A headless CMS for small teams

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Most advice about a headless CMS assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What to keep

Separating content from presentation lets you redesign without remigrating. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

What good looks like

Same content can feed a site, an app, and a screen. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about a headless CMS before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Editors get a proper interface instead of raw markup — 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.