A modern headless architecture — Sanity, Payload, Statamic or Strapi as the content brain — paired with a Next.js or Astro front-end and connected to your mobile app, voice agent, internal portal, partner API and anywhere else content needs to live. Built by senior engineers in 6-10 weeks.
WordPress, Wix, Squarespace — fine for one website. Quickly painful when content has to live in two places, then three. Here's what we see when clients call us in.
The product description on the website is different from the app's. The pricing in the brochure PDF disagrees with both. Three teams maintain three sources of the same truth.
WordPress: 14 plugins, 7 out of date, 3 paid-only-if-renewed. Every quarter is a security scramble. The marketing team can't change a hero without breaking layout.
The site looks dated because changing the theme means breaking SEO + content. So you don't change it. Years pass. Bounce rate climbs.
Hard-coded sections nobody can edit without raising a ticket. Marketing team writes copy in Google Docs, emails to dev, waits 4 days. Velocity = zero.
Headless isn't a fashion — it's a structural choice. The content backend is decoupled from the presentation. Every front-end is just an API consumer. Everything else flows from that.
Edit a product description once. Website, mobile app, partner portal, voice agent, email broadcast — all update. No duplication, no drift, no "which version is current?".
Re-design the front-end in 2027 without touching the content. Or build the same content into a totally different shape (e.g. a partner-branded portal) without rewriting anything.
Static-rendered pages from a JAMstack front-end. No PHP request cycle. No theme overhead. Cached at the edge. Site loads in < 1 second from anywhere.
The CMS UI is built for editors, not developers. Add a blog post, change a hero, swap a service description — without raising a ticket. Velocity climbs.
No PHP attack surface on the website itself. Front-end deployed as static files to a CDN. The CMS lives behind auth, isolated. Zero-downtime updates.
Need to feed content into a chatbot? An AI summariser? A partner system? Just call the API. The content is structured + queryable from day one.
A headless architecture isn't one tool — it's a stack of well-chosen layers. Each one is replaceable independently. No "all-or-nothing" rewrite if a vendor goes sideways.
Sanity Studio · TypeScript schemas
Sanity · Payload · Statamic · Postgres
Sanity Studio · Payload Admin · Statamic Control Panel
GROQ · GraphQL · REST
Next.js · Astro · Remix · SvelteKit
Vercel · Cloudflare · Bunny CDN
We don't have one "correct" CMS — different shapes of business need different brains. Below: what we use them for, what we love them for, and where they hurt.
Real-time collaborative editing, hosted (no maintenance), GROQ query language, generous free tier. Best for marketing-led teams that want the editor experience to feel like Linear, not like phpMyAdmin.
Open-source, self-hostable, Node + MongoDB / Postgres. Schemas as code. Best when you want to own the entire stack and have an in-house dev team to run it.
Laravel-based, flat-file or DB-backed. Perfect when your team already runs Laravel for the rest of the stack. Easy to host on the same infra. Great control panel.
Node + your-choice-of-DB. Massive plugin ecosystem. Best for enterprises wanting an "Oracle of CMSs" — established, extendable, lots of off-the-shelf integrations.
WordPress as the editor your team knows, with the front-end built as Next.js / Astro. Useful when the marketing team has 5+ years of WordPress muscle memory. Not our default.
For very specific needs (multi-tenant CMS, complex workflow rules, on-prem compliance) we'll build the admin in Laravel + Livewire from scratch. The biggest commitment; the most flexibility.
The CMS choice is the easy decision. The hard one is what shape is your content? Models that mirror your business — not your current homepage layout — survive every redesign and every new front-end. We spend week 1 on this, before any code.
The CMS, the front-end, the schema, the API docs — everything self-hostable. No subscription owed to Sitect.
Every content type defined as TypeScript schemas in your repo. Required fields, references, validation rules — versioned in Git, reviewable in PRs.
Your chosen CMS installed, seeded with sample content, branded with your colours/logo. Editor accounts created for your team with role-based access.
The user-facing site, built against the CMS schemas. Lighthouse 95+, mobile-first, SEO foundations baked in. Deployed to Vercel / Cloudflare.
Click "Preview" in the CMS and see the actual rendered page with draft changes. Reduces "ugh, that broke" deploys to near-zero.
The same content available via documented REST and GraphQL endpoints. Postman / OpenAPI collection. Auth + rate-limiting wired in.
3-hour training session for content editors + technical lead. Markdown runbook for the top 10 admin tasks. 30 days of Sitect on-call after launch.
You'll spend ~12 hours of stakeholder time. Most of it is in week 1 (content modelling) — the most under-rated step that everyone wants to skip. Skip it, regret it for years.
Workshops with your team to define schemas. The single most important week of the engagement.
Schemas implemented. CMS deployed. Editor accounts created. Sample content seeded.
Next.js / Astro front-end built against the CMS. Weekly Friday demos. Staging URL live by week 3.
API endpoints documented. Preview pipeline wired. Performance tuned to 95+. Migration of existing content.
DNS cutover. 3-hr training. 30-day on-call begins. Hand-over runbook delivered.
Median across our deployed headless builds. Your numbers will be yours — these are the bracket to expect.
Fee fixed in writing. CMS provider fees (Sanity, Payload Cloud, etc.) billed directly to your accounts — typically R 0–R 4,000/mo depending on volume and tier.
If yours isn't here, send us your existing CMS — we'll come back with a migration plan in 48h.
Drop a sample of your current site structure (or just the URL). Within 48 hours one of our senior partners will come back with: the recommended CMS for your business, a sketched content schema, migration cost estimate, and an honest read on whether headless is worth it for you. No sales pitch.