Headless CMS

PayloadCMS is our platform of choice at Little Dash, and for good reason. It's fully open source, self-hosted, and built on TypeScript, which means your data lives on your infrastructure, not a third-party server. It offers an exceptional developer experience, a clean and intuitive admin interface for content editors, and the flexibility to model virtually any content structure you can imagine.

It's particularly well-suited for: complex websites, platforms that combine content and commerce, and projects where long-term content ownership matters.

One of the most established headless platforms, Contentful is a SaaS product, meaning your content lives on their servers, and you pay a monthly subscription. It's powerful, well-documented, and has a large ecosystem. The trade-off is cost (it gets expensive at scale) and the fact that you don't own your infrastructure.

Sanity is another strong SaaS option with a highly customisable editing experience called Sanity Studio. It's particularly popular with design-forward agencies because of how much the editing interface can be tailored. Like Contentful, it's subscription-based.

Strapi is an open-source, self-hosted option similar in philosophy to PayloadCMS. It's been around longer and has a large community, though PayloadCMS has largely overtaken it in developer preference due to its TypeScript-first approach and cleaner architecture.

Before any code is written, a good agency will spend time understanding your content structure, your team's workflows, your integration requirements, and your performance goals. This phase produces a content model — essentially a blueprint of all the content types your site needs and how they relate to each other.

Skipping discovery is the number one cause of expensive rework later. Don't let anyone skip it.

The development team configures the CMS, in our case, PayloadCMS and builds out the content model defined in discovery. This is where fields, relationships, and permissions are set up so your team can manage content cleanly and confidently.

The frontend, what your visitors actually see, is built separately, typically using a modern JavaScript framework like Next.js. This is where the design is brought to life, connected to the CMS via API, and optimised for performance.

This separation is what enables headless sites to be so fast. The frontend can be statically generated or server-rendered at the edge, meaning pages load almost instantly regardless of where your visitor is located.

Most business websites need to talk to other tools, a CRM, an email platform, an eCommerce payment provider, an analytics system. Headless architecture makes these integrations cleaner and more maintainable than bolting plugins onto a traditional CMS.

A proper staging environment lets you review the complete site before anything goes live. Cross-browser testing, mobile testing, performance testing, and content editor training all happen here.

Where your headless site is hosted matters. At Little Dash, we manage hosting on infrastructure that prioritises uptime, security, and performance, so you're not scrambling when something goes wrong at 2am before a product launch.