What to ask your agency about a headless CMS

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on a headless CMS, these questions are worth asking early.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Separating content from presentation lets you redesign without remigrating. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Same content can feed a site, an app, and a screen. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about a headless CMS before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Same content can feed a site, an app, and a screen — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.