listings, multi-author publications).

Contentful is what happens when a headless CMS is designed for the constraints of large organizations — multi-language, role-based publishing, content scheduling, audit trails, and SOC 2 compliance. It's not the cheapest option, and that's the point. The pricing aligns with the kind of company that needs marketing, legal, and product teams collaborating on the same content without stepping on each other.

Where Sanity gives you a customizable Studio, Contentful gives you a polished web app that works the same for every customer. That consistency is a feature for enterprise teams — onboarding is fast, training is documented, and switching agencies doesn't mean retraining everyone. The trade-off is less flexibility in the editor itself.

Localization is where Contentful pulls clearly ahead. Field-level translations, locale fallbacks, and content variant workflows are built in. If you publish in three or more languages, Contentful saves weeks of custom plumbing on every other platform.

We pair Contentful with Next.js for marketing sites and with Nuxt for teams already invested in Vue. The Contentful GraphQL API is mature and well-documented, so integration is fast. Where we spend time is on the content model — getting it right up front pays back ten times during build and ongoing editorial work.