- Headless separates content from frontend: one backend, any number of channels.
- The strengths: speed, security, design freedom. The price: more initial effort than a site builder.
- For editorial standard websites a classic CMS stays legitimate - the honest trade-off decides.
What "headless" means
A classic CMS like WordPress renders the website itself: content and presentation live in the same system. A headless CMS only manages content and serves it over an API - the frontend is its own project that fetches and displays that content. The "head" (the presentation) is off, hence the name.
Why put yourself through it
- Speed: frontends can ship as static pages - almost nothing loads faster.
- Security: no database and no admin login on the public frontend means a drastically smaller attack surface.
- Freedom: the design is not bound to theme structures - any interface can be built.
- Multi-channel: the same content feeds website, app and more.
This website is itself an example of the headless approach: editorial content is separated from public delivery so pages can remain fast, flexible and independent of the CMS. The same principle supports international brand sites whose content must stay consistent across markets while remaining locally manageable.
The systems that matter
| System | Strength | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| Strapi | Open source, self-hosted, flexible data model | data sovereignty and tailoring count |
| Contentful | SaaS, mature, strong integrations | budget exists and nobody wants to host |
| Sanity | Real-time collaboration, flexible studios | editorial teams work closely together |
| WordPress (headless) | Familiar backend, new freedom up front | the editors love WordPress, the tech does not |
Our default choice is Strapi: self-hosted (data sovereignty, GDPR), open source, with freely modellable content types. We have operated Strapi instances in production for years - version upgrades and build pipelines included.
When headless is the wrong answer
Honesty is part of it: a five-page site with occasional text changes needs no API architecture. And if you produce dozens of editorial pages daily with ready-made theme layouts, a classic CMS is often cheaper. Headless pays where performance, security, design freedom or multi-channel delivery carry real business value.
"Architecture follows the use case - not the trend."
DUNA engineering principle
The migration path
The switch works step by step: model and migrate content, build the frontend in parallel, flip over with a redirect mapping - the rankings move with you if the mapping is right. How that works without losses is in our relaunch checklist.
