Headless CMS: what is it, and do you need one?

The marketing lead wants to update the homepage before Friday’s campaign, but the site has not been updated in two months, because the last plugin update made the contact form disappear. Meanwhile, sales wants to show the same cases in an app and on the screens in the showroom, which currently means someone copies text into three places. Those are the two situations where we most often hear the question: should we get a headless CMS? The answer depends on how many channels you have, how often you publish, and how much speed and security matter to you.

What is a headless CMS? A simple explanation

CMS stands for content management system, the place where you write and edit the content on your website. In a traditional CMS such as WordPress, editing and the website itself live together in one system: content is stored in a database, and the same system builds the pages with a theme. The "head" is the part that shows content to visitors. A headless CMS has removed the head. It only stores the content and makes it available through an API, and the website, app or info screen is built as a separate solution that fetches the content from there.

Think of it as a warehouse and a set of shops. In a traditional CMS, the warehouse and the shop are built together, and if you want to open a new shop you need a new warehouse. With headless you have one warehouse that can supply as many shops as you like. If API is a new word, we explain it from scratch in the guide what is an API.

Headless CMS vs WordPress: what is the difference in practice?

The table shows that headless typically costs more to build and less to run. That is why the three-to-five-year sum often favours headless, while the sum for the first three months favours a ready-made theme. We go deeper into exactly that trade-off in Next.js vs WordPress.

When does a headless CMS pay off?

Use the list as a quick test. The more points you can say yes to, the stronger the case for headless.

• The same content is used in several places: website, app, newsletter, screens or partner portals.
• Your website is in two or more languages and you want to manage translations field by field.
• Speed matters to your sales, for example because you buy traffic or sell online.
• You have had trouble with plugins, updates or hacking on your current site.
• Several people publish regularly, and you want roles, drafts and approval.
• You want a bespoke design that is free of a theme’s limits.
• The website has to connect to other systems, such as product data, booking or a CRM.

When is a traditional CMS enough?

A traditional CMS or a website builder is a sensible choice when the budget is tight, when the site is small and rarely changes, and when one person wants to build new pages from scratch with drag and drop. It is also fine if you already have a well-functioning WordPress site that is kept updated and is fast enough. Then it is rarely worth the money to switch for the technology’s sake alone.

Which headless CMS options are there? Sanity, Contentful, Strapi and Payload

There are dozens of headless CMS products, but four appear in most of the projects we see. They fall into two groups: hosted services, where the vendor runs the system for you, and open-source systems that you or your developer host yourselves. Prices change regularly, so always check the current plans with the vendor.

Other names you may meet are Storyblok, which is strong on visual editing, Directus, which puts an editing layer on top of an existing database, and WordPress used headless. In our experience, the choice of system matters less than the content model. A well-thought-out set of page types and blocks can move between systems. A poor model is poor in all of them.

What does a headless CMS cost?

For comparison, a standard site from a Danish agency typically costs DKK 15,000–40,000, while bespoke solutions run DKK 50,000–200,000 and up. A headless solution often lands at the upper end of the standard range or in the bespoke range, depending on how many page types and integrations are included. A worked example: a 15-person company with a website in Danish and English with 12 page types, cases and job posts, which also shows news in a customer app. With headless, each news item is written once and appears in both places. Without headless, it is written twice and maintained in two places, year after year.

How do you move from WordPress to a headless CMS?

Step four is where many switches go wrong. Without a complete list of old addresses and their new counterparts, a new website can lose a large share of its Google traffic within weeks. We have written a full guide on migrating a website without losing SEO that you can use as a checklist.

Which pitfalls should you avoid with a headless CMS?

• No preview. Editors write blind and publish to see the result.
• A content model shaped around one specific design, so everything must be redone at the next redesign.
• The CMS account is in the agency’s name, so you lack access to your own content.
• Images are uploaded at full size with no automatic compression, and the site ends up slow anyway.
• SEO fields such as title, description and share image are missing from the model.
• Every page is rebuilt on each change, so a correction takes a long time to go live.

The point about images ties into speed. A headless set-up gives you a good starting point for a fast site, but heavy images and too much third-party code can still drag you down. See our guide to website speed and Core Web Vitals for the concrete thresholds Google measures.

How does Ceptiv work with headless CMS?

We build websites in Next.js, React and TypeScript, and we choose the CMS based on who will edit and what the content will be used for. We create the content model together with your editors during the design phase, so the fields match the way you work. The account is in your name, and you own the code and data. Hosting, updates, security and backups are part of the fixed monthly plan. Read more about our work as a Next.js agency, or see the prices of our web packages.

If you are considering a switch, write briefly what your site does today and how many people edit it. Then you get a fixed price within 24 hours, including content migration and redirects.