Choosing a Headless CMS Without Regret
by Tomas Reyes
Feature tables make every content management system look the same. After a dozen projects, we have found that four plain questions predict whether a client will be happy with their choice two years later.
Who edits the content?
If the answer is a marketing person who lives in Word, a clean writing interface matters more than flexible data modelling. If it is a developer, the opposite is true. Match the tool to the person who will use it every week, not the one who signs off the purchase.
How much does the content change shape?
A restaurant menu and a news archive are very different problems. Sites with a few stable page types can use almost anything. Sites that keep inventing new content types need a system that makes new fields cheap to add.
Questions to ask every vendor
- Can we export all our content in a standard format, today, without asking you?
- What does the price become at ten times our current usage?
- Who do we call at two in the evening when the editor will not save?
- How long will you support the version we are installing?
Our usual answer
For most small businesses, a mature, well-understood system with a large pool of support beats a clever new one. Boring is a feature when you are the one who has to keep the site running.