Signs it is time to revisit a headless CMS

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few signals that a headless CMS is due some attention.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Separating content from presentation lets you redesign without remigrating
• Editors get a proper interface instead of raw markup

The practical version

Same content can feed a site, an app, and a screen. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Separating content from presentation lets you redesign without remigrating — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.