Common questions
How long does a headless build take?
Eight to sixteen weeks for a meaningful production build — and that’s not a sandbagged estimate. Content modeling alone (which most teams underestimate) is 1–2 weeks of work before any code is written. Then it’s frontend build, preview environments, deploy pipeline, and editor onboarding. The “8–16 wks” in the table above is honest; if someone quotes you 4 weeks, they’re shipping a template rebrand, not a real headless architecture.
Headless or WordPress?
The comparison table above shows them close on most dimensions but diverging hard on time-to-launch (8–16 wks vs 4–8 wks) and learning curve (Very Hard vs Hard). Headless makes sense when one of three things is true: content needs to render in multiple places (web + app + voice + signage), engineering is the bottleneck on content velocity, or sub-1s LCP across geographies matters. For everything else — and that’s most projects — WordPress is the simpler, faster, cheaper answer.
Which headless CMS should we pick?
The architecture diagram above shows Sanity because it’s our default — real-time collaborative editing, generous free tier, content modeling that scales to genuinely complex schemas. Contentful when the marketing ops team needs workflows, environments, and roles out of the box (and you have $300+/mo to spend). Strapi when you need self-hosting for compliance reasons. Headless WordPress when the editorial team already lives in WP and you don’t want to retrain them. The right call usually comes down to the team’s content workflow, not the tech specs.
