Decoupled front-ends on Next.js, Astro, or SvelteKit. Headless WordPress, Sanity, Strapi, or Contentful as the backend. Edge-cached, structured-content-driven, editor-friendly. When the project actually earns the architecture — not because the agency wanted a React project.
When headless is genuinely the right call
Most “headless” pitches are agencies wanting to bill more for the same work. The honest list of when it earns the complexity:
- Real-time / personalized content. When the same URL serves different content per visitor and traditional caching falls apart.
- Multi-locale at scale. 5+ languages with diverging content per market. Headless CMSes handle this without monolith plugin hell.
- Multi-channel publishing. Web, mobile app, kiosk, voice, partner APIs all consuming the same content. One CMS, many fronts.
- Performance ceiling. When monolith CMSes can’t hit your INP budget no matter how much caching you stack. Edge + static gets you there.
- Engineering team is already React/Vue/Svelte. Decoupling lets your devs work in their native tools.
- Content-modeling complexity. Deep relationships, references, computed fields — structured CMSes (Sanity, Contentful) handle this where WordPress strains.
And when it’s the wrong call: most marketing sites under 50 pages, most editor-team-owned blogs, most clients without an in-house developer who can debug a Vercel build. WordPress with a great block theme is the right answer for those, and we’ll tell you so.
The stacks we ship
Headless WordPress + Next.js
WP REST or WPGraphQL on the back, Next.js 14+ (App Router, RSC) on the front. ISR with on-demand revalidation when content changes. Vercel or Cloudflare Pages for the front-end, Kinsta / Rocket.net / WP Engine for the WP backend. Editorial teams keep their familiar WordPress UI; visitors get edge-cached pages with sub-1s LCP.
Sanity + Next.js or Astro
Sanity Studio for structured content (schema-as-code, real-time collaboration, custom editor UI). Next.js or Astro on the front. GROQ queries that read like a real language once you spend a week with them. Sanity’s Visual Editing for in-context editing of the live front-end — a genuine game-changer for marketing-team adoption.
Contentful + Astro
When enterprise compliance, native localization, and marketing-team polish matter more than schema flexibility. Contentful’s editor UX is the most polished of the headless CMSes. Astro on the front gives partial hydration, native image optimization, and Lighthouse 100 on most content pages.
Strapi + Next.js (self-hosted)
When you need to own the database, when compliance demands self-hosting, or when SaaS-CMS pricing gets ridiculous at scale. Strapi v5+ runs on Node, PostgreSQL or MySQL backend, deployable on any VPS or container platform. We’ve shipped Strapi at 100K records with no performance issues.
What a headless build with us actually includes
- Content model design from day one — documented schemas, references, computed fields, validation rules
- Editor experience customization — preview windows, dashboard widgets, role-based access
- Front-end build with proper data fetching patterns (RSC, ISR, SSG, where each one earns the choice)
- Edge caching strategy — Cloudflare Pages, Vercel edge, or self-hosted CDN with cache-tag invalidation
- Webhooks for on-demand revalidation when editors publish (no 5-minute cache lag)
- Image optimization pipeline — either platform-native (Cloudinary, Sanity images) or self-hosted (Sharp, IPX)
- SEO — canonical URLs, structured data, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, OG image generation
- Analytics — privacy-first (Plausible, Fathom, Umami) by default; GA4 / GTM when the team requires
- Migration from existing CMS, with redirect-map preservation and SEO-equivalence audit
How a headless engagement runs
Week one: content model workshop. We sit with your marketing or editorial team and map every content type, every reference, every field. The schema we leave with is what we’ll build the next 8–10 weeks on. Get this wrong and the entire project pays for it.
Weeks 2–6: parallel work on backend schemas and front-end templates. Friday demo of working pages. Editorial team starts entering real content week 4 onward so we catch UX issues before launch.
Weeks 7–9: migration of existing content from old CMS, redirect-map building, SEO-equivalence testing, performance budgeting. Pre-launch rehearsal at week 8.
Week 10: launch. We hold the DNS cutover at low-traffic hours, monitor for 24 hours, hand off the runbook.
Pricing
- Marketing site, single locale, 30–50 pages: $50K–$120K, 8–14 weeks
- Multi-locale, 5+ markets: $90K–$220K, 12–20 weeks
- Enterprise / multi-brand: $180K–$400K, 16–28 weeks
- Migration from monolith CMS to headless: add 30–50% to the base scope
Start a headless build
Tell us about the project — current CMS, traffic level, edit-team size, content-type complexity, locales. connect@prizorai.com or use the form. We’ll come back within one business day with whether headless is actually right for you and a scope band if it is.
