What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS is what teams usually move to after a few years of fighting a traditional one. The theme slows the site down, every plugin update risks breaking the contact form, and a redesign means rebuilding inside someone else's templates. Cutting off the "head" separates two jobs: the CMS stores and manages content, and the website is built as its own product that fetches that content through an API.

In practice the website is usually generated ahead of time and served as static files from a CDN close to the visitor. That is what people mean by a headless website. Editors still log in, write and publish; a publish triggers a new build, and a minute later the change is live. WordPress still runs 39.6 percent of all websites, but 32.1 percent use no recognisable CMS at all, largely custom builds of this kind.

What you gain and what you give up

The last row is the honest trade-off. In WordPress a marketer can add a new kind of page with a page builder in an afternoon. In a headless setup, a new type of page needs a developer. You buy speed, security and design freedom with a little flexibility. For a site where the structure is stable and the content changes, that is a good deal; for a team that redesigns its pages every month, it may not be.

What it costs per month

The CMS is usually a subscription; the website is a one-off build plus hosting. Sanity is free for up to 20 seats and 10,000 documents, then $15 per seat per month. Storyblok is free for one seat, then $99 a month ($90.75 on annual billing) for five seats on its Growth plan. Hosting a static site on a CDN costs a few euros a month for most company sites. The real cost is the build: templates for each type of page, previews for editors and the connection to the CMS. Compare that over three years with the cost of keeping a WordPress site updated and fast; the full picture is in what a website costs per year.

• Choose a headless CMS ifseveral editors publish every week, the same content feeds a site and an app, or speed and security matter more than drag-and-drop freedom.
• Choose WordPress ifyour team already knows it, you need dozens of off-the-shelf plugins, and you have someone who keeps it updated; see custom website or WordPress.
• Choose no CMS ifthe site changes a few times a year; a developer edit is cheaper than a CMS subscription and a login nobody uses.

How we build without a page builder

Most sites we build have no traditional CMS. Villa Lidia, the journal on the image above, and Business Centrum are static sites on Amazon S3 and CloudFront: every page is built ahead and served from a network near the visitor, with no database and no plugins to attack. Villa Lidia's home page went from 8.4 MB to 1.4 MB in the rebuild. Where a client edits a lot, such as availability or news, we add an admin for exactly that part.

We also keep WordPress when it works: for No.4 Lange Ast the existing WordPress site stayed, and we built a plugin for its availability calendar and enquiries. If your WordPress site is the reason you are reading this, start with why WordPress is so slow and is WordPress safe.