CMS Development Services

Choosing a CMS

We recommend the CMS that your team will actually enjoy using — the best technical choice fails if editors avoid it.

Traditional vs headless CMS

A traditional CMS such as WordPress manages content and renders the website in one system. A headless CMS stores content and delivers it through an API to a separate front end, such as a Next.js site or a mobile app. Headless gives developers more freedom and performance, and lets one content source feed many channels; traditional is simpler, cheaper and easier for small teams. WordPress can also run headless when you want both.

Our CMS services

Structured content: making pages easy to manage

The difference between a CMS your team loves and one they avoid is usually content modelling. Instead of giving editors a blank page and a toolbar, we define the building blocks of your site — hero sections, feature lists, testimonials, case studies, FAQs, calls to action — as reusable blocks or structured fields. Editors assemble pages from these blocks, and the design stays consistent no matter who builds the page.

Structured content also pays off beyond the website. Product information, locations, team members and FAQs entered once can appear on several pages, feed schema markup for search engines and be reused in apps or other channels. When the brand is refreshed, the blocks are restyled once and every page updates.

Editorial workflow and governance

• Roles for authors, editors and publishers with appropriate permissions
• Draft, review and scheduled publishing
• Revision history and the ability to roll back changes
• Media library with alt text and image optimisation built in
• SEO fields for titles, descriptions and social sharing on every page
• Training and a short editor guide at handover

Migrating between CMS platforms

Moving from one CMS to another — for example from an old proprietary system, Joomla or Wix to WordPress or a headless CMS — needs careful planning. We inventory all content and URLs, map content types to the new structure, migrate text, images and metadata with scripts rather than by hand, rebuild templates, and set up 301 redirects from every old URL. After launch, we monitor Search Console for errors and rankings so any issues are fixed quickly.

WordPress, Drupal, Webflow, Contentful or Strapi?

Each platform solves a different problem. The table below summarises where each one tends to be the strongest choice.

How headless CMS architectures fit together

In a headless setup the CMS stores and manages content, and one or more front ends fetch it through an API. A typical architecture looks like this:

1. Content modelling

   Editors work with structured types — articles, authors, products, landing-page sections — rather than free-form pages.

2. Publishing

   Publishing a change triggers a webhook that rebuilds or revalidates only the affected pages.

3. Delivery

   A front end such as Next.js renders pages statically or on the server and serves them from a CDN.

4. Preview

   A preview mode lets editors see unpublished drafts exactly as they will appear before going live.

This gives excellent performance and lets the same content feed websites, apps and other channels. The trade-off is more moving parts than a traditional CMS, so it is worth it when you need speed, multiple channels or a custom front end. Read more about headless web development.

Keeping a CMS secure and maintainable

• Core, theme and plugin or module updates applied on a regular schedule, tested on staging first
• Only well-maintained plugins and extensions, with unused ones removed
• Editor roles that match real responsibilities, with two-factor authentication for administrators
• Automated off-site backups and a tested restore procedure
• A web application firewall and login rate limiting for publicly hosted platforms
• Content and configuration kept separate so deployments do not overwrite editors’ work

Planning a CMS migration

Moving to a new CMS is mostly a content and SEO project rather than a coding one. The steps that protect your traffic are: an inventory of every URL and its performance, a content model for the new platform, scripted migration with spot checks, a complete redirect map from old URLs to new ones, and monitoring of rankings and errors in the weeks after launch. Pages that drive traffic or leads get migrated and reviewed by hand; low-value pages are consolidated or retired.

Our website redesign service covers this process end to end.

Designing content models editors understand

The most common CMS complaint is not the platform but the content model: fields with unclear names, pages that break when an image is missing, and layouts that only a developer can change. We design content models with editors in the room. Each content type has a clear purpose, helpful field descriptions, sensible defaults and validation that prevents broken pages. Reusable sections — hero, feature list, testimonial, call to action — let marketers assemble new landing pages without asking for development time.

We also plan for governance from the start: who can draft, who can approve, how long content stays live, and how outdated pages are reviewed. A well-designed model keeps a site consistent as dozens of people contribute over several years.

Performance and hosting choices

For traditional CMS sites, performance comes from good hosting, page caching, image optimisation and restraint with plugins. For headless sites, pages are pre-rendered or cached at the edge and editors’ changes are pushed through on-demand revalidation. Either way, we test Core Web Vitals on real templates before launch. Hosting ranges from managed WordPress hosts to your own cloud account; we recommend based on traffic, security requirements and who will operate the platform. See also WordPress developers for ongoing support.

Multilingual and multi-site content

Organisations operating in several markets or with several brands need to decide early how content is shared. Options range from separate sites with independent content, to one CMS with locale variants of each entry, to a shared library of components with market-specific overrides. Each platform handles this differently — Drupal and Contentful have strong built-in localisation, WordPress relies on plugins or multisite, Strapi offers an internationalisation plugin. We choose based on how much content is shared, who translates it and how many markets you expect to add.

SEO needs the same care: correct hreflang tags, locale-specific URLs and sitemaps, and no automatic redirects based on IP address that hide content from search engines.

Built for SEO and speed

• Clean URL structure, editable titles and meta descriptions
• Schema markup and XML sitemaps
• Fast hosting, caching and a CDN
• Optimised images and minimal scripts
• Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA

Redesigning an existing site? See website redesign.

Explore more in Software Development Technologies We Use.