Contentful · Headless CMS
Moving off WordPress onto a headless CMS. Editors publish without a developer, the site rebuilds itself, and there is no server sitting about waiting to be patched. We did it to one of our own sites first, which is the example below.
Nobody rings up wanting a headless CMS. They ring up because one of these is happening.
Plugin updates. Security patches. A theme nobody wants to touch, and a hosting bill for a server that mostly sits there doing nothing. The site works fine. Keeping it working has quietly become somebody's part-time job.
The people who write the content cannot get it live without help, so every post turns into a ticket. A CMS is supposed to make writers independent of developers. Plenty of them manage the opposite.
Content locked inside a theme has to be rescued every time the site gets redesigned. Kept separately, it can be poured into a new design, or a newsletter, or an app, without anyone retyping a word of it.
Caching plugins sitting on top of page builders sitting on top of a database query per element. Sites built like this get faster by taking layers away, not adding more.
Ours, so we can show you all of it, including the parts that were awkward.
Worked example
WaterLog.au
A writing and heritage site about cold-water swimming. Long articles, a big archive, several authors, and a collection of seventy pieces on ocean pools.
It started life as WordPress. The content was worth keeping and the maintenance was not, so the archive moved into a headless CMS and the site got rebuilt in front of it.
Six practical differences, rather than a description of the architecture.
Zero
servers to patch
No database, no PHP, no plugin updates. The published site is static files on a global network, so there is very little left that can break or be broken into.
Publish
to live, unattended
An editor hits publish in the CMS, the site rebuilds itself, and the change is live a minute or two later. No developer, no deploy, no ticket.
100+
posts migrated
A full WordPress export moved across. Posts, pages, images, authors and a 70-article collection, with the URLs kept so nothing lost its search ranking on the way.
Static
by default
Pages get built once and served as files. Nothing is assembled per visitor, so the site is as quick for the thousandth reader as it was for the first.
Migration and build both, plus the unglamorous parts. Redirects, content models, editor training.
The place your team writes content and the website visitors see are two separate systems. The CMS holds the words and images as structured data. The website reads them and renders the pages. Traditional WordPress does both jobs in the one place, which is why a theme change and a content change end up feeling like the same risky operation.
Not if the migration is done properly. What costs rankings is changing URLs. We keep them, or redirect them one to one where they genuinely have to change, and carry the page titles, descriptions and structured data across with the content.
Usually easier. They get a clean editing interface, drafts they can preview on the real site, and the ability to publish without asking anyone first. What they lose is the page-builder habit of designing every post individually, which was normally the thing making the site look inconsistent.
No. It is what we have used most and what the example below runs on, but the pattern matters more than the product. If Squarespace does the job, use Squarespace. It is on our list for a reason. We will tell you when a migration is not worth the trouble.
Hosting for a static site is usually free or close to it. The CMS has its own subscription, and small sites often sit inside a free tier. Set that against the hosting, plugin licences and maintenance time the WordPress site was already eating.
For a content site of a few hundred posts, typically four to eight weeks. That covers the content model, the migration scripts, the front end and a redirect map. Most of the work is deciding how the content should be structured. The moving of it is scripted.
Tell us roughly how many pages and posts you have, who writes them, and what is painful right now. A short audit will say whether moving is worth it. Sometimes the honest answer is that a tidy-up of what you already have is the better spend.
